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| Mozhda Tv — Described by its founders as the first Afghan Christian television channel, began broadcasting on Saturday, October 24. |
On Saturday, October 24, 2026, Mozhda TV went on air as what its founders call the first television channel dedicated specifically to Afghan Christian programming. Church leaders, mission partners, and Afghan believers marked the launch with worship, prayer, and a sense of historic breakthrough.
The satellite channel broadcasts Christian content into Afghanistan and beyond in the country’s main languages, aiming to reach audiences who have long had limited access to such material under successive regimes.
Christian media for Afghan listeners and viewers is not new. For years, radio programs, shortwave broadcasts, online content, and cross-border satellite feeds from neighboring countries have carried gospel messages, Bible teachings, and testimonies in Dari, Pashto, and other languages.
What distinguishes Mozhda TV, organizers emphasize, is that it is the first channel built and presented as an explicitly Afghan Christian television service. “This day, for the first time in history, the first Afghan Christian satellite channel will start its broadcasting to Afghanistan and around the world,” said Shoaib Ebadi, executive director of the Afghanistan Bible Society, in a recorded video message played at the launch.
The name “Mozhda” itself carries resonance: it means “good news” or “glad tidings” in Dari and related languages, a direct nod to the gospel.
Can Religion Bring World Peace?
Context: Afghanistan’s Religious Landscape and the Constraints on Christian Media
Afghanistan remains one of the most restrictive environments in the world for religious minorities. Under Taliban rule since August 2021, the public practice of any faith other than the group’s interpretation of Sunni Islam has been severely curtailed. Conversion from Islam is treated as apostasy, and reports from human rights organizations and Christian advocacy groups document arrests, social ostracism, family pressure, and violence against those identified as Christians. Open churches do not operate; any Christian communities that exist do so underground and at significant personal risk.
Internet access has been intermittent and heavily monitored. Christian materials, Bibles, and digital content have been banned or destroyed in successive crackdowns. Missionaries and foreign aid workers with Christian affiliations largely left the country after the Taliban takeover.
In this environment, satellite television offers a distinctive advantage. As Mozhda TV’s executive director Masoud Ghorbani noted in an earlier interview with the Finnish Christian media organization Sansa, “Almost everyone has a television and a satellite dish at home. The Taliban control the country, but they cannot control the satellites.”
Producer Mikael Tunér, a senior technical specialist who previously spent nearly two decades working with the Persian-language Christian channel SAT-7 PARS, underscored another strategic point: visibility of Afghan faces and voices.
Although official narratives often claim there are no Christians in Afghanistan, Tunér and others involved in the project assert that underground churches and several thousand believers exist.
Seeing fellow Afghans on screen, rather than only foreign or diaspora presenters, is intended to reduce the sense of cultural foreignness that sometimes accompanies imported Christian media.
The channel currently airs in Dari and Pashto and plans to expand into Hazaragi, Uzbek, Turkmen, Baluchi, and other languages spoken across Afghanistan’s diverse ethnic landscape. “Our strategy is to make at least some program in every language, so that every viewer could find something to watch in their own heart language,” Tunér said.
Content aimed at women forms a deliberate priority. Series addressing health, education continuity, and encouragement are being produced with the understanding that many women can watch privately at home. Ghorbani framed the messaging simply: “We want to tell them that the Lord loves them and that ‘this is not the end; hold on to hope.’” Recording of new series began in March.
A Launch Framed by Scripture and Suffering
Minutes after the channel began broadcasting, Ghorbani delivered the main address, drawing from Mark 6:34. In the passage, Jesus looks at a crowd and has compassion because they were “like sheep without a shepherd.” Ghorbani turned the question toward Afghanistan: What do observers see when they look at the country—separated families, persecution, discrimination against women, mothers without visible futures for their children, young people in despair?
The deeper tragedy, he argued, is not only the suffering but that many do not know “their true shepherd.” He declared, “Jesus Christ is the good shepherd of Afghanistan,” citing John 10:11, and noted the possibility that the signal could reach unexpected viewers, including Taliban members: “We need to pray for them.”
