“We need you journalists,” said a member of the Taliban, talking to us in 2022 on a hillside of the Bamiyan valley in east-central Afghanistan, once the site of 6th-century Buddha statues, carved into cliffsides, and which were destroyed by the Taliban in 2001. Well aware that the Taliban, who took back power in the country in the summer of 2021, are not advocates of the freedom of the press, we nevertheless could never have imagined that one among us, Mortaza Behboudi, would end up imprisoned by the Sunni fundamentalists just one year later.
Mortaza Behboudi was born in Afghanistan to a family of Hazara Shia Muslims, an ethnic and religious minority targeted by the Taliban. An outstanding journalist, he gained French nationality after being forced into exile in 2015, and after completing the trying, obstacle-laden path west. But his native land remained close to his heart.
Finally freed on Thursday after 284 days in detention in Afghanistan, when he suffered torture and other abuses, he arrived back in France on Friday. On his arrival, his first words were to give thanks to all those who had campaigned for his release.
Magistrates at the Kabul criminal court on Wednesday pronounced his acquittal on all of the charges that were levelled against him, including espionage, of giving “illegal support to foreigners”, and of “helping the crossing of borders” to foreign countries. He was made to sign a document by which he agreed to never again work in Afghanistan for foreigners.
When he was released from Kabul’s Pul-e-Charkhi prison on Thursday, he was met by Raffaella Lodice, the European Union’s chargée d’affaires and deputy head of the EU delegation to Afghanistan, who became involved in efforts to free Mortaza as of the first contact she had with his supporters (France, which does not officially recognise the Taliban regime, has no diplomatic presence in Afghanistan).
Lodice placed him in a secure location before he boarded a plane to take him to the United Arab Emirates. Waiting for him in Dubai was his wife Aleksandra Mostovaja, who said that with Mortaza’s release “light has come back into my world”, and that “life can now begin again”.
Since the return to power of the Taliban in 2021, Mortaza had travelled to Afghanistan on multiple occasions – ten times in 2022 – to work with reporters sent to the country by major French media, including Mediapart, Libération, France Télévisions, Arte, and Radio France. He was driven by the journalistic ambition of keeping the light shining on the Afghan people, allowing a voice for those who had lost theirs in the fast-changing media agenda, when one story chases another, and in which the Russian invasion of Ukraine had reshuffled the priorities of war correspondents and headlines.
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His last direct contact with me before his arrest was a text message sent on January 4th 2023. “Hi Rachida, I’m leaving for Afghanistan and I will be in Kabul tomorrow morning,” it began. “Would it interest you to propose a story together on the banning of Afghan women from studying at university and from working in NGOs?”
Following that came silence. We contacted those close to him, notably his wife Aleksandra, and tried to hide the growing concerns: “We have no news from Mortaza”. Then came the bombshell. We learnt that he had been detained by the Taliban since January 7th and placed in the hands of the regime’s feared General Directorate of Intelligence (GDI), which accused him of espionage, a typical charge used by authoritarian regimes to gag journalists.
In France, the mobilisation began. His wife, his friends, the NGO Reporters Without Borders (RSF), the French authorities, among them the foreign ministry’s crisis and support centre, set to work to obtain his release, initially in a discreet manner in the hope of a rapid result, and later, faced with the Taliban’s refusal to free the arbitrarily detained journalist, in the media spotlight.
The campaign would last ten long months, during which optimism was to be raised and dashed. It used every available means, including addressing the highest levels of the French and Afghan states, but also those of other countries, including Qatar. A number of town hall facades in France displayed the face of Mortaza, and the updated number of days, hours and minutes he remained detained featured on a giant screen placed on the wall of the Paris city hall. There were #FREEMORTAZA social media campaigns and in the port of Douarnenez, his adopted hometown in France in the north-west region of Brittany, local campaigners mounted a support committee, organising events such as the launch of a flotilla of small boats covered in #FREEMORTAZA banners. A permanent balance had to be found, highlighting his ordeal to prevent him from becoming forgotten while avoiding any provocation that might bring further harm to him.
Torture, beatings and sleep deprivation
During the early months in detention, Mortaza was able to speak to his wife over the phone for a total of just one minute, and under the surveillance of a Taliban guard. It was only at the end of July, when he was transferred from the GDI’s high-security prison in Kabul to that of Pul-e-Charkhi, in another district of the Afghan capital, which houses common law prisoners, that his conditions improved. They were still harsh, and he had to be constantly on his guard, but he was relieved to no longer be at the mercy of the GDI bully boys. He was allowed to regularly phone those close to him. To do so, he had to buy phone cards, which cost 5 euros for a 30-minute call abroad.
