Taliban | Afghanistan
Taliban detained, abused and threatened me: Australian female journalist
London: A female journalist has claimed that the Taliban forced her to publicly retract some of her reports about Afghanistan by threatening that she will be prisoned.
"I left Afghanistan today after three days of cat-and-mouse with Taliban intelligence agents, who detained, abused, and threatened me and forced me to issue a barely literate retraction of reports they said had broken their laws and offended Afghan culture. If I did not, they said, they’d send me to jail," Australian journalist and author Lynne O'Donnell, who writes for Foreign Policy, wrote in her article published in the magazine.
"At one point, they surrounded me and demanded I accompany them to prison. Throughout, a man with a gun was never far away," she wrote.
She said she has left Afghanistan, a nation which is now ruled by Taliban forces.
"Far from achieving their goal of intimidating and undermining me, they showed me what I went to find—their true face. Their brutality, arrogance, and lack of humanity. Their self-righteousness, intolerance, and misogyny. Their incompetence and their utter lack of ability to rule. Afghanistan has fallen prey to terrorists who have not made and cannot make the transition from fighting force to governing body," she wrote.
The Taliban captured Kabul on Aug 15.
Meanwhile, the Taliban confirmed they had detained Ms O'Donnell and claimed she had falsified reports, reports BBC.
“She was informed that she will be able to stay and operate in Afghanistan if she can produce evidence to substantiate any of the claims in her report. She was assured that in line with journalistic standards, she will not be required to reveal her sources but only details of victims or other circumstantial evidence that would allow the authorities to prosecute violators of Afghanistan’s law,” tweeted Abdul Qahar Balkhi, Foreign Ministry spokesman as quoted by Tolo News.
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