Originally published by JSK Fellows Medium on December 4, 2023
By Faisal Karimi
Journalism in exile: I had never thought about it even in my wildest dreams. Now from my new home in the United States, I run the Afghanistan Institute for Research and Media Studies, including the Afghanistan Women’s News Agency (AWNA) and Kaashi Media. These are organizations I started in 2015 to inform, create civic engagement, amplify women’s voices, strengthen women journalists, and train a new generation of journalists in Afghanistan. Figuring out how to sustainably do it in exile is the focus of my work as a John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University.
The collapse day
When the Taliban seized my hometown in the western province of Herat in Afghanistan on August 12, 2021, all our hopes and achievements were lost. That day remains the darkest day of my life. Over 20 years of our hard work and efforts for media freedom and freedom of expression were destroyed overnight.
Our country was retaken by the Taliban, a terrorist and radical Islamist group that has no belief in human rights, freedom of speech, and democratic values. For over two decades, I worked as a journalist, journalism lecturer at Herat University, chief editor, and media entrepreneur in my country. Still, in the end, I had to leave my country and leave behind everything in my beloved motherland with my family and colleagues.
We were working in our media office when the sound of gunfire and bullets rang out in the neighborhood alley. This gunfire signaled the fall of Herat to the Taliban and the death of freedom. Hurriedly, my journalist colleagues and I left our media office. We gathered valuable media equipment, such as cameras, computers, and important documents, and put them in my car trunk. I called my wife to tell her to get ready; we had to leave home immediately.
For a week, we had to hide in the houses of our relatives and think about saving my family and colleagues, especially women journalists who faced threats to their lives more than ever before.
I spent a week under Taliban rule with extreme stress, fear, and worries. During this time, I reached out to several journalist-defending organizations and foreign embassies to ask for any support in leaving the country, but only received a response from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), our partner, for the past seven years.
Leaving the country
With the unhesitating and generous support of NED, I managed the evacuation of my colleagues, including their spouses and children. We truly owe our exit to NED. We lived in the western province, Herat, almost 750 miles from Kabul. To leave the country, we had to travel the dangerous and arduous route from Herat to the Kabul airport by public bus, a path completely under Taliban control. At several checkpoints, our bus and companions were inspected by Taliban fighters, and they were looking for journalists, former government security forces, and ex-government employees. Ten days after the fall of Herat and a week after the fall of Kabul, my colleagues and I flew out of our country, each of us with just a backpack.
Leaving the motherland was very difficult. We had to leave our relatives and families. Some of my colleagues could not say goodbye to their parents. We miss our family; we lost our country. We lost everything. We have worked and lived in various challenging situations in Afghanistan for the past 20 years. We have fought traditional society, conservative society, extremist groups, radical religious groups, and even terrorist groups such as the Taliban and ISIS. We, the new generation of Afghanistan, had built a new Afghanistan with significant and obvious achievements. Still, all of it was destroyed overnight when the Taliban came to power.
Exile life in the new society
Our first stop was a refugee camp in Abu Dhabi, the capital of UAE. We spent four days and nights there before going to our next destination, Albania. Within days of moving to Albania, we held a newsroom meeting in the migrant camp and restarted our journalistic and media activities. Despite the trauma of leaving the homeland and family, as well as facing a huge shock, our will to cover and amplify women’s voices under the Taliban regime was strong, and we started practicing journalism in exile. We were in Albania for seven months, continuing to update our news agency websites, holding weekly virtual panel discussions, and live streaming on social media. We received many stories from citizen journalists and protestors, especially women on the ground. We received videos and photos from inside the country. After verification and follow-up with the sources, we published them on our news media outlet website and its social media pages. During this time in Albania, NED still supported us and facilitated our final moves as immigrants to the United States and Canada.
The new chapter of life
When I arrived in the United States, I started my work as a visiting research scholar at San Jose State University in California. My colleagues also started new lives in other states. We had lost our funds and had no financial resources to continue our activities in exile for the first six months. So, they had to find other jobs to survive in their new homes. Soon after resettling in the United States, my colleagues and I applied for asylum. It’s been more than a year since we submitted and did our interviews, and our applications are still pending.
Since our arrival, we have built our newsroom in exile again with a new team. We hired new colleagues on the ground in Afghanistan, mostly female journalists, who work anonymously with us due to threats and dangers. Doing journalism in exile is very difficult and mentally challenging. Still, we continue our mission because of our commitment to the country and social responsibility. Currently, the only way and hope for people’s awareness and free information for the deprived and suffering Afghanistani people in this critical time is the existence of free and independent media in exile. Due to this importance, we are committed to continuing our journalistic activities in exile, empowering women’s voices and reflecting their concerns.
So this year as a 2024 JSK Fellow, I am exploring innovative ways for the sustainability of exiled media, rebuilding my profession, and pursuing my future goals. My lovely wife and I are trying to build a new life and raise our three children in peace because we can no longer return to our country due to the threats and dangers.
Faisal Karimi is a John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University, the founder and director of the Afghanistan Institute for Research and Media Studies (AIRMS), and a member of the New University in Exile Consortium.