379: What Happens to Women’s Rights When There Are No Consequences?

Zahra Nader joins Dr. Sandie Morgan to discuss why, for nearly every five women killed in Afghanistan by their own families, only one man is ever arrested, and how a newsroom of journalists writing under pseudonyms is building the record no one else is keeping.

Zahra Nader

Zahra Nader is the founder and editor-in-chief of Zan Times, a women-led newsroom in exile reporting on human rights violations in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. She began her journalism career in Kabul in 2011, and in 2016 joined the New York Times bureau there, becoming the first Afghan woman to work with mainstream Western media inside the country. She moved to Canada in 2017 for graduate study and was still a doctoral student in gender and women’s studies at York University when the Taliban retook Afghanistan in August 2021. She founded Zan Times in August 2022 with $30,000 she had saved to build a home in Kabul, and now runs it from Edmonton alongside a network of journalists who report from inside Afghanistan under pseudonyms. She briefed the UN Security Council in October 2022, and was a 2024–2025 Knight-Wallace Fellow at the University of Michigan, where she studied sustainable funding models for exiled newsrooms.

Key Points

Five years of Afghan women losing basic rights with no international consequence lowers the floor for what can be denied to women anywhere. International law has not prevented it, and that is the precedent that travels.
A newsroom reporting under an authoritarian regime protects people by compartmenting them. Zan Times journalists inside Afghanistan publish under pseudonyms, connect only to an editor, and do not know each other, so one arrest cannot expose the rest.
The Taliban’s Code on Judicial Separation of Spouses removes any minimum marriage age. A father or grandfather can give a child into marriage without her consent, at any age.
School was the brake on early marriage, and it is gone. Parents used to defer marriage until a daughter finished school; with girls out of classrooms, Zan Times found families selling one-year-olds and two-year-olds for future marriage to settle debts.
The penalties encode the asymmetry. A man who beats his wife to visible injury, a broken bone, serves 15 days if she can prove it in court. A woman who goes to her parents and refuses to return, along with her parents, serves 3 months. Sandie converts it on air: 90 days against 15.
The 2025 US funding cut closed 445 clinics and hospitals and cut more than 3 million people off from healthcare. Rural women lost the mobile teams that were their only access to a midwife or a blood pressure check.
Restrictions push women out of healthcare even where they are still permitted to work. A Kandahar midwife supporting three children and a paralyzed father paid half her salary to a distant relative to pose as her brother, then stopped going in when the Taliban started asking for ID.
The countermeasure is documentation. Zan Times’ femicide investigation across 10 provinces found roughly one arrest for every five women killed by a family member, with deaths certified as suicide despite visible signs of abuse. Subscribing to the newsletter at zantimes.com is the step the episode asks for.

Resources

Transcript

[00:00:00] Zahra Nader: I think it’s very important for all of us to be advocates of Afghan women’s rights, because their rights is about women’s rights everywhere globally, and Afghanistan is the battleground, the worst battleground for women’s rights.

And if we lose there, I believe we will lose everywhere, so we have to really try to fight there. We cannot take guns, we cannot fight the Taliban in any other means except via our words, and that words are the words of truth.

[00:00:26] Sandie Morgan: For nearly every five women killed in Afghanistan by their own families, only one man is ever arrested. Cases get written off as suicide even when the body shows signs of abuse. One journalist decided someone had to keep the record the world isn’t keeping, so she built a newsroom to do it, one investigation at a time.

Hi, I’m Dr. Sandie Morgan, and today you will hear the interview I was privileged to do with Zahra Nader, founder and editor-in-chief of Zan Times. She briefed the UN Security Council on the Taliban’s treatment of women and now runs a newsroom of journalists reporting from exile and under pseudonyms inside Afghanistan.

Here’s our conversation.

It is wonderful to welcome Zahra Nader, founder and editor-in-chief of Zan Times, and I’m so grateful that you made time to be here on the Ending Human Trafficking Podcast.

