Left Behind, US and Afghan Journalists Seek Help
Media Experts are deeply concerned for the safety of hundreds of local journalists and media workers.
Following the Taliban's takeover of Kabul, three of the US’s leading newspapers have asked the Biden administration for assistance in evacuating their employees and their families, according to CNN.
On Monday, The Washington Post Publisher Fred Ryan sent an email to White House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan with an "urgent request on behalf of" his paper, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal.
Ryan requested that "204 journalists, support staff, and families from the civilian side of the Kabul airport be transported by US Military to the military side of the airport where they can be safe while awaiting evacuation flights."
Later that day, The New York Times published a separate group statement signed by the publishers of the three papers and addressed specifically to Biden. The statement requests that the President grant their Afghan colleagues protected access to a US-controlled airport, safe passage through a protected access gate, and facilitated air movement out of Afghanistan.
The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) Executive Director Joel Simon, writes in a Washington Post op-ed that if the Biden administration does not intervene to bring Afghan journalists to safety, an entire generation will be lost.
CPJ calls on governments around the world to take urgent action to save Afghan journalists.
— Committee to Protect Journalists (@pressfreedom) August 16, 2021
In recent weeks, we have documented escalating violence against journalists in #Afghanistan. This is what they have been facing ⤵️ pic.twitter.com/ktwewNT7I2
On his account, CPJ's advocacy and communications director Gypsy Guillén Kaiser stated to CNN, "It is appalling that despite timely efforts to secure the safety of these local journalists who made so much of that reporting possible, they are being left to fend for themselves."
Following the fall of Kabul that shocked the globe, images of massive crowds and traffic jams near Kabul International Airport and on the tarmac were heartbreaking.
The US has been accused of abandoning Afghanistan to the Taliban’s advance. Andrea Prasow at Human Rights Watch said that “it’s easy to wonder if history will blame the US for the human rights and humanitarian disaster there,” adding that “many parties were to blame, but the US had committed human rights abuses of its own and had rarely put the interests of the Afghan people first.”
On his end, US President Joe Biden announced Monday that “the situation in Afghanistan unfolded faster than the administration anticipated," also asserting that he doesn't "regret [his] decision to end America’s warfighting in Afghanistan."