When the Taliban returned to power in August 2021, Afghanistan possessed one of the more developed media landscapes to have emerged in the region over the preceding two decades. Reporters Without Borders (RSF) recorded roughly 12,000 working journalists and more than 500 active media outlets at the time of the takeover. Five years on, that infrastructure has been substantially dismantled, not through a single decree, but through a sustained accumulation of closures, arrests, financial strangulation, and restrictions on who is permitted to report and on what.
The scale of the collapse is documented consistently across independent monitors. RSF’s country assessment records that 43 percent of Afghan media outlets disappeared within the first three months of Taliban rule, that more than two-thirds of the journalists working in the country in 2021 have since left the profession, and that eight in ten women journalists have stopped working entirely.
The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ), marking the fourth anniversary of Taliban rule in 2025, found Afghanistan ranked 178th out of 180 countries in the 2024 World Press Freedom Index, a fall of 44 places in a single year, placing it above only Syria and Eritrea. The Afghanistan Journalists Center (AFJC) recorded 172 violations against journalists and media outlets in the twelve months to March 2025, a 24 percent increase over the previous year.
Perhaps most striking is the collapse in women’s participation specifically: the number of active female journalists fell from 2,833 before 2021 to 747 by 2025, a decline of 74 percent, according to IFJ’s South Asia Press Freedom Report.
This erosion has continued into the present reporting period rather than levelling off. UNAMA’s Human Rights Service documented multiple closures and detentions between April and June 2026 alone. In Khost, the Department of Information and Culture discontinued Lawang Radio’s educational programming on 11 April for alleged non-compliance with the official curriculum. In Bamyan, the General Directorate of Intelligence ordered the closure of Radio Bamyan on 17 May over an alleged licensing violation; it was permitted to resume broadcasting only on 23 June.
Rah-e Farda TV, suspended since February over a broadcaster’s statement authorities deemed to have justified Pakistani military action against Afghan civilians, was allowed to resume on 21 June only after replacing its management, a case worth noting precisely because it shows Taliban media control operating without ideological consistency, silencing content critical of Pakistan just as readily as content critical of the Taliban itself.
Separately, at least seven radio stations across Kandahar and Ghazni ceased operating during the same period simply because they could not meet the financial and licensing obligations required to keep broadcasting. In Kabul, intelligence officials detained three journalists in two separate incidents in May, searching newsroom offices and confiscating equipment; one was held for over two months, and two others were released after roughly three weeks with no charges ever disclosed. As recently as 24 May 2026, three further radio stations in Kandahar, the Taliban’s own stronghold, were shut down over alleged tax, licensing, and content violations, with authorities publicly urging remaining broadcasters to align programming with “Islamic principles and ethics.”
Detention has not been confined to institutional crackdowns. AFJC’s most recent annual report documented forced confessions extracted from imprisoned journalists and restrictions on female journalists’ participation in official press conferences, alongside the live censorship of women’s voices during news broadcasts. RSF’s cumulative tally puts arrests of media professionals since August 2021 at more than 165, including 25 in 2025 alone.
Even Taliban officials themselves have not been exempt from the broader information clampdown: in mid-June 2026, the Taliban’s supreme leader issued an order restricting smartphone use among de facto officials, prompting several provincial spokespeople to stop posting public updates altogether, a measure that has further narrowed the flow of even officially sanctioned information out of the country.
Human Rights Watch’s own assessment, published ahead of the five-year anniversary in August 2026, concluded that independent media in Afghanistan has been reduced to a fraction of its former size, operating within a climate of fear that makes genuine investigative reporting all but impossible. That characterisation is difficult to dispute against the documented record: a media sector that supported 500 outlets and 12,000 working journalists in 2021 now operates at a fraction of that capacity, sustained largely by outlets willing to self-censor sufficiently to retain their licenses.
What this pattern reveals is not simply repression in the abstract, but a specific and recurring mechanism: financial and licensing requirements applied selectively enough that ordinary economic pressure, itself a product of Afghanistan’s broader post-2021 economic collapse, does much of the censoring work that outright bans would otherwise have to perform.
Outlets that cannot meet licensing costs close quietly; those that publish anything authorities find objectionable, whether critical of the Taliban or, as the Rah-e Farda case shows, critical of a neighbouring state in ways Kabul finds inconvenient, face suspension until ownership or management changes satisfy the authorities.
Five years on, the appropriate international response is not further documentation alone, a task RSF, IFJ, AFJC, and UNAMA have each carried out with considerable rigour, but sustained attention to the mechanisms making Afghan journalism unsustainable rather than simply banned.
Donor support for independent Afghan media operating in exile, continued monitoring of licensing decisions as a censorship tool rather than a neutral regulatory function, and consistent public reporting of arrests and their outcomes would each address a specific, identifiable point in the pipeline through which Afghanistan’s media landscape has been dismantled. Absent that, the trajectory documented over the past five years gives little reason to expect the coming year will look different from those that preceded it.
