Kimberly A. Ponders is an American fiction writer and former military aircrew weapons controller. Her first novel, The Art of Uncontrolled Flight, was released with HarperCollins in September 2005. Her second novel, The Last Blue Mile, was released 22 May 2007.
Anna Benjamin David is an American publisher, author, speaker, podcast host, and television personality.
Christina Lamb OBE is a British journalist and author. She is the chief foreign correspondent of The Sunday Times.
Ann Jones is an American journalist and author of a number of non-fiction books about her research into women's and humanitarian issues: Women Who Kill, Kabul in Winter, Looking for Lovedu, Next Time She'll be Dead and When Love Goes Wrong. She has also written and taken photographs for a number of publications including National Geographic Traveler, Outside, The Nation, The San Francisco Chronicle and The New York Times. The majority of her work and writings centers on women's issues, especially domestic violence. Jones has provided humanitarian aid around the world, including Afghanistan, Liberia, Sierra Leone and the Ivory Coast. She currently resides in Oslo, Norway.
On 5 August 2010, ten members of International Assistance Mission (IAM) Nuristan Eye Camp team were killed in Kuran wa Munjan District of Badakhshan Province in Afghanistan. The team was attacked as it was returning from Nuristan to Kabul. One team member was spared while the rest of the team were killed immediately. Those killed were six Americans, two Afghans, one Briton and one German.
Julia Cheiffetz is an American publisher, writer, and editor who currently lives in New York City.
Bibi Aisha is an Afghan woman who fled from an abusive marriage she was forced into as a teenager, but was caught, jailed, mutilated and left to die as revenge for her escape. She was later rescued by aid workers and her story was featured in American news as an example of the effects of the Taliban's reign of terror on women. As of 2014, she lives in Maryland as the adoptive daughter of an Afghan-American couple and has received reconstructive surgery.
Sonia Nassery Cole is an Afghan-born American human rights activist, filmmaker, and author.
Gayle Tzemach Lemmon is an author who has written on the role of women and girls in foreign policy. She has held private sector roles in emerging technology for national security as well as financial services. She serves as an adjunct senior fellow at the Women and Foreign Policy Program with the Council on Foreign Relations and has written the New York Times bestsellers The Dressmaker of Khair Khana (2011), Ashley’s War: The Untold Story of a Team of Women Soldiers on the Special Ops Battlefield (2015) and The Daughters of Kobani: A Story of Rebellion, Courage, and Justice (2021). A graduate of the University of Missouri and the Harvard Business School, Lemmon has covered a variety of topics such as women's entrepreneurship, women in the military, forced and child marriage, Syria and Afghanistan. She has also served as a board member of the Mercy Corps and the International Center for Research on Women, and as a member of the Bretton Woods Committee. She speaks Spanish, German, French and is conversant in Dari and basic Kurmanji.
Fatema Akbari is an Afghan and ethnic Hazara entrepreneur and women's rights advocate who is the founder of the Gulistan Sadaqat Company and non-governmental organization the Women Affairs Council. In 2011, she received the 10,000 Women Entrepreneurial Achievement Award.
Roya Mahboob is an Afghan businesswoman. She founded and is CEO of the Afghan Citadel Software Company, a full-service software development company based in Herat, Afghanistan. She has received attention for being among the first IT female CEOs in Afghanistan, where it is still relatively rare for women to work outside the home. On 18 April 2013, Mahboob was named to TIME magazine's 100 Most Influential People in the World for 2013 for her work in building internet classrooms in high schools in Afghanistan and for Women's Annex, a multilingual blog and video site hosted by Film Annex. This was the 10th anniversary of the TIME special edition. The Women's Annex platform give the women of Afghanistan and Central Asia a platform to tell their stories to the world. The TIME magazine introduction to Mahboob was written by Sheryl Sandberg who is the chief operating officer of Facebook and the author of "Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead". U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry met with Mahboob and other Afghan women entrepreneurs at the International Center for Women's Economic Development at the American University of Afghanistan. She is also known for her work with online film distribution platform and Web Television Network Film Annex on the Afghan Development Project. She is an advisor at the Forbes School of Business & Technology.
The "Hillary Doctrine" is the doctrine of former United States Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, particularly in reference to her stance that women's rights and violence against women should be considered issues of national security. The doctrine encompasses stances she has held before, during, and after her tenure as secretary.
Rape is a major issue in Afghanistan. A number of human rights organizations have criticized the country's rape laws and their enforcement.
Ann Scott Tyson is an American journalist, reporting from combat zones since the invasion of Iraq, and recently from Asia. She has written for The Christian Science Monitor, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and The Seattle Times.
Kamila Sidiqi is an Afghan entrepreneur, government official, and the subject of the New York Times bestselling book, The Dressmaker of Khair Khana.
Aryn Baker is an American journalist who is Time magazine's Africa correspondent. She was previously based in Beirut, Lebanon, for Time as the Middle East bureau chief, and has been a correspondent in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Atia Abawi is an American author, DEI speaker and television journalist. While working as a foreign correspondent, she was based in Kabul, Afghanistan, for almost five years. Her first book, the critically acclaimed The Secret Sky: A Novel of Forbidden Love in Afghanistan was published by Penguin Random House in September 2014. Abawi is known for her strong support for female empowerment in both her writing and reporting. She is fluent in Dari and is a graduate of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.
Reconciliation: Islam, Democracy, and the West (2008) is the last book by former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. The book was published after her assassination.
Homeira Qaderi born in 1980 is an Afghan writer, advocate for women's rights, and professor of Persian literature, currently serving as a Robert G. James Scholar Fellow at Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Research, Harvard University.
Berta Berkovich Kohút was a Czechoslovakian-born survivor of the Auschwitz concentration camp. By the time of her death in 2021, she was the last surviving seamstress who lived through internment at the camp by creating dresses for the wives of Nazi officers.
