Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has formally asked International Criminal Court chief prosecutor Fatou Bensouda to investigate murders of journalists and media workers in Afghanistan since March  2020, after which 11 have been murdered, RSF said on Wednesday.

RSF is asking Bensouda to investigate these murders – which could be regarded as war crimes – under article 15 of the ICC’s Rome statute.

The three latest media victims, according to the report, were three women working for Enekaas TV in the eastern city of Jalalabad who were gunned down while on their way home on March 2, 2020.

Before that, Voice of Ghor radio station director Besmellah Adel Imaq was shot dead as he was returning home in Firoz Koh, the capital of the central province of Ghor, on January 1, said RSF.

RSF listed others:

Imaq was fifth media worker to be killed in the space of two months. The others were Mohammad Aliyas Dayee of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s Pashto-language service, who was murdered in Lashkargah on November 12; Malalai Maiwand, a TV presenter and representative of the Centre for the Protection of Afghan Women Journalists (CPAWJ), and her driver Taher Khan, who were murdered in Jalalabad on December 10; and Rahmatollah Nekzad, a reporter for international media, who was gunned down in Ghazni on December 21.

“All of these journalists and media workers were targeted because of their work amid an armed conflict that has seen an increase in violence against journalists and civil society in general since early  2020. RSF has every reason to believe that armed groups, especially the Taliban or Taliban affiliates, are responsible for this wave of killings,” the RSF report stated.

RSF has asked the ICC’s chief prosecutor to include these murders in the crimes committed in Afghanistan since 2003 that she was authorised to investigate by the ICC’s Appeals Chamber in March  2020. With a view to prosecuting those responsible, RSF has asked her to determine whether they should be treated as war crimes or as another category of crimes defined by the ICC’s Rome Statute, such as crimes against humanity. 

 At least 100 journalists, including 15 international journalists, have been killed in connection with their work in the past 20 years, while more than 60 media outlets have been destroyed or attacked and hundreds of threats have been made against journalists and media, the report said.