New Delhi: The Taliban is widening its crackdown on “images of living beings” in Afghan media as part of its “morality law” signed in August 2024. The authorities Wednesday summoned media outlets and online content creators, including YouTubers, in the country’s western Herat province and ordered them to stop broadcasting images of living beings, the newspaper Kabul Now reported.
The order extends restrictions on visual reporting, banning the filming or broadcasting of animated beings, including journalists, presenters, and interviewees. It comes as the regime already faces criticism for efforts to stifle literature, shut classrooms and strip away women’s rights.
The Taliban authorities also reportedly detained veteran theatre artists Gholam Farooq Sarkhosh and Firoz Ahmad Malaeka Thursday, who tried to voice criticism of the ban on “living beings”.
The decree, from Taliban’s ‘Department for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice’ and the ‘Department of Information and Culture’, is now in force across 23 of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces and has forced at least 20 television stations to shut down, according to Kabul Now.
The instructions go beyond content. Journalists have been told to grow beards and avoid wearing neckties, the newspaper reported.
The clampdown is part of the Taliban’s “morality law” which was signed in August 2024 by leader Hibatullah Akhundzada, and was to roll out gradually. It pushed journalists to replace images of living beings with words and sound alone.
The restrictions forced many media channels to operate as and become fully audio-only broadcasters, whereas others replaced video clips of people with buildings, landscapes, or generic shots, and played the voices of officials or interviewees in the background.
By banning media from displaying images of people, the law is decisively erasing their identities and voices.
Press freedom in Afghanistan, hailed as a major achievement under the previous government, has declined sharply since the Taliban returned to power in 2021. The regime rolled out official media guidance that included 11 points for journalists and media outlets. These prohibited publishing or broadcasting of material regarded as “contrary to Islam”, insulting to “national figures”, or violating privacy. It also demanded that journalists report only balanced stories and publish the truth.
The Taliban’s ‘Command of Good and Prohibition of Evil’ law further enforces strict moral and social rules across Afghanistan. The restrictions, according to a statement from Afghanistan journalists in exile, have effectively dismantled independent journalism and “driven the final nail into the coffin of free expression”. It added that of 12,000 journalists and media staff active in the nation before the Taliban’s return, only 4,500 are still working.
Afghanistan ranked 175th among 180 countries on last year’s World Press Freedom Index.
The Taliban has also imposed severe restrictions on women’s voices in the public sphere, including in media. It has also targeted ordinary people online. For instance, UNAMA’s 2024 report noted that TikTok and YouTube creators were arrested for satire or criticism.
The Taliban has also built both overt and covert propaganda networks, according to an Afghanistan Journalists Center report. They run across TV, radio, and social media platforms by the intelligence directorate and push Taliban narratives.
(Edited by Nida Fatima Siddiqui)
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The only reason Bush and Blair invaded Iraq was so they could take focus and attention away from Afghanistan because they did not want the Taliban to be eliminated (the Taliban had unconditionally surrendered in Dec 2001).
The defeat/elimination of the Taliban would have meant the end of Pakistan (the Afghan part of Pakistan re-joining Afghanistan, and the Indian part of Pakistan re-joining India with the support of the international community), which Bush and Blair opposed.
Within a month and a half of the Iraq invasion, the US and UK had achieved total victory, but Bush deliberately did things which led to an insurgency in Iraq, an insurgency he could have easily crushed anytime he wanted to within the first 2 years of that war, but he deliberately allowed to fester.
For this reason, in people’s heart of hearts, people think the invasion of Iraq was the right thing to do, even though they may pretend otherwise. When they pretend otherwise, they are simply being disingenuous.
Regarding the first 4 years of the war of terror, the media were totally complicit and they did not do their job of holding Bush to account by asking why America had not and is not crushing the terrorists already and why America is giving them breathing space to fester instead.
Biden deliberately did his botched withdrawal from Afghanistan instead of withdrawing the 2500 US troops Trump had left behind by 1 May 2021 so there could be a mass influx of refugees into the West.