Save these courageous Afghan journalists

The Taliban want this young Afghan couple dead. We urgently need to get them to a place of safety and we need your help to do it.

As journalists, they have been courageous and outspoken in reporting the crackdown on human rights in Afghanistan. Time and again they have put their lives on the line to tell the truth about Taliban rule – how they are taking away freedom of speech and the right to dissent and how they are forcing women out of education, out of the workplace and back beneath the burqa.

After repeated threats to their lives, the couple have fled across the border, but they are still not safe.

Taliban leaders want revenge and have said they will be murdered if captured.

That is why we cannot show you their faces or tell you where they are – because it would put them in even greater danger. But when they are safe we will be able to tell you their extraordinary stories in full.

Who are ‘we’? We are Brian Cathcart, recently retired as Professor of Journalism at Kingston University London and a founder of the press reform campaign Hacked Off, and Katherine O’Donnell, a national newspaper journalist and a former night editor of The Times. A chance connection put us in touch with the couple and we have carefully verified their story, including with international NGOs who know of their plight but are so swamped by the international refugee crisis they have nothing left to give.

We feel we can’t turn our backs. So, what is required to get our Afghan colleagues to safety?

We have to raise £8,000. Please help if you can.

The couple are seeking visas to a safe country, but that will take several months and, in the meantime, they need to remain in hiding. Since they cannot work and have no income, they need help to feed and clothe themselves as well as to pay fees for applications and eventually (we hope) to buy tickets to safety. Even then there will be a short period of adjustment that will cost money.

Working with them we have calculated a budget of £8,000 that we believe should see them through to the day when they are safe. In context, that is not a great deal of money to rescue two courageous young people who have demonstrated, at risk of their lives, the true purpose of journalism.

Please help us to help them.