Journalist Mortaza Behboudi back in France after 284 days in Taliban jails
Journalist Mortaza Behboudi arrived back in France on Friday after being held prisoner in Afghanistan for 284 days. “My crime is to have given a voice to Afghan women and men,” says the 29-year-old, who holds dual French and Afghan nationality. Based in France, he has worked on numerous reports from Afghanistan since the Taliban returned to power in 2021, for Mediapart and other French media. He notably teamed up last year with Mediapart’s Rachida El Azzouzi in a series of reports from the country. Here she tells the story of his ordeal, including torture, following his arrest on January 7th by the Taliban regime’s feared General Directorate of Intelligence.
“We“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.
