Zahra Joya Devoted Her Life to Telling Afghan Women's Stories. Now She's Telling Her Own

One morning last fall, I woke up to a string of text messages from the Afghan journalist Zahra Joya. This wasn’t unusual — the two of us were writing a book together and in near-constant contact — but a trio of angry face emojis caught my eye. 

‘Americans are turning into the Taliban!’ she wrote. ‘How is this possible?’ 

Under President Donald Trump, the U.S. was erasing women and girls from its foreign policy, shuttering the Office of Global Women’s Issues and signalling that Washington will turn a blind eye to gender-based crimes, echoing the rollback of women’s rights on American soil. 

The sheer hypocrisy of what was unfolding felt surreal. What made it all the more dizzying was the history: Throughout America’s 20-year war in Afghanistan, improving the lives of women had been central to its mission — or so we were told. It was talked about almost as much as security and fighting terrorism. For Afghan women like Zahra, and journalists like me who had reported from the country, we couldn’t help but feel ridiculed. 

Zahra and I had reported out of Kabul at the height of the American war – Afghanistan was her home country, and for a while, my adopted one – but we rarely experienced the same version of the conflict. She lived with her family and rarely encountered foreign officials, while I was in the barricaded diplomatic area, reporting on NATO’s every move. Still, despite our different lives, the stories were often the same: Senseless murders of women across the country, slain daughters, a grinding inequality between the sexes that worsened as violence deepened. 

I had moved to Kabul in 2011, when President Obama’s troop surge made the war in Afghanistan the biggest news story in the world. Zahra and I would meet five years later, in 2016, when she enrolled in a Kabul-based media program I had established to train women journalists. It was spring, and the city was fresh with new blossoms. In Kabul, offices and classrooms marked International Women’s Day by giving their female employees and students headscarves. Many were disgruntled; they had wanted pens. Zahra went on to found her own newsroom, Rukshana Media, to publish stories about Afghan women and girls every day.

Five years after those hopeful days, the tides shifted again, this time with devastating effects. As the U.S. pulled out of Afghanistan, the Taliban triumphantly returned to power, bringing with it an abrupt and ignoble end to America’s war. I had long left the country by then – I was starting a family back in London – but Zahra, naturally, remained in Afghanistan. She was at great risk – her journalism, gender and being Hazara, an ethnic minority persecuted under the Taliban, made her a wanted individual. Worse, she was visible. I immediately went to work, helping Zahra and her family flee to the U.K. on one of the last military planes out of Afghanistan. 

It’s now another half-decade from the Taliban’s roar back to power. Since capturing Kabul in August 2021, the Taliban have imposed over 100 edicts on women and girls, restricting their movement, enforcing a strict dress code and banning school for girls over age 12. They have legalized marriage for nine-year-old girls and ruled that a woman cannot talk or even pray loudly inside her own home. The United Nations says half of Afghan women only manage to leave the confines of their homes once a month. Rates of suicide are sky-rocketing.  

Zahra now lives in London and has a memoir to her name, “The Vanishing Girl of Kabul.” The book, which I co-wrote with her, takes readers on a journey through Zahra’s life and work, which, in many ways, traces the trajectory of Afghanistan’s fate over recent decades. As a small girl under the Taliban’s first rule in the 1990s, Zahra disguised herself as a boy to get into school; in the post-9/11 era, Zahra became the first woman in her family to attend university, eventually going on to become a journalist; while a young woman, she escaped suicide bomb attacks as violence escalated across the country and the experiment with Western-style democracy failed. 

Underpinning it all is a deep sense of betrayal, made keener by the day. From broken promises, to abandonment, to fleeing corrupt government officials to the foreign nations who fail to step in and support the millions of women trapped under a brutal system of gender apartheid that the world has never seen before. 

The clampdown on women’s rights in the West was the coda neither Zahra nor I saw coming. It feels like Trump and the Taliban are increasingly in sync, each dismantling decades of progress. 

This is also why I wanted to write the book with Zahra. From the beginning, we set out to make this a historical document, showing how rights and hopes can be given by a government, enforced by militaries, and taken away just as quickly. 

So many versions of a woman’s life exist. It is fractured by rumor, rewritten by friends and enemies alike, and buried beneath the history of the victors.  Memoir is a way of taking control of one’s narrative, of owning the final say. This is particularly relevant in a time of shrinking freedoms. 

For me, writing this with Zahra was the ultimate feminist act. Women need to uplift each other, share stories, and cheer their sisters on. This is an Afghan story, but it’s also for and about women everywhere. 

In a conversation for The Persistent, I talked with Zahra about the process — the fears, joys and revelations of making this book.  

Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

Read an excerpt from The Vanishing Girl of Kabul:

When we started writing “The Vanishing Girl of Kabul,” were you afraid to tell your story? 

I always had doubt — should I do this or not? — because it’s not just my story, it’s my whole family’s. We are a large Afghan family and my relatives are scattered around the world — in Kabul, Bamiyan [a central Afghan province], Germany, Iran, Pakistan. It’s nerve-wracking exposing your whole life like that, and I really have no idea what their reaction will be to the book. I don’t want them to get into trouble for being related to me.  

