In a new report, a British media outlet has revealed that the Taliban has allegedly purchased satellite jammers from Iran to disrupt the last remaining independent television channel reporting on the regime’s brutal crackdown on human rights.
As per the executive editor of Afghanistan International Television (AITV), Iran’s assistance helped the Taliban leaders acquire orbital jammers for the satellite stations of the and shut down broadcast for more than a week.
Harun Najafizada told the media outlet that Taliban officials reportedly sent disruptive signals from a ground station within Afghanistan to the satellite, interfering with its broadcast.
Hundreds of people in Afghanistan saw a blank screen from September 5 to September 13 before the channel shifted to a different satellite frequency.
The channel is popular among Afghans for their critical coverage of the country’s hardline Islamist regime. AITV has consistently reported on the Taliban brutalities on Afghan women, minorities and widespread shutdown of humanitarian work and have also not followed Taliban’s orders of having no female anchors or women appearing on TV with their faces covered.
“I had received information in August from inside Kabul that the Taliban had purchased an extremely expensive jammer with the intention of using it against us,” Najafizada, who operates the channel from London, UK, said.
Other sources who spoke to the British media outlet on the condition of anonymity claimed that the Iranian orbital jammers were obtained earlier this year around May and the expensive purchase was confirmed from inside Kabul’s General Directorate of Intelligence (GDI), the intelligence agency of the Taliban.
As per the report, this is not the first time Iran has been accused of interfering with press freedom in central Asia. During the protests against the morality police following the death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Iranian woman who died in custody, AITV’s sister channel Iran International also experienced satellite jamming from a ground station in Karaj near Tehran. This impacted the Iranian news channel’s frequencies on Eutelsat and Arabsat satellites. Iran allegedly jammed and disrupted the broadcast services in 2022 during the civil protests caused by Amini’s death.
The report stated that Najafizada said that the act of orbital jamming not only attacks press freedom but also violates international standards and highlights the Taliban’s increasing efforts to dismantle free expression and restrict Afghan citizens’ access to truthful information.