Key Reflections
* There are many people at the highest levels of Taliban leadership in Afghanistan who have foreign passports. This includes Taliban spokesperson, Abdul Qahar Balkhi, whose real name is Hassan Bahiss. Balkhi is a New Zealand passport holder who once lived in Hamilton.
* In addition to their misogyny, the Taliban regime have also been clear and direct about their homophobia. There is daily persecution of the LGBTQ community in Afghanistan.
* The Taliban have adopted a policy of coercive intimidation towards foreign journalists, arbitrarily detaining them. On occasions, mobile phones were confiscated, and journalists were forced to write messages under duress designed to absolve the Taliban.
* The Taliban’s General Directorate of Intelligence (GDI) have been using social media to monitor articles that journalists have written about them before they took control of Afghanistan in August 2021 as well as thereafter.
* When journalists have refused to comply with the Taliban’s draconian rules, they have been threatened with violence and even death.
* Journalists and photographers that captured images and video footage of al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri’s Kabul residence have been arrested and detained for long periods.
Transcript:
SG: Dr. Sajjan Gohel
LOD: Lynne O’Donnell
SG: Hello, and welcome to the NATO DEEP Dive podcast, on this episode I’m joined by the highly esteemed author and journalist, Lynne O’Donnell for a three-part special on Afghanistan and the Taliban head on.
Reporting on matters inside Afghanistan as a columnist for Foreign Policy magazine, Lynne was detained by the Taliban in July 2022. In this first of three podcasts, Lynne recounts her own personal experiences in facing down the Taliban’s misogyny and intimidation tactics.
Lynne O’Donnell, a warm welcome to NATO DEEP Dive.
LOD: Thank you for having me. Nice to be here.
SG: It’s a pleasure. You’ve got a huge amount of experience when it comes to looking at Afghanistan. You are one of the few people that have travelled back to the country since the Taliban retook Afghanistan. Could you explain more about your time there, what you encountered, what you saw, and just how dire is the situation?
LOD: Yes, well I went back last July, July 2022, because I wanted to report on what the situation was in Afghanistan, at that time, as we came up to the first anniversary of the Taliban’s takeover. I had been quite coincidentally on the last commercial flight to leave Kabul, just hours before the Taliban came back and took over. I left with my friend and colleague Massoud Hossaini, who’s a Pulitzer Prize winning Afghan photographer, and we had spent three or four months covering what turned out to be the final months of the war. And we had seen first-hand, and reported on, the way the Taliban were squeezing their way into Kabul. And we saw that it was pretty clear what was going to happen and we had both been declared high value targets for the reporting that we had done.
Nevertheless, I thought that a year later, now they were purportedly forming a government and in control of the country, even though we had heard a lot of things about how awful things had become—even worse than under the Republic for most Afghan people —I wanted to go back and see it for myself. And so that’s what I did, and I got a visa, the embassy here in London, where I live, issued me with a media visa. They did ask me to sign an affidavit accepting all risk. I went in, I registered at the airport as foreign visitors have to do and then the following day, I presented myself at the foreign ministry to meet with the spokesman, because I knew that that was what I had to do. My guest house had to register me, and I had to come back to them with a certificate from the foreign ministry to say I was there legally and working as a correspondent, so that’s what I did.
And I met with a man who calls himself Abdul Qahar Balkhi, but that’s not his real name. His real name is Hassan Bahiss and he is a New Zealand passport holder. And I have been told by people in the United Nations, who have attended international conferences where Bahiss has also been in attendance representing the Taliban, that he travels internationally on his New Zealand passport. He has family, it’s well documented, living in Hamilton, and he’s married to a woman who is also Taliban royalty, you might say, and they were apparently married in Australia.
So, this alerted me to the fact that there are very many people who are working at high levels of the Taliban who have foreign passports, and use those foreign passports, and her family living abroad, daughter’s going to school abroad, and who are able to take advantage of the comforts and freedoms of the countries where they have grown up, where they have lived, and where their families still live. Hassan Bahiss also has high profile brothers and cousins who are working in think tanks and big multilateral institutions as well.
SG: So, there’s so many important points that you’ve already addressed here. One is this aspect of Hassan Bahiss, also known as Abdul Qahar Balkhi, as you mentioned. He seems to be very important. He in many ways, is the face of the Taliban, the face that they want to promote. You had a direct encounter with him, which you have written about in Foreign Policy magazine, where you were also detained by the Taliban, they took possession of your own mobile phone. It was a very frightening encounter, reading it. Could you talk more about that experience and just how the Taliban are actually approaching people directly; the aspects that don’t necessarily get enough attention in the media?
