About Freshta

About Freshta Jalalzai
Freshta Jalalzai is a journalist with a postgraduate degree in politics from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. Her work focuses on war, historical memory, and post-conflict transitions, with a particular emphasis on the implications of U.S. foreign policy in Afghanistan as well as in the wider South and Central Asia region.

Her work has appeared in The Diplomat, New Lines Magazine, and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), with translations into Arabic, Russian, Uzbek, and Bosnian. Her reporting has been widely republished across South Asian media and cited by organizations such as The Asia Foundation and Cambridge University Press.


She is currently working on two long-form pieces: a personal narrative for The Diplomat magazine comparing Afghanistan’s situation before and after the Taliban takeover in August 2021, and an analysis examining the complex relationship between Iran and the Taliban in Afghanistan, with a focus on regional implications amid the ongoing Middle East crisis.


In 2024, her analysis of Sirajuddin Haqqani, the leader of the Haqqani Network and a senior figure in the Taliban hierarchy, received significant attention in Afghan and American political circles. Her work sheds light on the ideological influence and operational authority within the Taliban’s leadership. This assessment, framed within the context of U.S. foreign policy, contributed to policy debates on the Taliban’s internal power dynamics.


Based on her master’s thesis at Columbia Journalism School, "The Little-Known Story of Afghanistan’s Last Jew" was published in the Fall 2023 edition of New Lines Magazine and remains one of the few works documenting this minority community through the perspective of a woman survivor. It explores identity, gender, and memory amid cultural erasure.

In 2022, she was selected to participate in Columbia University’s prestigious Book Writing Seminar. She spent her formative years in Prague, Czech Republic, while studying at the University of New York in Prague and working for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), one of the leading U.S. news agencies in Europe focused on the post-Soviet world and Russia. During that time, she covered pivotal political crises, including the Arab Spring, the rise of ISIS in the Middle East, and the war in Ukraine.

In 2019, she was named one of RFE/RL’s Top 12 Women Journalists, selected from 23 countries.
In 2015, she led a documentary team in Athens covering the mass migration of unaccompanied children from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya. Her work helped draw international attention to the crisis, focusing on children vulnerable to trafficking and detention.


In 2012, she received RFE/RL’s Presidential Award for her research on the challenges faced by Afghan women journalists during the country’s democratic transition. This research led to the founding of the Afghanistan Independent Journalists Association (AIJA), advocating for and defending the rights of Afghan journalists, mainly women reporters in rural areas. In 2006, she co-founded Kabul’s first press club. She is fluent in five languages.