We’ve spoken many times about how wars affect women and girls in particular. Last year, we had a pod on sexual and gender based violence in Sudan. And we have spoken about the role journalists play in wars and how they are sometimes targeted for showing what happens on the ground.

Zahra Nader is an Afghan journalist. She started her career in Kabul in 2011 and is now based in Canada. She is the editor-in-Chief of Zan Times, a new women-led newsroom-in-exile that covers the human rights situation in Afghanistan with a focus on women, the environment and other issues.

We asked Zahra about specific examples of stories that women are uniquely positioned to shed light on, how it felt to be a woman journalist in Kabul when she first started working and how Zan Times reporters are able to do their job under the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.

We hope to have some more interviews like this to shed a different light on how women cover conflict.

Zahra is thinking a lot about intergenerational trauma, and she recommends the book It Didn’t Start With You: How inherited family trauma shapes who we are and how to end the cycle by Mark Wolynn.