Zahra Nader
Over the course of three years of Taliban rule, visibility has become a highly dangerous thing, especially for women.
But at least one woman refused to bow to the new norms. Hora Sadat was unconventional. She dared to be visible on social media — laughing with friends, singing, even interviewing the Taliban on the streets. These audacious acts made her famous, and gained her thousands of followers on YouTube.
Then, last August, her YouTube channel went silent.
Since the Taliban took over Afghanistan on August 15, 2021, freedom of expression and the press has become almost non-existent.
For us at Zan Times, a women-led newsroom, the path to access information is not only difficult and bumpy, but extremely dangerous. Discussions about safety and security are constant.
“If we publish this story, whose lives would be most at risk?” is a question we ask on every story we work on. There have been times when we decided not to run a story because we couldn’t minimize the risk of harm to our journalist or sources.
On August 8, the second anniversary of the founding of Zan Times, I wrote: “The stress and fear that my colleagues could be arrested and tortured would make me nauseous. There were many nights that I couldn’t sleep, feeling responsible for people who might be put in danger because we told their stories.”
At the same time, I feel very lucky to be able to do the work I do and remain safe in exile. That is not the reality for women in Afghanistan.
It is now three years that girls in Afghanistan cannot attend secondary schools and two years that young women cannot go to universities. Women are banned from most formal employment, and for the most part depend on male relatives, if they are lucky enough to have one.
It is a dangerous time to be a woman who chooses to be visible, like Hora Sadat.
As rumors swirled about her death at the hands of the Taliban, Sadat’s YouTube channel suddenly came back to life. Videos were being posted by her family — her two sisters had played a big part in helping her make her videos.
They confirmed what Sadat’s fans had feared: the YouTuber was dead.
In one video, one of Sadat’s sisters said they “couldn’t cry” or “talk” because their voices were being recorded.
Then something quite bizarre happened: The Taliban published a 20-minute documentary claiming that Hora Sadat died as a result of ingesting rat poison.
In the Taliban video, Sadat’s mother and brother were also interviewed in their home, with several Taliban members sitting around them. Her mother said Sadat thought she was poisoned. The Taliban said “she was killed as a result of rat poison” and that they had arrested two people in connection with the death.
Two Taliban officials spoke in the video — one suggested that Sadat was killed by her friends, while the other claimed it was suicide.
Few viewers were fooled. From the YouTube channel going silent to the Taliban documentary being released — all of this happened over a short span of time after Sadat and her sisters had been detained by the Taliban, spending a month in custody on charges of “moral corruption.”
So Zan Times started analyzing the Taliban video minute by minute, and comparing it with what we knew about Sadat.
We asked a local journalist to find Sadat’s family and speak with them. The journalist managed to speak with some of her colleagues as well as with a man in Kabul who claimed to be Sadat’s uncle. The journalist interviewed the “uncle” via phone and soon started receiving suspicious phone calls. It turned out, Sadat didn’t have an uncle in Kabul and the man was an informant for the Taliban.
The journalist had to go into hiding.
We concluded that it was too risky for any journalist on the ground to cover this story. So my colleague Freshta Ghani and I started investigating from abroad and interviewing different sources close to Sadat. The hardest part of the investigation was to win the trust of sources who knew the truth but were too fearful to speak.
We spent six months convincing them and earning their trust. The final interview was conducted in July — it was a crucial one, with an important source who had seen Sadat’s body before she was buried.
With the help of that interview, we managed to debunk the Taliban’s claim that Sadat was poisoned. Instead, we had two credible sources who said Sadat was killed after she was ordered to visit the Kabul police headquarters, and that her body showed obvious signs of torture.
When Zan Times reached out to the police spokesman, he said those who believed Sadat was killed by the Taliban should register a complaint with the police. And he said that Sadat’s death was a suicide.
But our investigation suggested that the 20-minute documentary was a desperate cover-up; thanks to the persistence of our newsroom, we were able to expose this.
You can read more about the Taliban’s cover-up of a YouTuber’s murder at Zan Times.