[00:01:59] Zahra Nader: Thank you so much, Sandie, for giving me this opportunity to be here with you and to share about what’s happening in Afghanistan.

[00:02:07] Sandie Morgan: So your family fled Taliban rule when you were just a child, and Afghanistan fell to the Taliban again, and you had been studying in Canada since then. So what was the moment you decided to start a newsroom rather than going back to reporting for someone else?

[00:02:36] Zahra Nader: Thank you for that question. I’m going to take you a little bit back, maybe in August of 2021 when the Taliban take over Afghanistan. At the time, I was in Toronto, Canada, studying at the university. But my plan and my goal for the future was to go actually back home in Afghanistan.

There was a recently created gender and women studies at the University of Kabul, which my plan was to actually when I graduate, I am going to teach there. And my plan even for my research was to, during the time that I go back for research, I can go there and teach there and do my research, and this will work out for me.

But when the Taliban take over Afghanistan, that dream was gone. The future that I envisioned to build for myself was no longer there. Beside that, my family, my friends, everybody I knew was in Afghanistan. So it was very emotional and painful for me to think about all of this.

I started reporting for international media in the first year, and I did reporting and helped another Afghan woman-led media as well. So the first year passed, and I remember the exact moment was May 7th of 2022. I was sitting in a coffee shop working on one of my assignment for the university when I read the news and saw the headline of news about the Taliban forcing women to cover themselves head to toe when they’re going outside their own home.

That was the moment that really hit me hard. I remember sitting there and then crying and just thinking that being able to choose your own cloth is the very basic human rights, and now that right is taken away from Afghan women. And what am I going to do about this? It was in that moment that I remembered I was a journalist.

I can write stories. So I said, “You know what? Let’s create a media outlet.” And I knew who the Taliban were from what I have heard from our previous generation, from my mother’s neighbors here and there. So we had a vision of who the Taliban were, even though I didn’t live under the Taliban rule myself.

So I started talking with a group of Afghan women journalists that I knew that I worked with, and some other colleagues that I knew, and I shared this idea of building a newsroom. And up to this point, I had no experience of management, no experience of fundraising. My only experience was journalism, and I thought, you know what?

A media is about writing stories. Let’s go write some stories. Let’s help Afghan women journalists to write some stories out from under the Taliban rule. And we started doing that. And five months into the work, I understood that I knew nothing about running an organization and managing a newsroom.

So it was hard, but we manage it. Now, August 8, Zan Times became four years old.

[00:05:38] Sandie Morgan: Happy birthday.

[00:05:39] Zahra Nader: Yeah, so this is how we started Zan Times. Our lens was actually looking at the human rights, covering human rights situation in Afghanistan with a focus on women and LGBTQ people, people whose perspective not always inform news and they don’t have power and platform to speak for themselves.

So it’s very important for us to bring their perspective to the public and enable them to share their stories and experiences as a way for us to understand what’s happening, and taking their experience, trying to build a better future for Afghanistan. And a part of that story is for us as Afghan women journalists to be able to tell our own stories.

[00:06:17] Sandie Morgan: So you call it a newsroom, and the name of this is Zan Times. Do you have a physical newsroom, and do you print a physical Zan Times like New York Times, LA Times newspaper? How does that look?

[00:06:38] Zahra Nader: No, unfortunately. I wish I had. So there is no physical newsroom except everybody is working from their own home. Our core team is six people, and we are all working from our own spaces. So there is no physical newsroom that we can call, and there is no print version of Zan Times.

It’s only a digital website, and we do distribute our content through our social media and as well as a newsletter. Our newsletter is a very important one because every week, I or one of our editors, Khadija or Freshta, write an intro that talks to our readers about what really happened this week, something that happened at Zan Times or in Afghanistan, or something that we came to know or analyze and think about.

So that’s like having a conversation with our readers and telling them what really happened to us or to Afghanistan, and what we are thinking about, what we are struggling with.

