Zan Times has a small, core team, all of whom work in exile. This team is responsible for the editorial direction and management of the newsroom and collaborates with a wide network of freelance journalists and writers inside Afghanistan and in exile.

For the safety of colleagues and operations inside Afghanistan, some of our colleagues in exile and all of our colleagues inside Afghanistan cannot be publicly identified. For their safety, all journalists and writers working with Zan Times from Afghanistan use pen names.

The individuals listed below are members of our core team who are able to work under their real identities.

Zahra Nader

Executive Director and Editor-in-Chief

Zahra Nader is an award-winning journalist with over a decade experience in covering Afghanistan. She started her journalism career in Kabul while in high school and has worked with several Afghan newspapers and online outlets. In 2016, she joined The New York Times bureau in Kabul, becoming the first Afghan woman journalist to work with English language media outlets after 2001. 

Her reporting and writings have been published in Time, Foreign Policy, The Guardian, Toronto Star, Globe and Mail and DW. 

She was a 2024–2025 Knight-Wallace Fellow at the University of Michigan and holds a master’s degree in communication and culture from York University in Toronto.

She is fluent in Farsi-Dari and English.

Read the articles wrote by Zahra Nader

Khadija Haidary

Managing Editor

Khadija Haidary is a journalist and a writer. She is the author of two short story collections: My Grandfather’s Radio, published in Persian, and Letters of an Afghan Woman, published in Mandarin in China. While in Kabul, Haidary began writing for the media after the Taliban takeover in 2021.

In 2023, she started writing for Zan Times under a pseudonym while based in Kabul and later in 2024, after completing the Zan Times journalism training, she joined the newsroom as a journalist. Her writings have appeared in The Guardian, Al Jazeera and many Chinese news outlets.  

She holds a bachelor’s degree in economics and a master’s degree in finance and banking, both from Kabul University.

She is fluent in Uzbek, Farsi-Dari, and English.

Freshta Ghani

Multimedia Editor

Freshta Ghani is an Afghan journalist and writer. She began her professional career as a radio journalist in Kabul and has over a decade of experience working in media.

Her short stories, originally written in Pashto, have been translated into Dari, German, English, Japanese, and Korean. Two of her works appear in the anthology My Pen Is the Wings of a Bird. She is one of 21 Afghan women writers featured in My Dear Kabul (2024) and Rising After the Fall, published in English for young adults. Her stories and memoirs have also appeared in German and English on Weiter Schreiben, Whistles, and Words Without Borders.

Ghani is fluent in Pashto and Dari. 

Hamayon Rastgar

Senior editor

Hamayon Rastgar is a researcher and writer with working experience in research and communications for Afghan and Canadian civil society organizations, where he has contributed to writing, translation, and editorial work. He served as a lecturer at private universities in Kabul from 2010 to 2014. He holds a master’s degree in politics and is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in politics, specializing in political theory, at York University in Canada. 

He is fluent in Farsi-Dari, Urdu, and English.