My immediate family has now read it of course. Some of them didn’t know what I had covered in my journalism — that I got so close to some really distressing issues, that I had spoken to so many rape survivors. So I was this weird mixture of nervous and excited. For the more personal stories involving my family, my sisters went through the manuscript at an early stage, and acted as a sounding board. That gave me the confidence to continue, to be wide open. 

Tell me more about the experience of working together. We’ve known each other for a decade, but this was new for both of us.  

Over the years, I have done many interviews with foreign media and talked about my childhood story, how I disguised myself as a boy to go to school in the 1990s. They were always pretty short and always focused on this part of my life. But there is a lot more to me than that! I’ve also had a long career in journalism. And you saw that and seized on it — probably because you’re also a journalist. Talking about all the stories I’ve worked on helped me carry my current work at Rukhshana Media. It made me realize what I am doing at Rukhshana is my life’s work. 

Putting this book together took us a couple of years. I would interview you for several hours at a time, often in a park where no one could hear us – it was all in English, as I don’t speak Dari/Farsi. When we began writing, trading drafts of each chapter, I felt the project truly come alive. How did you find working together? 

I learned a lot from this process, from you. How tiny details are important. You went so, so deep into my story, and drew those details out in a way that made sense. It also made me realize how poetic Persian is, and how we use it in everyday life. Sometimes we recite lines from Hafez [a 14th century Persian poet] to each other as a way of speaking. You and I spoke about poetry so much for the book that I was even inspired one night to write one!  

I also feel relief at having the book out. I’ve kept a journal since I moved to England, after fleeing Afghanistan. But I was always worried I’d lose it — this is what happens when you’re forced to leave everything behind. Now I can sit tight knowing that my life story has been preserved. 

What surprised you during the process? 

I was fearful of having to dig up the painful moments from reporting on terrible issues. Like the sexual assaults of women, the Taliban’s brutality towards women and girls. But actually retelling those awful stories, and seeing them on the written page, became a form of therapy. All of this weighs so heavily on me, but by sharing it I could actually feel the burden shift. It was difficult, of course, but it also helped me.

That's interesting, as I was worried to ask you personal details about yourself and thought those would make you most uncomfortable — like when you got your first period, what that meant for your life disguised as a boy. But that didn’t bother you, right?

Not at all. Menstruation is not taboo to me. As a journalist, I have reported on it a lot, how difficult it is for Afghan girls, who are poor and don’t know what it means. It was natural and easy for me to share this; it’s a part of human nature. 

What did you learn about yourself as we wrote the book? 

I realized how strong and stubborn I am. That came as a real surprise. Looking back on my life, I was surrounded by people who ignored me, who wouldn’t let me in, but I insisted on being present in spaces that were not open to me. 

I see how I fought with everyone: with boys, with men, with Afghan society itself. For the book I needed to dive into my childhood, and I spoke a lot with my mother about how I was in my early years. Almost every memory involved me in a standoff or quarrel with someone. Not with my family, but the people who didn’t approve of me in some way: my disguising myself as a boy, going to mosque in boy’s clothing, stuff like that. 

I always saw myself as a survivor, but now I see I’m also a fighter. I work on behalf of victims, I’m constantly in a defense position. I’m even a defender in soccer [where I play on a local team]. I’ll do anything to stop the other team from winning. 

Sometimes we talked about whether it was the right time for a book. You were also juggling so much – a media company, bringing your parents to London from Afghanistan, adjusting to life in exile. But you did it anyway. Tell me about that.  

I worried it was too early to be putting out a book. I suppose this is what people mean by an inferiority complex. Some people told me I am not old enough to write a book about my life — they said one should have a long life before summing it all up. But then I thought about the situation Afghan women are in, and I felt the book’s urgency. 

Earlier this year a teenage girl called Noria was caught by the Taliban in Helmand province. After her father died, she became the family breadwinner, disguising herself as a boy to work in a cafe to support her sisters. She changed her name to Noor Ahmad. There are so many similarities with my story. When the Taliban arrested her, I thought, ‘God, history is repeating itself, again and again.’ When will this circle of violence be broken? Then I knew we were right to get this book out now. 

Do you know what happened to Noria?

Unfortunately we do not know. She was taken into Taliban detention and disappeared. 

As editor-in-chief of Rukhshana Media, you encounter many traumatic stories. In the book, we spoke a lot about your recurring nightmares, how you're always "on," how you follow the Afghan working day from London. How does it feel to be running a newsroom while in exile? 

It’s not an easy job. I have to be there for my colleagues in Afghanistan around the clock. They are really stressed, and live in constant fear for their lives. I have to remind them — and myself — that none of this is normal. We are fighting a gender war against a regime that has dehumanized us. But they’re also so committed. Not long ago one of my reporters asked for a holiday — I told her to take 10 days off, but she came back after a week. She said she could hear my words ringing in her ear. 

I’m constantly exhausted. Soccer helps and I try to play on my team at least once a week. It perks me up. 

The “vanishing girl” in your title has many meanings. She is you, and she is every woman. She was you as a child, and you as an adult. What do you hope people will think when they read the book?

If readers come away with a better sense of the Afghan war, and a sense of empathy in their heart for Afghans, and particularly for the women and girls, then I know this journey has been worth it.