Plus, we publish whatever we have produced at Zan Times and some important news that was reported by other media, mostly Afghan media. So we include that in our newsletter and send it out every Friday. The closest thing we can get into a publication is that newsletter that others have gotten with the website.

[00:07:52] Sandie Morgan: Do I subscribe to your newsletter? How do I get the Zan Times in my inbox?

[00:07:59] Zahra Nader: That’s such a lovely question, Sandie. I would love to answer that question. It is that in our website, if you go there, there is a section on the top of the page site newsletter, and in the bottom of it also can find it. But there will be a pop-up as well that says, “Sign up for our newsletter. Knowing is the first step to resisting.”

And so that’s if you enter your email address, that means that you will keep getting our newsletter every Friday.

[00:08:23] Sandie Morgan: All right, so I’m gonna go to zantimes.com and subscribe to the newsletter, and I love that’s my first step in resistance. Now, when I’ve worked in some countries, safety for women who are speaking up and telling the stories, that is a form of resistance that is often challenged by existing structures in that country.

So safety is clearly central to everything. And I don’t wanna ask you how it works, but can you speak in general terms to what it takes to protect journalists reporting on a regime like the Taliban?

[00:09:17] Zahra Nader: That is my biggest challenge actually, security. Safety of my colleagues in Afghanistan is the biggest challenge that we are facing at Zan Times right now. The way I’m thinking about safety is that none of our journalists working from inside Afghanistan are writing or publishing under their real names.

That is the standard of the risk, that if they do produce under their real name, the next thing, they will be arrested and punished for reporting the truth and covering what’s happening right now in Afghanistan. There is no safety in that sense that we can tell, like, “Oh, yeah, we are making things safe for them.”

There is no safety in that sense. But what we are trying to do is to actually think through, what is the possible risk? Who are the Taliban, how they act, and how can we take some measures that prevent our colleagues from being caught by the Taliban? So one of the measures that we take early on was not to connect all of our colleagues in Afghanistan together.

So my colleagues, my journalists in Afghanistan, they don’t know each other. If they meet each other in person, possibly, hopefully, they don’t know both of them are working for Zan Times. The reason for that is because we didn’t put them in one place, and for each we use pseudo names. Each are connected with our editors individually, and that’s how we know that they know us, but they don’t know each other.

So in case, God forbid, that one of them is arrested, they won’t be able to know who else is working for us inside the country, except that those of us outside the country, so that’s fine because—

[00:10:49] Sandie Morgan: So the common thread is they know you, they know the editor, but they don’t know each other, and they don’t congregate even online in a group that would put more risk on them. So I think one of the most valuable tools in advocacy is telling the story, and let’s talk about a few of the stories that have been published in the Zan Times.

One of them, I flashed back to when ISIS invaded in northern Iraq, and I was working with colleagues there at the university, and in the camps, little girls were being married off, and your story was titled When She Turns Eight, They Will Take Her. Give us a two-minute version of that story.

[00:11:59] Zahra Nader: Mm-hmm. So the story started for us, we knew the child marriage had increased in Afghanistan. And more recently in April of this year, the Taliban leader had approved a law that they call it the Code on Judicial Separation of Spouses. What, among other things that this code or this law legalizes, it legalizes child marriage.

It says that a father or a grandfather can give a child into marriage without their consent, when they are under the age of 10 or 12. And in any age. So basically, there is no cap at how young a child can be given in a marriage by father or grandfather.

So imagine that that’s happening in an environment like Afghanistan, where more than 90% of the population is going hungry. The economy is collapsing. People cannot afford to eat, and the families are often large, 10, 12, 13 is a very normal-sized family in Afghanistan. And imagine if you are a family who, a mother or father who has eight children, how you are going to feed your children? You cannot when you don’t have a job and you are not earning.

So one way, which is very common in Afghanistan, is that they give their daughters into marriage. And often, if they have to sacrifice one child, it’s often the girls who become sacrificed, right? They give this girl into marriage, and they get money in exchange and use that money to support their families.

So we knew this reality. So with this concept, we started looking at what’s really happening in the life of these young girls. And one thing that prevented girls from being given into marriage early was school. Because when girls were at school, parents would say, “Oh, she’s still young.

She’s going to school. Let’s give her into marriage once the school is finished.” So that prevented many parents from giving their daughter into marriage, thinking that let school finish, and then we’ll do it. And so there’s no school. So now these girls are sitting at home.

Their parents are poor and just like, “Okay, we can give her into marriage.” She’s home. She’s not doing anything. So that became a mechanism. So what that look like in society, what that look like in the life of a young woman? So we talked to an 18-year-old woman who has given four birth.

Imagine that young woman, every year. She’s been married five years now, and she’s given four—

[00:14:30] Sandie Morgan: So she’s 18 now, and she’s had four children in five years. So she was 13 when she was…

And when you’re talking about school helped prevent early marriage, what kinds of school opportunities are available now?

[00:14:55] Zahra Nader: Not much. So the only options that are available is underground schools. This is more of local initiatives, grassroots initiatives, women deciding to turn their basement, their room into a classroom. So they invite six or seven girls from their neighborhood to come and study there.

But that is the luxury that not everybody has. If you have a parent who’s really invested in your education, as well they do have the means, they can support you, they can feed you, that would be an option for some girls. And also online education. But online education, you have to have devices, you have to have internet, and you have to have the money to pay for the internet.

So there’s lots of barriers for these girls. So for this particular young woman that we talked to, she married her cousin, living in the same yard or the household that she used to live with her parents, then she did not move out, and her husband is jobless, so she’s dependent on food.

Even given birth to four children, one of them did not survive, unfortunately, so she has three. And to feed those children, she’s dependent on her parents or her in-laws. Her husband is not earning. So that is the difficulty of you talking about how that look like in the life of young girls in Afghanistan.

And this, she’s not the only one. We talked to families who have sold a one-year-old girl or two-year-old girl for future marriages. In a few years, the husband’s family will come and collect these girls, and then they become wife. Their bodies are still children. They’re not ready to be married off, to be pregnant, yet they do in Afghanistan.

And that’s the environment, the situation that created by the Taliban policies, by the economic collapse that followed. And more brutal than that, we recently published another story that looks into femicide in Afghanistan. And we are looking at also lack of hospitals. What really happens when this young girl is 12, 14, is pregnant, and there is no hospital in her village?

What is really going to happen? These are some of the questions that we try to answer in the investigation that we work on.

[00:17:02] Sandie Morgan: One of the stories that I read reminded me of global efforts in reducing domestic violence, but with some of the new decrees that took away the minimum age for marriage also blocks women from getting a divorce without their husband’s consent. So that means that if they’re in an abusive marriage, they have no way out.

[00:17:36] Zahra Nader: Yes, that’s correct. No way out. No way out. They have to either continue to endure that abuse in their household, in their family, or to end their life, unfortunately. That is mostly the two kind of ways that Afghan women are facing right now because there is no mechanism for supporting them. So the law that I, there’s another law that the Taliban leader approved.

There’s a code and there is a criminal code. In the criminal code, the Taliban leader said that if a man beats his wife to the point of visible injury, a bone broken, he will be punished. If proven in the court and woman is able to prove it in the court, he will be punished for 15 days in prison.

But if that same woman go to her parents’ home and her parents refuse to return her to her husband, the parents and the wife will be in prison for 3 months. And look at that. To me, that is—

[00:18:38] Sandie Morgan: So wait a minute. Let me do the math here. So, if he breaks her collarbone, and she can prove it in court, that means she has to have the resources to go to court. We won’t even talk about that. He can be sentenced up to 15 days, not months, not years, not weeks, days. But if she goes back to her parents and refuses to return to her abusive husband, she and her parents can be arrested and imprisoned for 3 months.

That’s 90 days.