LOD: Yes, I think you’re right about this sort of stuff not really getting as much attention as it should, because it’s indicative of the Taliban modus operandi. I went to see Balkhi, Bahiss, whatever we want to call him, in good faith, knowing that that was what I was expected to do as a visiting foreign correspondent. He told me that the intelligence agency, the General Directorate of Intelligence (GDI), did not and would not recognise me as a journalist. He told me that stories that I had written were false, that the sources that were quoted in them did not exist, that I had made them up. He cited a couple of stories in particular, although he didn’t even seem to know that one of them had been published before the Taliban even took over the country in July of 2021. And I just said that to him.
And he said, “Oh, really,”
And checked his phone to see the date, but another one had been recently published and interestingly enough, they were both about sex. One was about the way women were being treated in areas of Afghanistan that were being taken over by the Taliban. There had been rumours of forced marriages and I went to a place that had fallen to the Taliban for four days, and then been retaken by local militia and armed police, and I talked to people there about what had happened during those four days. And the Taliban had indeed, collected the names of women and ages of them, marital status, affiliations, and told them that they would be married off to Taliban fighters as reward—a very old-fashioned concept for their loyalty. And I wrote this story for Foreign Policy and as Massoud likes to say, it was like a bomb going off, because forced marriage is effectively sex slavery, and that’s what we call it. And they went crazy. They set their bot army after us like nobody’s business.
The other story was about Taliban treatment of LGBTQ people, who I would argue are even more vulnerable, in many instances than women and girls and are treated much worse. So, those two stories were particularly offensive apparently. Bahiss effectively threatened to have me killed.
He said, “we have a way of dealing with people like you”
And he remembered to me a suicide bomb attack on a bus carrying employees of a television station home from work that had taken place in 2016. And a lot of people had died. It was a really terrible thing to do. And, of course, he cited that as an example of how people like me could expect to be treated.
Now the reason that they had attacked that bus, the Tolo Television bus, was because during a siege of Kunduz city a few months earlier, Tolo had reported live from Kunduz, that the Taliban had stormed into women’s dormitory at Kunduz University and assaulted the young women there. And that hadn’t been the case at all, the university was on break time. And there hadn’t been anybody there, but Tolo refused to retract the story. You know, as journalists and media organisations every day there’s a “we were wrong. We need to correct this,” or “when we said this, we actually meant that,” we are on the front lines of reporting history. So, these mistakes are understandable, I think, and forgivable, and more often than not, corrected, but for some reason, the man who runs Tolo TV refused to retract it.
And I interviewed him about it later.
And he said, “Oh, we dropped that from the report.”
But the Taliban held that grudge and they threatened an attack and this suicide attack on the bus carrying people, who weren’t even journalists, they were like graphic designers and people like that, was their revenge.
And he said, “and we’re proud of that.”
And I said, “you killed a lot of innocent people that day,”
He said, “and we’re proud of that.”
And I said, “you know, one of the people that you killed was a friend of mine,”
And he said, “and we’re proud of that.”
So, I was effectively being threatened. My life was being threatened directly by the spokesman for the Taliban’s foreign ministry, for turning up in the country, and for writing stories that I was able to verify. He demanded that I give him my notes, footage, recordings, and names and contact details.
Which of course I said, “look, the people named in that particular story all used their own names, you do your own work.”
So, he told me that the intelligence people would contact me, which they did. They asked me to come for a meeting. I realised that I was going to be harassed, I started to notice that I was being followed, and so I booked a ticket. I wanted to stay about a week and do some decent reporting and move outside of Kabul.
I booked a ticket to Pakistan, for two days hence.
And I said to the GDI (General Directorate of Intelligence) guys, when they called me “look, I’m gonna leave. I know that you don’t want me here.”
They said, “if you don’t have a meeting with us to confess your crimes,”
These are the words they used, “we’re going to make sure that your name and details are on all ports of entry and exit for Afghanistan, so you will not be allowed to leave the country until you have met with us.”
