Cheryl Benard, an American scholar and spouse of former U.S. envoy Zalmay Khalilzad, told Deeyar Television that an account on the social media platform X impersonating her is fake and that statements attacking Amrullah Saleh, Afghanistan’s former vice president and ex‑intelligence chief, have nothing to do with her.
“I only became aware of this fake account yesterday,” Benard said. “I immediately flagged it with X, they verified my identity and my objection, and I believe the account will be removed in the next few days — it’s a process. I am quite upset about this.”
She added that the impersonators had “done a quite thorough job,” using her photos and biography, which explained why Mr. Saleh may have thought the comments were genuine. “But the reality is that I do not know him and I have no views on him,” she added.
Benard also expressed dismay at the tone of the online reaction. “If you read the comments under this post, I am consistently saddened by the hateful and aggressive tone of many Afghans,” she said. “I have lived in and worked with many countries and nationalities, but none are as full of hatred and as prone to baseless accusations. Sadly, this explains a lot about the situation Afghans are in.”
Earlier, Deeyar TV’s newsroom found that the fake account — created in August 2023 — had posted only four times, all within the past five days, each praising the Taliban. The pattern fueled questions about who was behind it.
Amrullah Saleh, reacting to one of those posts that alleged he had harassed businessman Mirwais Azizi, treated the remarks as Benard’s and launched a fierce attack on her and Khalilzad in his official X account. He called Benard a “Taliban lobbyist” and described Azizi Bank as “an Afghan version of Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme,” accusing Khalilzad and his associates of benefiting from the bank for over two decades.
Saleh also claimed Benard was indifferent to “the enslavement of 20 million Afghan women” and the mass displacement of citizens under Taliban rule, yet objected to the exposure of what he called “Azizi Bank’s fraud.” In a separate post, he labeled Azizi Bank one of the “top three frauds,” dismissed Azizi’s promised $21‑billion investment since 2024 as “imaginary and baseless,” and urged Afghans to withdraw their money, saying that under the republic Mirwais Azizi “would now be behind bars.”
But Deeyar TV’s findings and Benard’s statement show that Saleh’s blistering criticism was aimed at a fake account — what some observers described as a serious reaction to a virtual shadow.
Fake accounts are a persistent feature on X and Facebook. Deeyar TV has documented numerous pro‑Taliban accounts that promote the group’s narrative and attack its opponents, including one impersonating Uzbekistan’s intelligence chief “Qurbanov Bahadur,” created the same month as the fake Benard account and now apparently deleted.
The episode has amplified criticism of Saleh himself, once known for asserting “don’t doubt my intelligence assessments.” The former spy chief now appears challenged in distinguishing between genuine and fake accounts.
