Meet the Anonymous Woman Journalist Reporting Inside Taliban-Run Afghanistan

On Monday evening, media figures gathered at the Sheraton Grand in London for the annual awards of the Foreign Press Association. Among the nominees for one of the categories, the Thomson Foundation Young Journalist of the Year, which recognizes reporters under the age of thirty, were two female Pakistani investigative journalists—and the eventual winner, an Afghan reporter, whose work is so dangerous that she couldn’t be identified at all. 

Maryam, which is not the reporter’s real name, is one of the few female journalists left in Afghanistan who report primarily on women’s issues. She told CJR that she works anonymously for her own protection and that of her subjects. She rarely meets with sources in public, and sometimes doesn’t even reveal her true identity to the people she interviews. To keep her identity a secret, she did not attend the awards ceremony. (When she was announced as the winner, the association replaced its live broadcast with a message on the screen noting that she was not being named “because of the restrictions on women imposed by the Taliban.”)

Life in Afghanistan has become increasingly difficult for women in the years since 2021, when the Taliban came back into power after two decades of American military control. The group banned women from attending university and required them to fully cover their bodies and faces when out on the streets. This August, the Taliban announced that it would ban women’s voices from being heard in public. Journalists have also faced a crackdown, including a prohibition on live broadcasts of political shows and criticism of the regime—Afghanistan is currently the third-lowest-ranked country in the World Press Freedom Index. 

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