In 2017, the first issue of Nimrokh opened with the story of Masoma, a teenage girl from Herat. At 15, she had been sold into marriage by her father, who struggled with addiction. Her husband was ten years older. Masoma’s story was common, but it was also invisible, ignored by the male-dominated Afghan media that saw little value in women’s pain.
But we chose to tell it.
And in doing so, we began something rare and radical.
I founded Nimrokh because I had seen too much. I started researching in 2010, 16 years old, in a country where women weren’t supposed to speak, let alone write. Over five years, I traveled to twenty provinces, living in villages for weeks, documenting the women’s daily lives. I met mothers who lost daughters in childbirth for lack of female doctors. I listened to girls denied school, survivors of domestic abuse and child marriage, and women facing discrimination in every part of life.
And I knew their stories mattered.
“Nimrokh” means profile-a metaphor for the half-hidden face of women, exposed. It reflects a desire to explore both the visible and concealed aspects of women’s lives: the full humanity of Afghan women, in all their courage and complexity. From our first issue, we broke the silence on rape, harassment, women’s right to divorce and custody, child marriage, and even the simple but radical act of placing mothers’ names on birth certificates.
We documented the rise of domestic violence. We told the stories of survivors. We gave space to women navigating work, politics, culture, and education, often in the face of daily threats and LGBTQ+ rights. introducing these critical topics into Afghanistan’s legal and social discourse.
We became memory-keepers. A witness.
After the fall of Kabul in August 2021, when our office was forced to close, we did not stop. On the third day of Taliban control, we resumed publishing online, starting with news coverage of women protesting in the streets of Kabul. Since then, we have continued to report on migration, resistance, exile, underground activism, and the everyday fight of Afghan women to remain visible and heard.
And now, more than ever, we need your support.
There are millions of Masomas in Afghanistan today. Women erased from public life, mothers stripped of rights, daughters barred from school. They are waiting for someone to hear them.
Nimrokh must continue not only to report, but to preserve their voices for future generations.
With gratitude
Fatima Roshanian
Founder & Editor-in-Chief
About CEO
Fatima Roshanian is the CEO of Nimrokh Media and has studied political science and journalism at Gawharshad University, Kabul. She has worked for five years in the field of health, education, and women’s research in 27 provinces of Afghanistan from 2010 to 2014. In 2015, Fatima had an idea for a mechanism that would bring people together to fight for their fundamental rights. At the start of her university classes, she founded “Negarish Now” with several young people. She also volunteered in the cultural, social, educational, and human rights programs for three years, from 2015 to 2017, while serving as the head of the women’s committee and the deputy general of this institution.
After becoming aware of the deplorable conditions, imposed violence, and censorship against women, in 2017, Fatima established a weekly magazine under the name of Nimrokh in Kabul in August of the same year. For the five years that it has been active and published, this weekly has addressed problems pertaining to women, human rights, and the advancement of LGBTQ rights in Afghanistan. Following the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan on August 15, 2021, Fatima relocated to Albania on November 13, 2021, and then, on April 20, 2022, she became a refugee in Canada. She has registered Nimrokh as an independent, non-profit corporation in Canada, and its online activities reflect on the status of women in Afghanistan.
The policy and publication policy of Nimrokh is based on the protection of women’s rights, gender equality, democratic values, and critique of patriarchal socio-political culture and structures. In the last two years before the fall of Afghanistan, a major part of this media’s work was attending to women’s civil and political rights in the peace process as well. Striving to create a broad intellectual front among women in issues of peace and post-peace development; Nimrokh Media has defined the Taliban as an anti-woman terrorist group. After August 2021, Nimrokh focuses on the themes of women’s protest and resistance against the Taliban and the publication of reports on Taliban violence against women, women’s narratives of life under Taliban domination and women and migration.