[00:19:21] Zahra Nader: Yes, exactly.

[00:19:22] Sandie Morgan: That’s 6 times, is that right? The sentence he… I… Yeah, the math boggles my mind. And you also started to mention the lack of hospital care, and if a child is having a child, then the need— That’s considered a high-risk pregnancy, so the collapse of maternity care must be a challenge to… How do you report on that? What kind of resources? How are we able to advocate internationally for basic healthcare?

[00:20:13] Zahra Nader: Mm-hmm. So most of the funding or the hospital got closed since last year, 2025, when the US funding cut happened, and US was Afghanistan’s largest humanitarian donor. So with their money gone, like last year we documented 445 clinic and hospital got closed, and more than 3 million people have lost their access to healthcare due to this. Most of those people are living in rural Afghanistan, where a mobile clinic was the only thing that they had. Maybe once a month or every two months that a mobile team would come, and they had a midwife, they had a doctor, they had a psychiatrist.

So they will all come and check the women in these villages, and then they go on, and then the next time that they come. So these are very useful for women who there was no clinic to check them, their blood pressure or anything. So right now what happens is that mobile team is gone. The clinic that was kilometers away is gone.

So what happens to these women? The way that we cover it is we have women journalists living in these provinces, in these villages. So they do talk with people who have lost their loved one. I remember, for example, for one of the story, we talked with a sister of one woman who died in her way to hospital.

She was 30 year old.

She had two kid. She was pregnant with her third baby, and there was no clinic. The clinic in her village got closed. And when she was in pain, the family visited the nearest district hospital. They looked at her and they said the blood pressure is so dangerously high, and we don’t have the means or tools to treat her here.

We have to take her to the provincial hospital. So the provincial hospital was three hours drive. By the time that they reached the hospital, this woman is dead and her baby is dead too. And so that’s the cost of basically woman dying of preventable diseases in Afghanistan because there is no clinic.

And there is this combination of crisis that’s happening in Afghanistan, compounding with each other and making the situation even worse. Afghanistan was already one of the worst countries for women. We always had the shortage of female doctors, midwives. And now with the Taliban policies that ban education for women getting into this field and not becoming a midwife or a nurse or a doctor, that’s not happening.

So what’s gonna happen 5 years down the road, 10 years down the road when we don’t have any educated woman becoming a doctor? That one. And then the other one, the doctors, the midwife we already have, they are going through a lot. Yes, they are still allowed to work in Afghanistan, but there are circumstances and condition restrictions imposed on them.

To give you one example, we talked with a woman who was a midwife in Kandahar, I believe, a while ago, and she was a divorced woman. She had three kids. She had a father who she was supporting him because he was paralyzed. And she was working in the hospital, and then the hospital asked her that, “Now that you’re coming to work, you have to come with a male chaperone, a man who is blood related to you.

That man has to bring you to the hospital. He has to stay with you in the hospital and then take you home.” Be your chaperone all the way through. So…

[00:23:39] Sandie Morgan: To work, she has to have a chaperone that is a blood relation?

[00:23:44] Zahra Nader: Yes. She has to bring the mahram with herself to the work. The mahram stay there with her and then take her home after work.

So she doesn’t have such a mahram. She doesn’t have any man. Her father’s paralyzed. He cannot come with her and be her chaperone. And she hired a distant relative to act as her brother. Okay, he’s my brother, and she’s paying half of her salary to this man who act as her brother. So they go to hospital a month or two this last, and then the next thing is that the Taliban ask them, “Bring your ID.”

So if you bring your ID, they would know that he’s not her brother because the name of the father is different, the information is different. So this woman said, “I stopped going to work altogether because if they caught me doing this, the punishment would be even worse because I’m bringing a non-mahram with me and I’m just trying to deceive the Taliban.”

So she said, “I stopped going to work, and now I don’t know where my next meal will come and what I should be doing.” So even if these women who are in this field, they are being pushed back because of the other restriction the Taliban imposing. So it’s very hard to envision what will look like the situation in Afghanistan in 5 or 10 years.