After seven months of detention, he was finally able to speak with his mother for the first time. “She cried for ten minutes, then we were able to speak,” he recalled. “She didn’t think I was alive, she believed I was dead, [and] that she was made to think I was alive in order not to upset her.” Meanwhile, Mortaza’s aunt, who lives in Kabul, was allowed to visit him, but only occasionally, when, under the watch of an armed soldier, he was expected to tell her that all was well.
One afternoon in September my phone rang. At the other end was the unmistakable voice of Mortaza Behboudi. He spoke very fast, as if the conversation could be cut off from one moment to another. He recounted the “hell” of the GDI prison in the Shah Darak district of Kabul, from which, according to its reputation, one rarely comes out alive.
He told me of the different types of torture there, which leave the body numb as if paralysed, of the 24-hour surveillance and the sleep deprivation from the permanently functioning neon lights in cells, of interrogations during the night, and of the noise. “They wanted me to confess under duress, that I sign documents in which it was written that I’m a spy at the service of the French, that I led delegations of spies, to criticise the Taliban, to give negative news,” he said.
Over weeks that turned into months, Mortaza never saw the light of day. “I had lost the notion of time, I thought I was going mad,” he recounted. “Sometimes we were given medicines that left us dazed. We were shut away in underground cells. Food was passed to us under the door.” The only book permitted in the prison was the Koran, which he took to reading.
Mortaza said that one day he found the remains of a pencil on the GDI prison floor, which he wanted to use to write to his wife. The Taliban discovered it and he received a beating as punishment. “After the beatings we [inmates] used to massage each other.” The inmates were regularly moved separately from cell to cell to prevent them from forming friendships.
In the GDI prison basement, Mortaza could hear the cries of other prisoners. “I heard those of women and men accused of resistance [activity] in Panjshir,” he recalled, referring to the eastern province where the anti-Taliban National Resistance Front of Afghanistan is active.
The prison conditions, with overcrowding and a diet of rice, soup, and potatoes, took a toll on Mortaza’s health. A particularly frightening experience was when he was placed in the same cell as members of Islamic State-Khorasan Province (IS-K), affiliated to the so-called Islamic State group. With a goal of creating a caliphate in central and southern Asia, IS-K are enemies of the Taliban, and have carried out numerous terrorist attacks in Afghanistan before and since the Taliban took back power in the country. They notably target the minority Harara Shia people. “They wanted to kill me,” said Mortaza, who had to beg his jailors to transfer him to another cell.
It is a miracle that I am alive
The day finally came when he was transferred to the Pul-e-Charkhi prison, where at last he could see the light of day. “We are allowed to exercise for two hours in the [prison] yard,” he told me. A prison doctor supplied books in Dari, the country’s most common language, including poetry. He was allowed to write and use a phone, and instead of the orange jump suit he had previously had to wear, he was dressed in the traditional Afghan clothes of a tunic shirt and baggy trousers. Meanwhile, he was obliged to attend religious classes led by mullahs.
In his new prison, Mortaza met with other victims of the Taliban regime, notably the activist Matiullah Wesa, who campaigns for people’s access to education, and notably that of girls. Wesa was arrested in March and was also first detained by the GDI in Shah Darak. “It does me a world of good to find him here,” said Mortaza. “We understand each other.”
Wesa is accused of illegal activities. He is the founder and head of an association called PenPath, which openly campaigns for schools and other educational establishments to be re-opened to women and girls. In 2002, when he was a child, his own school was set on fire by the Taliban.
Wesa was due to meet with me and Mortaza during our series of reports from Afghanistan last year. We were to join him in his native Kandahar Province, fiefdom of the Taliban situated in the south of the country. In the event, Wesa was unable to come along to the planned meeting because of an urgent matter he had to deal with. It was one of many that have taken up his time since the Taliban’s return to power, with their methodical stripping of the fundamental rights of women and girls, including that of access to education.
On October 13th, just days before the news arrived of Mortaza Behboudi’s release, which we already knew was imminent, the organisers of the Bayeux war correspondent awards, delivered each year in Normandy, held an evening round-table conference on the situation in Afghanistan after two years of Taliban rule. In an audio message recorded in his Taliban jail, and passed on by his wife Aleksandra, Mortaza’s voice rang out to the around 1,000 attendees gathered in the marquee. “I was kidnapped by the Taliban,” he said. “It is a miracle that I am alive. My crime is to have given a voice to Afghan women and men.”
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- The original French version of this report can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse