A female journalist who had interviewed a Taliban spokesman flees Afghanistan. Beheshta Arghand made history in the country by conducting a ground-breaking interview of the spokesman of the Taliban on August 17 following the takeover of Kabul by the Afghan government.
The journalist fled the country because she is afraid for her life after taking the interview on Tolo News. Two days later, she had interviewed education activist Malala Yousafzai. Malala Yousafzai had survived the assassination attempt in the head in 2012 by the Taliban.
Meanwhile, her interview of Taliban spokesperson was ground-breaking and exemplary as she was the first Afghan female journalist to interview the Taliban on national television. Her second interview was exemplary because it was the first time Malala was interviewed on any Afghan channel.
Beheshta Arghan of Tolo News – Afghanistan’s only international channel – undertook a ground breaking interview with Taliban spokesperson Mawlawi Abdullhaq Hemad. See @CIoJournalist Linkedin news feed by Liz Justice at: https://t.co/iIpviIED4Y pic.twitter.com/0wSpwYx5Xd
— CIoJ (@CIoJournalist) August 30, 2021
Arghand wrote to CNN that, ‘I left the country because, like millions of people, I fear the Taliban.’ Saad Mohseni, the owner of the Tolo News, said her situation is indicative of the current conditions in the country as the Taliban has taken over the country.
‘Almost all our well-known reporters and journalists have left,’ he told CNN. ‘We have been working like crazy to replace them with new people.’
Read more: Afghans risk their live to escape country via road
‘We have the twin challenge of getting people out [because they feel unsafe] and keeping the operation going,’ he added.
Arghand said she is just 24 years old and had worked in Tolo News for one month and twenty days before the Taliban took control. The female journalist said that while her interview was challenging, she did it for the women of Afghanistan, knowing that their resistance to the incoming government of the Taliban must start from somewhere.
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‘If we stay in our houses or don’t go to our offices, they will say the ladies don’t want to work, but I said to myself, ‘Start working’,” she told CNN. “And I said to the Taliban member, ‘We want our rights. We want to work. We want — we must —be in society.’ This is our right.”