First Afghan Christian TV Channel Mozhda TV Launches Despite Taliban Restrictions

Masoud Ghorbani looked at Afghanistan and saw separated families, mothers who saw no future, and young people in despair. Then he asked what Jesus would see, and he answered from the Gospel of Mark: sheep without a shepherd, a crowd with no one to guide them home.

Mozhda TV, described by its founders as the first Afghan Christian television channel, began broadcasting on Saturday 24 October 2026. A launch gathering brought together church leaders, mission partners, and Afghan believers, and the new satellite channel began carrying Christian programming to Afghanistan in Dari and Pashto.

The channel also broadcasts online at mozhda.tv. Its programmes focus on women, health, education, and hope, and the launch was presented as a channel made by Afghans, in Afghan languages, for people living under a government that has banned Christian materials.

Ghorbani, the channel's executive director, preached minutes after going on air. He spoke from Mark 6:34, the passage about Jesus seeing a large crowd and having compassion on them because they were like sheep without a shepherd, and he set that picture against the Afghanistan he described.

The Taliban control the country, but they cannot control the satellites.

Those were Ghorbani's words, reported through Sansa and Christian Daily, and they carry the whole idea behind the channel in one line. Almost everyone in Afghanistan has a television and a satellite dish at home, according to Ghorbani, so a signal from the sky can reach living rooms that no visitor can enter.

Mozhda TV Launch: Christian Programming in Dari and Pashto

The launch message from Shoaib Ebadi, executive director of the Afghanistan Bible Society, was played as a recorded message at the gathering. Ebadi said the day marked the first time in history that the first Afghan Christian satellite channel would start broadcasting to Afghanistan and around the world.

That wording matters, because Christian programmes for Afghans have aired for years before this launch. Mozhda TV is presented by its founders as the first dedicated channel of its kind, and this article keeps that claim attributed to the founders rather than stating it as an absolute fact.

The vision behind the channel reaches back a long way. It is traced to a prayer gathering in 1986 near Tampere in Finland, involving Harun Ibrahim of Al Hayat Ministries, and the team behind Mozhda TV has been recording new programmes since March.

A dedicated channel changes what a viewer can find. Instead of a single programme inside someone else's schedule, Afghan viewers now have a channel whose whole day is built around Christian teaching, testimony, and practical help in their own languages.

Afghan Christians Under Taliban Rule: A Channel That Cannot Be Closed

Since 2021, the Taliban have banned Christian materials and driven Christian ministry underground in Afghanistan. Several thousand Christians live in Afghanistan, according to producer Mikael Tuner, and for those believers public worship is not an option they can take openly.

A satellite channel does not need a building, a permit, or a public meeting. It needs a dish, a television, and a quiet room, and in a country where almost every home has those things, the signal can arrive without anyone knocking on a door.

The pressure on believers in Afghanistan sits inside a wider pattern of hardship for Christians in many countries. That pattern is documented in the ACN report that found conditions worsened in 55 percent of countries assessed and improved in none, and in the Ethiopian Orthodox Church account of Christians killed in Oromia attacks.

Church leaders gathering in other parts of the world have also been in the news this month, including the Archbishop of Canterbury hosting South Sudan church leaders at Lambeth Palace, and the report of three arrests after nine Christians were killed in a church attack in Karak, Jordan.

For Afghan believers, the launch is personal in a way those wider reports are not. A christain viewer watching alone at home is no longer only listening to a foreign voice, because the presenters speak Dari and Pashto, and the programmes speak to the daily life of women, families, and young people in Afghanistan itself.

Launch Celebration in Kerava, Finland, and First Programmes at 4pm

The launch celebration was held at a Pentecostal church in Kerava, Finland. The first programmes went out at 4pm local time, according to Seurakuntalainen, reporting through Answered Faith, and the gathering marked the end of months of recording that began in March.

Finland is a long way from Kabul, but the distance is the point. A studio outside Afghanistan can keep broadcasting while the country itself stays closed, and a satellite does not stop at a border checkpoint.

The test for Mozhda TV will come in the weeks after the launch, when the first programmes give way to a regular schedule. Viewers will decide whether the channel speaks to their lives, whether the teaching holds them, and whether the promise of hope survives contact with the daily pressures they face.

Ghorbani preached about sheep without a shepherd, and Ebadi spoke of a first in history. The families watching in Afghanistan will be listening for something simpler: a voice in their own language, telling them they have not been forgotten, and a programme that returns tomorrow at the same hour. What they hear next, and who else starts listening beside them, is the part of this story the coming weeks will tell.

But the most surprising part of this story is yet to come — keep reading.