"I am fine"

My inbox since the Taliban began rounding up the girls of Herat this week — a few of the hundreds of messages I've received, and that I need you to read.

The messages below arrived in my Instagram inbox over the course of the last few days. They came from women in Herat, in Kabul, Balkh etc. Some replied to my stories. Some I had never spoken to before. Every one of them asked me to do the same thing: keep them anonymous, and don’t let this go quiet.

So I have blurred their faces and their names. I have changed nothing else. What follows is mostly their words and I am only the place they landed.

Last weekend, the Taliban’s morality police detained between 30-80 women and girls in Herat for the way they were dressed. Fully covered women with face veiled. The number is shaky as information coming from inside Afghanistan is hard to be verified, as media has been shut down and when the Taliban take these women, no one knows where they take them. Days later, 100-200 men and women gathered in the streets to demand their release, Taliban forces opened fire and killed two people. One woman and a child.

That is the news. But this is what it sounds like from the inside.

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I. The girl in the middle of hell

This one came as a reply to one of my instagram stories, at ten past eight in the morning. It is in Persian. I have translated it as faithfully as I can, and left it close to how she wrote it.

As a young girl living in the middle of this hell, my heart is being torn out of its place. When I think that the one child the Taliban killed in Herat was someone like me — young, someone who was worn down by all this hardship and surely carried a thousand dreams — I go crazy. May God destroy them from the root. And the one they killed — that is by far the better fate. God knows what has happened to the women they took away, and what hell they are living through now.

She is grieving a stranger she has decided is herself. Someone like me. And she has done the arithmetic that no one her age should ever do: that the child who was shot may have been the lucky one. To have been able to escape this hell.

II. “I am fine”

This message I want you to read is not dramatic but that is why it frightens me.

She wrote to say she was deactivating her account and that she was fine, safe, everything fine, after sending me some videos of the protests. Almost in passing, she mentioned she would no longer be going to Friday’s protest, that has been organised in Kabul or Herat and that she couldn’t say why.

I have learned to read these messages backwards. When someone disappears their digital self, promises an explanation for later, has to say the word “safe” twice — that is not reassurance. Their phones are being tracked and monitored. They can’t stay online for too long with the same account. They are hostages in their own country.

But the fact that she was trying to reassure me that she’s fine, thinking of me before herself is what had shaken me. I felt numb.

III. “If you will be a voice to us, I will keep sharing”

I keep thinking of this line ‘I’m not the Roya before yesterday’.

She is telling me that something broke in her overnight, that the person writing to me is not the person who woke up the day before. I have heard a version of that sentence now from too many women to count. And it makes me feel both broken for what they have done to the women and girls of Afghanistan, but also proud of their courage. There is no woman more courageous and brave to survive Taliban-run Afghanistan every single day.

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IV. Kabul

Herat was not the end of it. By the next morning, messages were coming from the capital.

I am in Kabul. I’m not in Herat — but if there’s a protest in Kabul, I’ll go too.

Even if they shoot and kill me, let them shoot. At least I won’t have stayed silent.

I’m exhausted by these conditions. If this road ends in freedom, I want to be its sacrifice — so that at least the next generation of us can live free…

And please, be our voice. 🙏🙏🙏

Her second message was in English. By her account, the Taliban arrests of women had reached the capital: men walking the streets looking for girls to arrest, with hijab as the pretext. The despair in those few lines is not performance. It is someone watching the door.

V. “Who will hear if we make noise?”

Not everyone believes making noise will work. I think their doubt belongs here too, because it is the truest thing in my inbox.

She had just watched a video of the Taliban beating protesters, captioned we have nothing left to lose — and her reply is a shrug and a question: who will even hear us? Her heart is heavy, she says, but she has no faith anyone will care, least of all the men of her own country. She is not wrong to ask. She is daring me to prove her wrong.

VI. “Please share my message so that others can read it”

The longest message came from a woman who had clearly weighed every word, and who asked me, explicitly, to publish it so others could read it.

She is making an argument, not just a plea. That the word Ghayrat — honour — has become an alibi for the men who stay silent. That hijab is a pretext: a girl can cover completely and still be taken, so this was never about a few strands of hair. That if honor means anything, it should be spent defending the girls being arrested, not policing them.

VII. The invitation

And then, at fourteen minutes past midnight, a message that reads like a press release written by someone with everything to lose, a calm, formal appeal to listen to the women of Afghanistan, an announcement that demonstrations would be held across the country on Friday for the right to work, to study, to be free, and a request that I carry word of it to the world.

VIII. “Where are they?”

This message turns outward, at those in the Afghanistan diaspora everywhere: the actors, the singers, the TV hosts, the journalists, the public figures with big followings, many of them in safe countries. Everyone with a platform who has said nothing.

“Put together a template and tag all the famous faces — the actors, the singers, the TV hosts, the Afghan journalists. Call them out, so they wake up. If they have honour, if they have any ‘ghayrat’, if they have a shred of dignity and self-respect, let them stand with the people of their own homeland.

Where are they?”

What they are asking

I hope you take the time to read these messages again and again and notice how little they ask for. Not to be rescued or for money. Not even safety, which they seem to have written off. They ask to be heard. They ask that the videos they filmed at the risk of their lives reach someone who will pass them on. They ask that their names be kept out of it.

Be our voice is not a metaphor to them. It is a job they are assigning, because they have run out of other options and because the act of speaking, even anonymously, even into a stranger’s inbox, online, is the last freedom the regime has not been able to take.

So this is me doing the one thing they asked. Not speaking for them as they are more than capable of speaking for themselves, as you’ve just read. Only making sure the words got out of the country.

If you read this far: you are now one of the people they were hoping existed.

Don’t let it go quiet.

NOTE TO READER:

For too long, our stories have been told about us, never by us. What you were taught about places like Afghanistan, South Asia, the Middle East, was decided by people who had every reason to flatten it into a single word: war. The rest was erased, rewritten, or locked away.

I’m taking it back, piece by piece, the history, the culture, the lives that never made the headline.

I do this with no funding, no institution, no one behind me. It means no one can tell me what to write, what to soften, or whose version to repeat. But it also means this work survives on one thing: readers who decide it’s worth paying for.

If this piece moved you, that decision is yours to make. A paid subscription is what keeps this independent journalism going and keeps these stories reaching the world.

And if you take nothing else: read it, sit with it, and send it to someone. Every person who reads is one more who can’t say they were never told.