The video begins with a terrifying image: three men, apparently hostages, kneel in front of a group of five Taliban fighters holding AK-47s. One of the turbaned figures recites an Islamic greeting, then warns: “We have one message for America.” He pulls off the hood shrouding the face of one of the “prisoners” — who promptly grins, sticks up his thumb and declares: “Welcome to Afghanistan!” The video then cuts to a montage of waterfalls, azure lakes and mountains, plus the occasional camouflaged tank. Its author, @iampocoloco, has 163,000 followers on Instagram and is one of a fast-growing band of social media influencers posting largely favourable content about the Taliban’s brutal, misogynist emirate.

Some of these influencers are Western women. Ignoring advice from the State Department, the British Foreign Office, and other EU governments to avoid even essential travel to Afghanistan, Zoe Discovers tells her TikTok audience that travelling through the country and meeting local women has given her “the best experiences”. When challenged that the trip might be too dangerous, her response was simply: “Trust me, you’ll be fine.”

Chloe Jade, who has 478,000 followers on TikTok, has enough self-awareness to suggest that she only feels safe there as a woman thanks to “Western privilege”, while it’s clear that Afghan women are “not treated the same as men”. Who knew? But she also states she “really enjoyed” her visit, and that one reason why the Taliban is not like Western governments is “what the US did” to Afghanistan.

Other influencers provide no mention of the widespread abuse of human rights, the purging of women from education and employment, and the regime’s clampdown on free speech. Instead, they prefer to dwell on the country’s scenic beauty and its people’s warmth and hospitality. A cursory search of TikTok, Instagram and other platforms will swiftly produce hundreds of examples.

Don Broussard, 33, an African-American who lives in Houston, uses much of his leave from his job in banking to travel to the world’s trouble spots. As well as Afghanistan, he has recently spent time and created content in Libya and Iraq for his 200,000 followers spread across several platforms. Posting as @thebeardedbackpacker, he told me that travel influencers often talked to each other, and on the basis of recent conversations he reckoned the total number who have made videos of their visits to Afghanistan since the Taliban seized power in August 2021 is “easily in the thousands”.

One reason, he said, is economic: Afghanistan has attracted a lot of interest, so posting videos there is a good way for an influencer to build a bigger following. That meant income: once a content creator reaches a level where their posts can be monetised (something that varies from platform to platform,) it’s possible to make $1,000 or more from a single, popular clip.

At the same time, the Taliban was “encouraging people” to do this, making it clear officials had no objection when visitors filmed them because they saw social media videos as a way of improving their international image. Broussard’s own dealings with the Taliban had, he said, almost all been positive. “Definitely they wanted me to be safe, so they made sure that they escorted me in many different places,” he claimed. “My experience with the Taliban is that hospitality is embedded in the culture, and they were hospitable to me, although I realise they had mixed motives.”

Only a few younger fighters were less friendly. They “were not pleasant at all”, Broussard said, “literally staring at you as you walked by”. He said he also witnessed them assaulting Afghan men trying to cross the border into Pakistan: “They were hitting and beating them, so apparently they like to hit.”

Curt Jones, who is 28 and currently lives in Bangladesh, quit his job in marketing to travel the long, slow way from his home in Newcastle to Australia, and has posted numerous videos from the two weeks he spent in Afghanistan in April and May. Like Broussard, he told me that the Taliban wanted as many influencers to visit as possible: “In fact, I met very few tourists there who weren’t creating content. The Taliban’s assumption was that almost everyone was.” Given that 9,000 foreign tourists are said to have visited Afghanistan as tourists last year, this is a somewhat startling idea.

Jones was at pains to stress that he “doesn’t endorse” any aspect of the Taliban regime, especially its treatment of women. But he said he enjoyed his visit nonetheless, and that it had “confirmed my view that the people who live in a country are not the same as its government”. The explosive growth in Afghan social media content was, he concluded, bound to continue: “I guess the Taliban think they can somehow normalise themselves by their presence online.”

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David Rose is UnHerd‘s Investigations Editor.

DavidRoseUK

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