I said, “okay, guys. Come over to my guest house.” And I set up a WhatsApp group with Australian diplomats who were based in Doha, and with Massoud Hossaini, the photographer that I work with, who’s a close friend, I mentioned him before, with location tracking, and they came to my guest house. They threatened me there, there were four of them. They kept telling me in a very Kafkaesque way that I knew what my crimes were.
They took me away, under armed escort, to the headquarters of the GDI, which is opposite the back gate of the former NATO base, and used to be the Republic’s intelligence headquarters. And they kept me there for four or five hours. They shouted at me, they interrogated me, they accused me of all sorts of things. They didn’t take my phone off me, which I thought was very interesting. And sitting in the back of the car, on the way from my guest house to the GDI headquarters, a man called Zahir, who had taken my passport off me, I carry it in a in a pink plastic Hello Kitty folder so that it’s anonymous in my bag, and he had taken it out of the folder and thrown that on the table, and then flipped through my passport and thrown that on the table, before they took me away. And then sitting in the back of the car with him, he put my passport back into the Hello Kittyfolder, and then handed it back to me. I thought that’s a bit odd.
‘Tap tap tap’ I texted my Doha diplomatic gang, “he’s just given me my passport back”
And I looked at him and I said, “have you got any kids?”
And he said, “yeah,”
And “how old are they? And do they go to school? Are they girls or boys?”
And he took his phone out of his pocket. And he started flipping through photographs and showed me pictures of his kiddies. And I thought this is really weird. And so, when we got to GDI headquarters, and I’m sitting in a very typical Afghan, bureaucratic office with big chairs and a sofa and too much furniture and a big desk and a fan and tea and glasses and sweets on the table.
And they started shouting at me, eventually I said, “look, guys, if you’re going to ask me questions, at least, you know, let me answer. Otherwise, this isn’t a conversation and I’m just, you know, this is just silly. There’s just no sense in it.”
And so I think they realised that they weren’t dealing with somebody who was going to be intimidated or quaking. I can’t say that I was not afraid because I think fear is a sign of intelligent life and there was no stage there where I thought this is going to end. Well. I could very well have been put in a hole in the ground for the next six months. I didn’t know whether it was going to end like that or not, but I couldn’t see the point in them treating me the way they were.
And eventually it became a conversation and they gave me a bottle of water and I handed it to one of them so they could open it for me and there were lollies as I said, and they kept accusing me of being an agent.
And eventually I said to them, “you know, don’t you, Mr. Zahir, that I’m not an agent.”
He said, “yeah, but I am an agent *laughs*.”
It was just all silly. So they wanted me to—do you want me to keep on going about this?
SG: Yes, it is both disturbing and riveting, your encounters, so please do keep talking.
LOD: Alright, yes. They also pointed out the stories about the sex slavery and forced marriages and the one about LGBTQ people and said to me, “There are no gays in Afghanistan.”
I said, “There’s gays everywhere, you know, don’t be silly.”
They said, “Maybe in Europe, but certainly not in Afghanistan. There’s no gays in Afghanistan. Why do you call us extremists?”
I said, “Well, I think this position is pretty extreme, don’t you?”
“Why do you call us terrorists?”
“Well, I don’t make this stuff up. You know, the United Nations Security Council lists your leaders, dozens of them, as terrorists.”
“So why don’t you say bad things about the United States?”
I said, “Check everything that I’ve ever written in my life. You will see, nobody is safe. Everybody gets a pasting, and I report what I find is worth reporting, so just check it out.”
And on it went. They had their own boss on speakerphone but tried to tell me that it was a woman, “you people think that we don’t employ a woman, but my boss is a woman.” And the next thing, he’s got his boss who’s a man on speakerphone. It was just crazy Kafkaesque stuff. So, my editor at Foreign Policy called me because…I don’t know how word got out, I had suspended my Twitter account, I didn’t tell anybody about this, but I guess it’s difficult to keep these things to yourself. My editor called me, and he said, “Are you safe?”
And I said, “One moment please. Excuse me, Mr. Zahir, am I safe?”
He looked down from his phone and he said, “You’ve got tea. We’ve got the aircon. You’ve got water.” The other guy said, “I even took the top off your water.” And Mr. Zahir said, “So yes, you’re safe.”
I said to my boss, “Mr. Zahir says that I’m safe.” He said, “Okay.”
So, then I said to them, “How does this end?” And they said, “Well you have to apologise.” I said, “Sorry.”
He said, “No, no, you have to do a bit better than that.” And I said, “I’m really sorry.”