The tone combined pastoral urgency with realism about the audience’s lived experience. Afghanistan has endured decades of war, displacement, economic collapse, and successive restrictions on education, work, and public life for women and girls since 2021. For the small Christian community and for seekers, isolation compounds the practical hardships.
From Cardboard Gramophones to Satellite: A Continuity of Effort
One of the more evocative moments at the launch came from a former missionary who first arrived in Kabul with his family in the 1970s. He traced the technological and logistical evolution of gospel outreach over five decades.
In the earlier years, colleagues returned from mountain villages carrying records produced by Gospel Recordings that contained New Testament stories in roughly 50 of Afghanistan’s languages. Villagers played them on simple gramophones fashioned from thick cardboard, turning the discs by hand with a pen.
In the 1980s the same worker and a colleague built a wheeled cabinet containing a television and video player, loaded it into a vehicle with a generator, and showed a film on the life of Jesus based on the Gospel of Luke in Afghan homes.
The reach was necessarily limited—one village, one household at a time. With satellite distribution, he observed, the same message can now travel far more widely. He referenced Psalm 147, which speaks of God’s word running swiftly across the earth.
This historical thread illustrates both continuity and rupture. Mission efforts adapted to successive regimes, invasions, civil war, and the rise of the Taliban. The 2021 withdrawal of most remaining foreign Christian workers and the intensified domestic restrictions forced a shift toward diaspora-based production, satellite, and digital means that do not require a physical presence inside the country.
Roots in a 1986 Prayer Meeting
Harun Ibrahim, founder of Al Hayat Ministries, connected the channel to a specific prayer gathering. Born into a Muslim family in Jerusalem and converted to Christianity in Finland in 1985, Ibrahim recalled a youth camp near Tampere in 1986 at which participants prayed for various countries, including Afghanistan. “It was just like this time, the fall, and after 40 years, we have it,” he said.
Ibrahim highlighted the interdenominational cooperation that made Mozhda TV possible—mission organizations and Afghan Christian leaders working together—and praised the production team for mastering media skills in roughly a year. He expressed hope that the signal would reach not only Afghanistan but neighboring countries as well.
The launch event itself featured worship in Farsi and Dari and a prayer of blessing over the Mozhda TV team. The channel is available online at mozhda.tv in addition to its satellite feed.
Broader Implications and Open Questions
The appearance of a dedicated Afghan Christian channel raises several practical and strategic considerations. Satellite television remains relatively resilient against local censorship compared with terrestrial broadcasts or easily blocked websites, yet viewers still face risks if discovered watching or discussing the content.
The decision to prioritize women’s programming reflects both demographic realities and the acute restrictions on female education and public life under current rules. Language expansion acknowledges Afghanistan’s ethnic complexity and the limited reach of purely Dari- or Pashto-centric media.
At the same time, the project sits within a larger ecosystem of Persian- and Afghan-language Christian media that has operated for years from bases outside the country. Mozhda TV’s claim to be the first fully dedicated Afghan Christian television channel rests on its explicit national framing, Afghan leadership voices, and multi-language strategy rather than on the complete absence of prior Christian broadcasts reaching Afghan audiences.
Whether the channel can sustain production quality, expand its language offerings, and maintain audience engagement under difficult conditions will depend on continued funding, technical reliability, and the security of its production and distribution networks. For those involved, the launch represents the culmination of long-term prayer, adaptation to technological change, and a calculated response to the post-2021 information and religious environment.
For Afghan viewers who find the signal, it offers another avenue—however constrained—to encounter Christian teaching in their own languages and from voices that claim shared national identity.
Mozhda TV’s first broadcasts thus mark both a media milestone and a continuation of a much older pattern: gospel outreach finding successive technological workarounds in one of the world’s most challenging environments for Christian presence.
Samuel O. Sulaimon is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of Naijapiz. He covers Global, News, Sports, Finance, Faiths, Education, Politics and Technology.
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