Taliban using Iranian jammers to stop people watching critical news channels, says TV boss

Popular channel’s boss Harun Najafizada tells The Independent Taliban purchased an extremely expensive jammer with the intention of using it against AITV

The Taliban have allegedly purchased satellite jammers from Iran to disrupt the last remaining independent television channel reporting on the regime’s brutal crackdown on human rights.

Iran’s assistance helped the Taliban leaders acquire orbital jammers for the satellite stations of the Afghanistan International Television and shut down broadcast for more than a week, AITV’s executive editor Harun Najafizada told The Independent.

The channel is popular among Afghans for their critical coverage of the country’s hardline Islamist regime.

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 5 September to 13 September before the channel shifted to a different satellite frequency.

“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,” Mr Najafizada, who operates the channel from London, UK, said.

His news channel has consistently reported on the Taliban brutalities on Afghan women, minorities and widespread shutdown of humanitarian work. They have not succumbed to Taliban’s orders of having no female anchors or women appearing on TV with their faces covered.

The AITV, launched on the day the Taliban took over in Afghanistan in August 2021, managed to overtake the popularity of BBC Persian and BBC Pashto in the country, according to a BBC Media Action report on media consumption in Afghanistan.

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, sources told The Independent on the condition of anonymity.

“This interference and shutdown via orbital jammers will not be limited to just AITV but other international news channels which the Taliban doesn’t find fit under their interpretation of Sharia law, they want to implement their own state radio and television broadcast which praise the Supreme leader and his Talib ministers,” sources said.

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, according to reports. This impacted the Iranian news channel’s frequencies on Eutelsat and Arabsat satellites.

“The interferences harmfully affect the transmission of several digital TV and radio channels broadcasting in Persian from outside of Iran, as well as other channels,” Eutelsat, one of the world’s largest satellite operators serving Europe, Africa, Asia and the Americas, said in a statement.

Iran allegedly jammed and disrupted the broadcast services in 2022 during the civil protests caused by Amini’s death, it said.

“This 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,” Mr Najafizada said.

Iran is yet to comment on these allegations.