I said, “Oh, I get it. It has to be public. You want me to tweet something.” So, they made me reinstate my Twitter account. And they dictated—they hadn’t allowed me to take notes or photographs up until this stage, and the only time they really became physically threatening was when I picked up my phone to take a photo and then they all stood around me. And they said, “If you don’t tweet something, if you don’t send the tweet that we want you to tweet confessing your crimes, then you’ll go to jail.”
Got out my notebook, got out my pen and said, “What is it that you want me to say?” And they dictated what they wanted me to say. They made me type it out onto a tweet. They gave my phone to a young guy who divided that tweet into a thread, and then they gave it back to me and I tweeted.
Then their boss, the man on the phone, said that he didn’t like it. And so, they made me delete it, and they rewrote it. And as far as I could see, it was exactly the same. We had a difference of technological prowess here. So, somebody had an Android, and I have an iPhone…and one was on Telegram and…for some reason, we had to go to Telegram to get the tweet that they wanted. And I’ve looked at both of the tweets, and they’re exactly the same. I don’t know what it was that the boss saw that he wanted changed, but it didn’t get changed. So, then they made me tweet it again.
But before we went through this rigmarole, I said, “In all sincerity, guys, I just want to tell you that if you do make me do this, the people who follow me on Twitter will know that it’s not me, and it will make you look silly.” And they had a debate about the meaning of the word ‘silly,’ and they decided that they wouldn’t look silly, and they made me do it anyway. With the storm that followed that was unleashed immediately this Twitter thread appeared, it just bore me out. I mean, one guy even said who knows me, he’s in the United States, an Afghan guy, said, “Australians don’t use Z in words like ‘apologise,’ so this is definitely not Lynne.”
And it went on from there. So…I was looking at the clock. At ten to six, I sent an email—because at no stage did they tell me they couldn’t use my phone—ten to six, I sent an email to a media organisation in the States that I was supposed to be doing a podcast with in ten minutes, and I said, “I’m afraid I won’t be able to join you at six o’clock Kabul time because I’ve been detained by, I am being detained by the Taliban.” And the email came back, “Oh, not to worry. We can reschedule.”
Then I said to the guys, “Okay, so what are you going to do? You’re going to take me back to my guest house now?
They said, “No, no. Now we have to do a video recording.” So, they moved the furniture, and I was wearing a hijab of course, and I sort of straightened my hair and redid my scarf and patted down my clothes. I said, “Do I need any lipstick on? Do I look okay?” And they’re like, “No, you look fine.” “Okay, so tell me what it is that you want me to say.” Scarf back on. They said…they told me what they wanted me to say, which included the rider at the end that I hadn’t been coerced into making this confession. I said, “Okay, we rolling? Off we go.”
And I said, “My name is Lynne O’Donnell. I’m a journalist. I don’t know anything about Afghanistan, about Afghanistan’s culture, or Afghanistan’s people, and I make up all of my reports, and I don’t have any sources.” And I took off my scarf, and I wound it around my neck, and I held it up like a noose, and I said, “And I haven’t been coerced into making this confession.”
And they looked at each other, and they looked at me, and we all burst out laughing. And they said, “Oh, you better do that again.” So, I laughed all the way through the next take. And I said, “Was that okay?” I mean, you know, I was laughing, still laughing, “Do you want me to do it again?” They said, “No, no, that’s fine.”
…So now we’ve gone through all that, I said, “Well, you know, it’s a bit late, isn’t it now, are you going to take me home?” And this guy, by now Zahir is sitting on a sofa with his hand on his forehead saying, “Oh my god, you’ve got no idea what pressure I’m under.” Oh, you poor lamb. He said, “Now that we’ve done all this, if there’s any help that you need with your reporting, just let us know. I said, “Okay, let’s go to the Panjshir.” There’s a hot war on in the Panjshir and surrounding areas. And he said, “Oh no, I don’t think we’ll be able to go there.” I said, “Okay. Well, what about Badakhshan?” Because there was a hot war over the coal resources up there. He said, “Well, it’ll take a long time to get there.” I said, “Well it’ll just take a few hours in a chopper, why don’t we go by chopper?” “He said, “We don’t have access to a chopper.” I said, “Okay, well, I’ve told you what you can help me with. So if you’re not going to help me, I’ll just get on my way then.” And they said, “Sure.” And they said they’d send me a copy of the videos, which they never did, and they took me back to my guest house.
