Afghans Beyond Taliban

A Norwegian freelance journalist and an Afghan colleague were released Thursday after nearly a week in captivity in eastern Afghanistan, according to international news reports. Paal Refsdal had called the Norwegian Embassy in Kabul on November 6 to say he and his translator had been abducted, according to international news reports. Refsdal was making a documentary for Norwegian production...

Long destabilised by efforts to defeat the Taliban, the southern Afghanistan province of Kandahar has become even more dangerous since the recent presidential elections. Besides the daily threat of being caught up in an attack by insurgent groups, several local journalists say they fear beatings, detentions, or worse in retribution for their reporting. Journalists say they are particularly

A group of Afghan journalists has blamed the international coalition for the death of an abducted colleague during the British commando rescue of a New York Times reporter. They have accused the troops of having a "double standard" for Western and Afghan lives, the Associated Press (AP) has reported. The accusation came on Thursday even as British Prime Minister Gordon Brown's office said that...

A New York Times reporter held by the Taliban in Afghanistan was freed during a dramatic airborne commando raid on Wednesday in which his Afghan colleague was killed, officials and the newspaper said. Gunmen snatched Stephen Farrell, who is Irish, and Sultan Munadi, on Saturday while they were reporting on the aftermath of a NATO air strike that killed civilians and dozens of insurgents in the...

The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) has condemned a police assault on radio reporter Dawa Khan Meenapal at the site of a bomb attack in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar, in which at least 40 people were killed and 65 wounded on August 25. According to the Afghan Independent Journalists’ Association (AIJA), an IFJ affiliate, Meenapal was recording witness accounts of the attack in...

The US military is cancelling a contract with a public relations firm after coming under flak for using the company to rate the output of journalists reporting on the Afghanistan war, a Pentagon spokesman has said. "The Bagram Regional Contracting Center intends to execute a termination of the media analyst contract ... for the convenience of the US government," military spokesperson Lieutenant...

Many embedded journalists are being screened by a controversial Washington-based public relations firm contracted by the Pentagon to determine whether their past coverage has portrayed the US military in a positive light, the Stars and Stripes newspaper has reported. Stars and Stripes, a military newspaper partly funded by the Pentagon but editorially independent, said private contractors had been...

The Afghanistan government has imposed a media blackout on election-related violence during Thursday's presidential polls. Afghanistan's National Security Council released a statement through the Foreign Ministry Tuesday and official spokesmen contacted news bureaus by telephone to discourage reporting on violent incidents from 6 a.m. to 8 p.m. on Thursday, according to local and international...

The violence that threatens journalists working for Afghanistan’s news media has created a climate that does not favour free and impartial coverage of the August 20 crucial presidential election, now just a day away. Media coverage is also affected by the fact that political obstruction has prevented the adoption of a new press law, a situation that Paris-based Reporters Sans Frontières (RSF) has

Tuesday's roadside bomb attack that seriously wounded two Associated Press journalists highlights the dangers journalists face in covering the escalating conflict in Afghanistan, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has said. AP's report of the attack said Spanish photographer Emilio Morenatti and AP Television News Indonesian videographer Andi Jatmiko were injured while embedded with the US...