[00:24:53] Sandie Morgan: Well, one person called this a global bellwether for women’s rights. And in 2022, you spoke with the UN Security Council, and you told them that the world has a major gap between words and actions, and you keep bringing the stories to us. Has anything changed since then?

[00:25:27] Zahra Nader: Things gotten worse since then. There’s many laws, many restrictions that came forward after 2022, and with every passing year, we are seeing the consolidation of the Taliban. We are seeing how they are consolidating their rule by embedding them into the law, into the structure of the society, and that really scares me.

[00:25:49] Sandie Morgan: So the international community, we, by subscribing to Zan Times and encouraging others, knowledge and insight, the UN has the opportunity to use our global understanding of women’s rights and apply this. So what can we do besides subscribe to the newsletter?

[00:26:25] Zahra Nader: I believe most of the things, big things happens because a lots of people come together and do small things. And I am really a big believer of that. And one thing I believe is, never stop talking about the situation of in Afghanistan. First, because what’s happened in Afghanistan has implication for women’s rights globally.

It will bring the bar low of what could be denied to women anywhere in the world, and there is nothing that could be done about it. International law cannot prevent it. So that shows the level of rights guaranteed to women. Like five years where Afghan women have no rights, basic human rights is being taken away from them, and nothing is changing, nothing is really happening.

So that shows where we are, where we’re standing, and it as well can tell us that this could as well happen somewhere else and there will be no consequences for it. First, so never stop talking about the situation of women in Afghanistan. I think it’s very important for all of us to be advocates of Afghan women’s rights because their rights is about women’s rights everywhere globally, and Afghanistan is the battleground, the worst battleground for women’s rights.

And if we lose there, I believe we will lose everywhere, so we have to really try to fight there. But in terms of support, I would say sometimes it started with the passion of a group of Afghan women journalists trying to do their part. We cannot take guns, we cannot fight the Taliban in any other means except via our words, and that words are the words of truth.

We are trying to document the facts of what’s happening today in Afghanistan as a way for us to have a record of history of what really happened. How did we fought against it? Who stood beside us and support us during this very, very difficult time? And to that means, I’m really hoping to keep this organization going, reporting, giving an opportunity to a group of Afghan women journalists to do this work.

And with the funding and everything that happened since last year, that means no funding is unfortunately coming our way, and we are trying to raise funding by communicating, by asking our readers across the globe to help and support us. The reason I’m asking this or saying this is because this, the most recent investigation we did, and that looks at the femicide in Afghanistan, we looked at 10 provinces, where we find out that women are being killed in a huge numbers by their families, husband, father, brother, and there is impunity for it.

Like nobody is getting from our dataset that we looked at, from almost every five women that was killed in Afghanistan by their families, only one man was arrested. One person was arrested for every five women who was killed.

[00:29:20] Sandie Morgan: And what’s the penalty? For breaking a bone, it was 15 days. For femicide, for actually killing the woman, what is the penalty for that one out of five that might—

[00:29:36] Zahra Nader: Sure. I don’t have a very successful example of what really happened to a man who had been convicted of killing a woman. But what we gathered is, even the fact of a man being arrested for the murder of a woman, that we took as action. We consider that. So there are many cases where a woman had been killed, but the husband and the Taliban came out and said this was a suicide.

There is visibly, this woman is beaten down, her body shows the sign of abuse, and then the death certificate will say, “Oh, this is suicide.” And suicide means that nobody will get punished for it because, oh, the woman killed herself. It’s okay that the husband beat her an hour before she was dead, but the fact that she committed suicide, that’s all good.

So that’s the story that they trying to tell. But how did the story came into existence was actually we started this early this year. We did a fellowship. They called the Zan Times Fellowship. We launched the Zan Times Fellowship. It’s a 10-month paid fellowship for, we initially intended for 10 Afghan women journalists inside Afghanistan to join our newsroom for 10 months, get learning, workshop training and mentorship, and also a stipend.

And so when we started receiving the application, our call for application was open for two weeks. In two weeks, we received 860 application.

[00:30:56] Sandie Morgan: Oh my goodness, for 10 fellowships.

[00:31:00] Zahra Nader: Women living all across Afghanistan. What that really showed us that there’s a lots of demand for, from these women to continue working, and that they trust us.

So that was very heartwarming for us. So what we did is from this 860 women, we looked at their application. One question we asked them in that application was, “What stories or incident that is happening in your neighborhood, but no media is reporting on it? Tell us one incident.” And we find out that actually a great number of these women talked about women being killed in their communities, and nobody’s talking about it.

Nobody’s covering it.

[00:31:35] Sandie Morgan: And that’s rooted in a cultural concept of honor killing, and we’ve talked about that in previous podcasts. And so there are policies, UN policies, and I believe that being in the West, that I can use my voice, and in fact, inviting you to be on this podcast is one way of expanding your voice, amplifying it, giving it a megaphone.

And so with one takeaway, can you tell me what you hope our listeners will think about after this podcast episode?

[00:32:30] Zahra Nader: That we all have power. I believe everybody who is listening, you have power. The reason that the fact that you brought me here, allow me and share your space with me, allow me to talk, this is your power. This is your space, right? And you decided to give this space to me and allow me to talk about the cause that’s really dear to me, but I believe is dear to women and women’s rights, human rights everywhere, that we have to care about this.

And we as humans have a responsibility. I believe this is true for all of us. We are looking for meaning in our life of finding something that we can hold onto and having this belief that I am doing good with my humanity. I am connecting with people, I am caring, I am part of the humanity.

And for me, that humanity is being able to report about what’s happening there, being the voice and creating opportunities for Afghan women in Afghanistan who don’t have the opportunity, the resources, the means, but they do have, and I want to be there and to raise their voice. What I hope the listener take away from this is that what happens in Afghanistan, you can do something about it.

And that sometimes could be as small as signing up for our newsletter, could be as well as small sharing our stories with your network, with the people, and telling them, “Hey, do you know what’s happening in Afghanistan? This is the misery that Afghan women are going through.” And I have came to know many groups or self-organized groups over this four, five years that I’m working, that they are organizing English classes, writing classes for Afghan women and coming together and thinking about the ways to support them.

And one way that I encourage you all to support this, to support Zan Times. This is a media organization that is being run, that is providing education, mentorship for Afghan women journalists and work opportunity for them. My goal is to enable Afghan women journalists to stand to the face of the Taliban at a time that the Taliban is trying to erase them from our society, erase them from our story.

In that space, we are trying to take the Taliban accountable. We are trying to cover their crimes and their regime of gender apartheid in Afghanistan. And for that to happen, we cannot do it alone. We really need help, and we really need help from people who really care about human rights, about women’s rights, and I hope that you come to our support and help us make this happen and hopefully things will change in Afghanistan.

[00:34:48] Sandie Morgan: It is an honor to join you to go side by side with amplifying your voice, and I encourage listeners, go to zantimes.com and just take the first step and subscribe to the newsletter. Gain the knowledge, build the insight, and use your voice. Thank you, Zahra.

[00:35:13] Zahra Nader: Thank you, Sandie, so much. I really appreciate the space and you allowing me to share my work.

[00:35:20] Sandie Morgan: Thank you, Zahra, for pointing out that knowing is the first step to resisting, and that by resisting, we stand up not only for Afghan women’s rights, but for women’s rights everywhere. Here at the Global Center for Women and Justice at Vanguard University, advancing the global status of women is our mission.

Listeners, if you enjoyed this conversation, make sure you check out our website at endinghumantrafficking.org. We have tons of in-depth show notes and other resources. If you’d love to help us grow this podcast, you can start by sharing this episode with someone, connecting with us on Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn.

And as always, thank you for listening.