Emergency help for Afghan journalist Lutfullah Qasimyar

Dear friends and supporters,

This fundraiser is to help me, Lutfullah Qasimyar, an Afghan journalist in exile, to keep my parents and siblings safe in Pakistan after their rejection from Germany’s admission program. While we appeal the decision in court, I need urgent support to cover housing, food, medical care, and visas for my family over the next 6–12 months.

When the Taliban came to power in 2021, I began to work as a fixer and translator for many German and international outlets such as DER SPIEGEL, DIE ZEIT, The Guardian, The Washington Post, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, L’Illustré, ProSieben, ARD/RBB, and NGOs like Kabul Luftbrücke.

Over the years, I have worked on a variety of stories, covering secret education for girls, cultural heritage and life under the Islamic Emirate. I traveled to nearly all 34 provinces to show the complex reality after years of war. However, with the Taliban increasingly restricting both foreign and national journalists, fixers and translators like myself face constant intimidation and threats. Many of my colleagues have been silenced, detained, or forced into hiding. In 2023, my uncle and colleague, Faizullah Faizbakhsh, was arrested along with an American journalist and held for around six months.

After my family and I had been living under serious threats by the Taliban for months, I applied for Germany’s admission programme for at-risk media workers and, at their request, relocated to Pakistan with my wife, my parents, my two younger sisters (who are 13 and 15 years old), and my younger brother (10 years old). Our son Muzamil was born during this time and is now 20 months old.

After almost 18 months of waiting, my case was first rejected for unexplained reasons. When my German lawyer attempted to access the case file to determine the actual reason for the rejection, the authorities refused to cooperate for more than seven months, delaying the process further until my parents and siblings were finally rejected again in the last week.

While the case of me, my wife and my son is still pending, the rest of my family has been given a deadline to leave the accommodation provided by the German authorities before September 5th. This comes at a time when the Pakistani government is carrying out a large-scale campaign to deport Afghan refugees, raiding cities and villages across the country.

We therefore urgently need to find a safe place to stay and obtain valid visas to protect our family while we wait for the outcome of our appeal in a German court, which could take six to twelve months.

Your contributions will directly help cover the costs of:

Every donation, no matter how small, brings us closer to safety and hope until a permanent solution is found. I am deeply grateful for your kindness, solidarity, and support during this very difficult time.

Thank you from the bottom of my heart,

— Lutfullah Qasimyar

Note: As I am not permitted to have a bank account inside Afghanistan or Pakistan, I organized this campaign with the help of my friend and colleague Julian Busch, who will ensure that the donations reach us in Pakistan as soon as possible.