“You can never be a good journalist because you are a woman.” Those were the words my editor told me one day in 2015, as I sat beside him in a large newsroom in Kabul.
I asked him why.
“You can’t stay late,” he said. “You can’t cover attacks. You can’t travel.”
What struck me wasn’t just the sexism, it was that I had never been given the chance to do any of those things. It was simply assumed I couldn’t, and that was enough to deny me the opportunity to try.
At the time, I was one of a dozen women journalists working to uphold press freedom in Afghanistan while pushing the boundary of our conservative society for equality. The environment was dismissive, often openly hostile. Still, I persevered, and in 2016, I joined The New York Times. There, I pushed for stories I was told women shouldn’t cover: suicide bombings, attacks, politically sensitive investigations. I covered suicide attacks in Kabul with male colleagues who doubted or pitied me. And I reported stories that rarely made it into Afghan media: the lives of single mothers, the government’s use of virginity tests, the quiet defiance of women simply trying to live freely.
In 2017, I moved to Canada. Starting over wasn’t easy. My career in Kabul felt like it had disappeared overnight. I enrolled in a master’s program in Communication and Culture, then began a PhD in Women and Gender Studies, researching the political history of Afghan women from the 1960s to the 1990s. I planned to return to teach at Kabul University.
But then, in August 2021, I watched the Taliban return to power live on Al Jazeera and with that, I saw my plans for the future disappear. I cried for hours. I thought of my friends, my family, the women I had just interviewed that summer: an attorney afraid to sleep, a peace activist in hiding, a YouTuber who could no longer continue her work. I had spoken with them in July and early August, intending to write a story about what Afghan women fear to lose if the Taliban take over.
Before I could publish that story, Kabul fell. The reporting eventually became What Afghanistan’s Women Stand to Lose, published by Time Magazine. But something inside me shifted. One article was not enough. I needed to do more.
I remember the exact moment I decided to build a newsroom. It was May 2022. I was sitting in a coffee shop in Toronto, trying to finish a university assignment on my computer when I glanced at the news: the Taliban had just issued a new decree banning women from appearing in public without a burqa, and without a male chaperone.
I sat there and cried, thinking: How did it come to this? Women in my country were being reduced to shadows. They could no longer decide what to wear or whether to walk alone. And here I was, in Canada—safe, free, studying feminist theory while millions of women in Afghanistan were losing their basic human rights.
I felt paralysed. But also responsible.
As a PhD student studying Afghan women’s political history, I had often judged the past harshly. “Why didn’t women fight back more? Why didn’t they resist harder?” I have pondered often. And suddenly, there I was, in that coffee shop, realizing I had become the very woman I once criticised: silent, powerless, doing nothing.
I wanted the next generation to look back and say: they tried. They did everything they possibly could.
At that moment, I remembered I was a journalist. I had the skills. I had a voice. I couldn’t give them back their rights, but I could give them a platform. A way to keep telling the truth. To keep documenting the facts, hoping that one story at a time, we are doing our part to take the Taliban accountable, to fight for justice.
That moment became the foundation of Zan Times. “Zan” means “woman” in Dari. Our newsroom became our form of resistance.
We started with nothing—no money, no institutional support. I used my student savings to pay our journalists. Most of us outside Afghanistan worked as volunteers. I had no experience in management, leadership, or fundraising. Had I known how hard it would be, I might never have begun.
But I couldn’t look away.
Since then, I have worked with 125 Afghan journalists and writers in 27 provinces of Afghanistan, trying to tell the story of Afghanistan through the experiences of the most vulnerable. So far, we uncovered some of the most disturbing stories inside Afghanistan today: the rape of women forced to beg on the streets, the public flogging of women for sitting in cafés or visiting clinics, the rise of forced marriages and suicide.
And we are not just reporting. We are rebuilding. With girls barred from education, Zan Times began training the next generation of women journalists. In 2024 and 2025, we have trained 70 women journalists, some of whom have joined our team as journalists.
But running Zan Times is a daily struggle. We operate in exile. The women who report for us inside Afghanistan risk their lives to document what’s happening in their communities. Every story we publish carries a question: Will this put someone in danger? Sometimes, I have to make decisions that weigh the truth against someone’s safety. I don’t make them alone. I rely on my team, mostly our reporters on the ground to help assess risks, to tell us what is possible. But the responsibility sits heavily.
And so does the question of money.
In January 2025, overnight, we lost half our funding as the result of funding cuts in the US. We have been trying to fundraise ever since, but it’s becoming harder and harder to continue this work.
As a woman running a newsroom from exile, I don’t have many connections to funding networks and we have often relied on individual donations from readers. I have no training in how to build an organisation. I never wanted to ask people for money but now I worry, I may have no choice. I cannot ask journalists in Afghanistan who are already going hungry to volunteer. I cannot ask them to risk their lives without compensation. Our ethics demand better. Our mission demands better and I refused to believe that people don’t care. I believe in the power of humanity to care, to support each other in difficult times.
You can learn more about Zan Times and support their work here.
Photo credit: Dieu Nalio Chery