Now in the meantime, they had detained my driver who worked for me and with me when I was bureau chief at Associated Press. They held him for three or four days, they deprived him of sleep, they beat him up, they kept his car and his phone. People, as they had been following me after they had called me, they locked onto my phone, and they monitored my movements. They went to places that I had been. They detained people I’d met with and questioned them. They also harassed…the owners of the guest house where I was staying, business is bad enough anyway. I got on the plane the next day and left for Islamabad, not knowing where Nazar was because I hadn’t been able to contact him. And they tweeted, getting back to Bahiss, the Foreign Ministry spokesman, he tweeted that I had left the country of my own accord after confessing that I made up my reports, the implication of the tweet being that they treated me very well, and we’d all left on good terms. But, you know, I was the baddie and had confessed to it.
I went to Pakistan, as soon as I got off the plan in Islamabad, I sent a tweet that I had prepared to say that I was out of the country, that I was safe, that I had been detained, and that two takes Taliban had made me tweet twice and do two video takes for my confessions and that it was all false. Two days later, the spokesman for the Taliban who is called Zabiullah Mujahid—that’s been the moniker for many people who are spokesman for the Taliban over the years—tweeted that I was a spy, that I had entered the country illegally, that I had masqueraded as a journalist and gone into hiding, that I had been hunted down and expelled from the country and would never be allowed to return. Now while that’s a bit of a joke, because it’s clearly not true and it contradicts the previous Taliban tweet about me, by calling me a spy, they also gave themselves carte blanche to call anybody I had been associated with a spy, and that’s very, very dangerous, and it really means that I was effectively PNG [persona non grata]. You know, I never wanted to become the story, that’s not the sort of journalism that I do. I don’t write the word ‘I’ or ‘me’ in any of the stories that I do. But they made me the story, and they made me a liability for anybody who I know or had met or would want to see in the future.
And so I spent the next month talking to the world’s media about what had happened to me. And the story evolved, of course, as it became clear what had happened to Nazar, my driver, what had happened to other people that I had come in contact with and the Taliban changing their own story about me. And I went there, as I said, to see what Afghanistan was like under the Taliban after one year, and they really showed me what they like because while I could deflect—you know, I’ve been doing this sort of stuff for a long time—while I could deflect the way they were treating me, if I was a twentysomething Afghan journalist who was taken in or an Afghan anybody taken in off the street, shouted at, intimidated, threatened with jail, I would know that there was a great likelihood that my family not only would not know what had happened to me, why hadn’t come home for dinner, where I was, but they might not see me for six months, and I might be very, very badly treated over the course of that time.
So, I saw how crude and violent their tactics are. And it’s very clear that what is essentially a minority government, a very unpopular, unwanted government, de facto authority, is holding on to power through fear and, as Mao said, “Power comes out of the barrel of a gun,” and that’s what the Taliban have. And really, I kind of think in a competitive journalistic way that I got the story of the anniversary. And there have been other foreign journalists who have been detained and treated much worse than I was. My friend Anas Mallick, who works for the Indian TV network WION was held overnight. His fixer and driver were held for much longer. Anas came out of prison after having been blindfolded and beaten up with broken ribs. His fixer had a broken arm. They were really badly treated. A young American guy called Ivo Shira, a filmmaker, was detained after being accused of taking video footage of the house where the al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri was killed in July, and he was kept for months on end and has only recently been released. So I was really very lucky, I think.
SG: I’m just trying to recompose myself as I am sure all of our listeners are too because your story had me on the edge of my seat. You’re very brave, Lynne, for what you had to deal with, what you had to encounter, and your experience does serve as a composite of what has now become Afghanistan under the dystopian Taliban. As we gather our thoughts, this would be an appropriate time to conclude the first of our three part special with Lynne O’Donnell. Stay tuned for the second part where I talk with Lynne about the dire situation Afghanistan is currently in.
Thank you for listening to this episode of NATO DEEP Dive, brought to you by NATO’s Defence Education Enhancement Programme (DEEP). My producers are Marcus Andreopoulos and Victoria Jones. For additional content, including full transcripts of each episode, please visit: deepportal.hq.nato.int/deepdive.
Disclaimer: Please note that the views, information, or opinions expressed in the NATO DEEP Dive series are solely those of the individuals involved and do not necessarily represent those of NATO or DEEP.
This transcript has been edited for clarity.