Afghan reporter to NATO chief: ‘Please don’t recognize the Taliban’

An Afghan reporter pleaded with the leader of NATO not to formally recognize the Taliban after its takeover of Afghanistan.

“Please don’t recognize the Taliban and don’t put us again in the same situation,” female Afghan journalist Lailuma Sadid told NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg during a press conference.

“Thousands of women already don’t know … what is going on and what should happen for them, and they are always asking, ‘What does it mean?’” Sadid said. “We are going back [to Taliban rule] again?”

During her remarks, Sadid was seen with an “Afghan Lives Matter” poster behind her.

Fears for women and girls in Afghanistan have grown given the Taliban takeover. 

When the conservative Islamic group ruled Afghanistan in the years before the U.S. invasion, women were not allowed to get an education or leave the house without a male companion. 

“I share your pain, I understand your frustration,” Stoltenberg told the Afghan journalist.

“We will continue to support. We will continue to watch and we’ll continue to hold the new rulers accountable for living up to fundamental human rights including, of course, the rights of women,” he said.

The exchange comes after similar remarks in the U.S. from a female Afghan journalist and U.S. official.

“As you know, I’m from Afghanistan, and I’m very upset today because Afghan woman didn’t expect that overnight all the Taliban came,” journalist Nazira Karimi told Pentagon press secretary John Kirby.

“Afghan people, they don’t know what to do. Woman has a lot of achievement in Afghanistan. I had a lot of achievement. I left from the Taliban like 20 years ago. Now we go back to the first step again,” Karimi said.

“We too have invested greatly in Afghanistan and in the progress that women and girls have made politically, economically, socially, and we certainly do understand, and we do feel the pain that you’re feeling. Probably not to the same extent,” Kirby said.