Meet The TikTokers Doing PR for The Taliban

Forget Italy, Dubai, or Bali. There’s a hot new holiday destination that travel influencers are flocking to: Afghanistan. Yes, the country ruled by the Taliban, where women are banned from singing, driving, laughing, and even looking at men in public, has become an off-the-beaten-track tourist attraction for Westerners. 

In particular, non-Muslim Western women are keen to display their tolerance and openness to new cultures by visiting the Islamist state and documenting their travels on social media. This might seem odd, given the country’s frankly abysmal track record when it comes to women’s rights, and human rights generally. Since the Taliban seized power in 2021, following the withdrawal of U.S. and coalition forces, a series of laws were introduced aimed at making women all but invisible in public. Women must, of course, keep their heads covered at all times, as well as most of their bodies. They cannot attend university—in fact, education is prohibited beyond the age of 13. There are no TV shows with female actresses, no beauty salons, no women drivers. Women are not allowed in parks, gyms, or public baths. They cannot read the Quran in public or speak too loudly. They cannot take a flight without a male companion. The Taliban also recently claimed that “one eye is enough” for women to see, and they should keep one covered when outside the home. For all intents and purposes, women may as well not exist in Afghanistan. They live under what has been described as a sort of ‘gender apartheid.’ 

As you might expect, the young, Western women travelling there don’t have anywhere near the same experience as the average Afghan woman. Australian influencer Chloe Baradinsky, who recently visited with a female American friend, described in her TikTok videos how the rules were often enforced sporadically and how the two of them received special treatment—presumably because they are white Westerners who were often accompanied by armed escorts. Baradinsky spent five days in Afghanistan, touring some of the country’s sights and cities, like the Blue Mosque in Mazar-i-Sharif, Band-e Amir National Park, and capital city Kabul, living a lifestyle that would likely be unimaginable for local women. Some of these videos feel like parody. Coffee shops were banned by the Taliban, Baradinsky explains in one video, because they encouraged men and women to mingle, but she manages to find one that serves iced mochas. Her companion asks the Afghan barista if he has any lactose-free milk.

Baradinsky constantly stresses how friendly the people are and how safe she feels—despite most European governments strictly advising against travel to Afghanistan for any purposes. Again, her experience likely has a lot to do with the fact that she often appears to be escorted by men with AK-47s. At one point, she even claims her “white privilege” probably helped her avoid the same brutal treatment as locals when crossing the border over to Pakistan. 

The astonishing thing is that Baradinsky isn’t the only young woman visiting Afghanistan for tourism and social-media content. Last year, a 33-year-old German TikToker called Margaritta spent three months there by herself. Her takeaway? That the regime of misogyny actually stems from a perverse kind of respect for women. Margaritta, who is not a Muslim, said she saw the strict laws as a sign that “women have value, and they are valued as precious.” She claimed that, in Afghan culture, women are seen as “womb carriers,” meaning that “any excellence a man demonstrates, he got from a woman near him.” The Taliban certainly have a funny way of showing gratitude to their supposedly cherished “womb carriers.” 

A common theme expressed in these kinds of videos is that we in the West are not being exposed to the ‘real’ Afghanistan. The mainstream media are, apparently, either lying or exaggerating the extent to which women are oppressed, poverty is prevalent, and violence is commonplace. Brit Zoe Stephens, another TikToker who has visited Afghanistan multiple times, echoed this view when speaking to NBC News: “All we see of the women in Afghanistan is shapes behind burqas. But when I got there, I realised that … there’s a lot more nuance to it.” What kind of nuance, Zoe? Like sometimes women are allowed to reveal their eyes in public, or are allowed outside the house without a male chaperone? Like the rest of the Taliban PR squad, Stephens is always quick to stress how safe and friendly Afghanistan feels when she visits. 

It is understandable that many people jump at the chance to visit a country that has been off limits for so long. But is the risk really worth it? The TikTokers mentioned above were all fortunate enough not to run into any serious danger during their visits—at least not any that they’ve talked about publicly. But despite their protestations that Afghanistan feels so safe and cuddly, it is still an incredibly high-risk place, even for tourists. It consistently ranks as one of the most dangerous nations in the world, and terrorism remains a threat. Just last year, three Spanish tourists and three Afghan nationals were shot and killed by Islamic State terrorists while visiting Bamiyan. 

It’s no surprise, then, that the Taliban are keen to encourage this stream of fawning tourists. Aside from helping to line their own pockets, these travel vloggers are giving the Taliban some decent press. The TikTokers don’t paint Afghanistan in a purely flattering light—much of this is still poorly disguised poverty tourism, and the fact that these women are being forced to cover up from head to toe is impossible to ignore. But the fact that normal young women are able to travel to and vlog from Afghanistan at all lends legitimacy to the Taliban regime. It might not be a standard holiday hotspot, but the Islamist state can still present itself as a destination for daring adventure tourists. The more people who go there and publicise their travels, the more desensitised Western audiences become to seeing radical Islam in action, particularly its abysmal treatment of women and girls. This process is well underway. Last year, 7,000 people visited the country, up from just 691 in 2021. Taliban officials say that, since 2021, Afghanistan has seen around 14,500 foreign tourists. 

It is also worth noting that, while these vloggers might be selling their content as the ‘real’ version of Afghanistan, this is far from the whole truth. While tourists are not required to have escorts, they must register with officials when they arrive in each province and submit to routine searches at checkpoints. The Taliban tend to keep tabs on foreigners inside the country, both to ensure their safety and, presumably, to make sure they have as hassle-free a trip as possible. As Afghan activist and scholar Orzala Nemat has complained, “what we’re seeing instead is a curated, sanitised version” of life under Taliban rule. The Taliban, for their part, are keen to show Afghanistan off to foreigners, in order to boost their reputation abroad.

In many ways, the phenomenon of Western women taking jaunts to Afghanistan is the ultimate form of virtue-signalling. Aside from it making for unique content, this urge to prove to the world that a bunch of Islamists aren’t so bad after all is strangely familiar. Since Hamas’s attack on October 7th 2023, progressives across the West rushed to the defence of those murderous terrorists. The politically correct–many of them women—still seem to believe that Hamas militants are nothing more than noble freedom fighters. According to the simplistic, black-and-white thinking of identity politics, the Taliban, Hamas, and other Islamist militants are almost without fail cast as the victims of any conflict. If Israel or the U.S. are the colonial oppressors, that must make Hamas and the Taliban the oppressed. When an ideology ties morality to how underprivileged you are, it ends up treating literal terrorists like the good guys.

To be clear, the TikTokers posting Afghanistan content very rarely talk politics. Their explicit aim is certainly not to propagandise for the Taliban and their regime. But regardless of intent, this is what they end up doing. These Islamist terrorists are not misunderstood rebels with a cause. They are violent, backward extremists who despise the West and everything it stands for. Under no circumstances should we let a bunch of influencers rehabilitate the Taliban of people.