Taliban Official Sits for TV Interview With Female Presenter

While Afghan women remained locked up at home in Kabul, fearing for their lives and their future, a completely different picture emerged on Tuesday on Tolo News, an Afghan television station: a presenter interviewed a Taliban official.

A few meters from Mawlawi Abdulhaq Hemad, a member of the Taliban’s media team, host Beheshta Arghand asked him about the situation in Kabul and about the Taliban’s house searches in the Afghan capital.

“The whole world now realizes that the Taliban are the real rulers of the country,” he said, adding, “I am still amazed that people are afraid of the Taliban.”

For many observers, who were conditioned by the repressive-patriarchal views of the Taliban, the appearance was striking. Kabul residents have recently torn down ads showing women without headscarves for fear of angering the Taliban, whose ideology disqualifies women from much of public life.

“Our presenter interviewed a member of the Taliban media team live in our studio,” wrote Tolo’s news chief Miraqa Popal on Twitter.

Afghanistan observers said that while such interviews were rare, it was not the first time the Taliban had publicly come into contact with female interviewers, despite the group preaching a policy of exclusion that deprives women of their rights and education.

Matthieu Aikins, a journalist who has reported extensively on Afghanistan, described the interview as “remarkable, historical, encouraging”. However, he noted that the Taliban had given journalists from Afghanistan and other countries access during the recent peace talks in Doha.

The all-male Taliban delegation that took part in the peace talks also worked with a team from the Afghan government that included a number of women.

The insurgent group has also called on women to join their government in an overt attempt to allay fears about what their takeover could mean for human rights.

But the idea that the Taliban will suddenly change their behavior has been received with deep skepticism in recent days. “Please think of the people, women and girls in Afghanistan,” wrote Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, the executive director of UN Women, on Twitter on Monday. “A tragedy is unfolding before our eyes.”

When the Taliban ruled Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001, they denied women and girls most jobs or schooling.

After the US invasion toppled the Taliban, women’s rights became a rallying cry. Over two decades, the United States has invested more than $ 780 million to promote women’s rights. Girls and women have joined the military and the police, held political offices, participated in the Olympics and on robot teams, and did things that once seemed unimaginable.

Now fears are growing that all of these hard-won rights will disappear.

Tolo News is an independent force in the Afghan media landscape, showing soap operas and reality shows that run counter to the Taliban’s conservative ethos.

After their recent capture of Kabul, the Taliban broke into Tolo’s intelligence center, collected all state-issued weapons, and offered to help secure the site.

Saad Mohseni, the chairman of the board of the Moby Media Group, which oversees Tolo News, told the BBC that the Taliban have been professional and courteous. But he said he suspected that his station’s content, especially entertainment, would be subject to possible censorship.

“The Taliban are trying to take control,” he said.