Khalida Popal, the previous captain of the Afghanistan ladies’s nationwide football workforce, aroused from sleep at the ground of her condominium close to Copenhagen, sopping wet in sweat and shaking.
She had collapsed and couldn’t talk. An ambulance rushed to her.
It was once two years in the past final month, and the Taliban had been taking keep an eye on of Afghanistan. Female football avid gamers at the nationwide workforce Popal helped create in 2007 had been determined to go away the rustic, fearing that the Taliban would kill them for enjoying the game.
Players had been deluging Popal with requests for lend a hand, and he or she felt smothered by means of guilt. For greater than 15 years, a lot of that duration spent in exile, she had inspired Afghan women to take part in all spaces of society, together with sports activities, jobs and schooling.
The message was once the whole thing the Taliban despised.
“I feel responsible for these girls,” Popal stated later. “I’d rather die than turn my back on them.”
So on that blue-sky summer season afternoon in 2021, Popal had a panic assault and idea she could be demise. But in a display of her resilience in a existence marked by means of trauma, she waved away the clinical staff and returned to her table to proceed coordinating an evacuation of avid gamers and their households from Kabul, the Afghan capital.
Relying on a community she constructed via her activism, she helped rescue 87 other folks, together with the senior nationwide workforce. Months later, every other 130.
Now Popal is on every other challenge, one who reached its top at this summer season’s Women’s World Cup. She is attempting to persuade FIFA, football’s world governing frame, to let avid gamers at the Afghan ladies’s nationwide workforce constitute their nation once more after the Taliban barred women and girls from enjoying sports activities.
The avid gamers, after escaping Afghanistan with Popal’s lend a hand, reside in Australia, which hosted this yr’s World Cup with New Zealand. Though the workforce is competing for the Melbourne Victory football membership, FIFA refuses to acknowledge it as a countrywide workforce since the Afghanistan Football Federation claims it does no longer exist. Under the Taliban, no ladies’s workforce does.
“These players dreamed of playing football for Afghanistan and men just came and took that dream from them,” Popal stated. “FIFA is saying, ‘We are sorry that you’ve lost your right to play football, girls, when you have done nothing to deserve it.’ It’s disgusting.”
In an emailed observation, FIFA stated it can’t acknowledge a countrywide workforce until it’s first said by means of its nationwide federation. FIFA has declared it a concern to make sure equivalent get admission to to football with out discrimination. But in Afghanistan’s case, it is only “monitoring the situation very closely,” consistent with its observation.
A spokesman for the Afghanistan Football Federation stated the group may do not anything to lend a hand since the ladies’s nationwide workforce dissolved when the avid gamers fled the rustic — an statement the avid gamers reject.
With espresso in hand and the power of somebody who has fed on a long way an excessive amount of of it, Popal, 36, has been sharing the Afghan workforce’s tale with everybody she will, in each manner she will. While operating for Right to Dream, a football nonprofit, and Girl Power, her personal nonprofit, she organized a petition, which has been signed by means of greater than 175,000 other folks since publishing on-line in overdue July. More than 100 politicians, throughout 4 international locations, endorsed a letter she wrote to FIFA with the British parliamentarian Julie Elliott and Malala Yousafzai, the Nobel Peace Prize winner who was once shot within the head by means of the Taliban when she was once 15.
Also, days prior to the World Cup started, Popal flew to Melbourne for a fit that Melbourne Victory organized, at her recommendation, between the exiled Afghan workforce and a workforce that represented the realm’s migrants and refugees. They referred to as the development the Hope Cup.
About 50 enthusiasts watched the Afghan avid gamers wave their country’s flag and sing about their nation. One Afghan wore a T-shirt that stated, “Save our families,” as a result of many avid gamers’ relations had been nonetheless hoping to obtain humanitarian visas to are living in Australia.
Like a Hollywood publicist, Popal performed cheerful but made up our minds host, rooting for the avid gamers, taking pictures and talking to journalists.
“Khalida is reminding the world that we are still here, don’t forget us,” stated Fati Yousufi, the Afghan workforce’s captain and goalkeeper. “I know a lot of us have said, ‘I want to be like Khalida one day, a strong and powerful woman.’”
Anyone who needs to be like Popal must needless to say her advocacy for the Afghan workforce has include severe sacrifices.
“It has taken a huge toll on her,” stated Kelly Lindsey, an American whom Popal recruited to train the Afghan nationwide workforce in 2016. “But she won’t stop for a moment to take care of herself. Because if she did that, there would be no time for her to take care of others.”
Creating the National Team
Even prior to the Taliban dominated Afghanistan, males would throw rocks at Popal when she performed football on the street, claiming it was once immoral for women to play sports activities. Yet she all the time believed ladies may earn recognize via football as it was once a language males understood.
During the Taliban’s first reign, from when Popal was once age 9 to fourteen, she was once caught in a Pakistani refugee tent town, with football as her best outlet. When her circle of relatives returned to Kabul in 2002 after a U.S.-led coalition drove out the Taliban, she was once desperate to develop the game.
Her mom, Shokria Popal, a bodily schooling instructor, helped recruit avid gamers, incessantly contending with oldsters who referred to as her a prostitute seeking to spoil the tradition. Teachers slapped Khalida within the face and attempted to expel her for her paintings. But from the Popals’ efforts, highschool groups had been born. Five years later, the Afghanistan Football Federation authorised Khalida’s workforce as the ladies’s nationwide workforce.
It was once too bad for the workforce to play in public as a result of spiritual conservatives stated the sports clothing confirmed the shapes of ladies’s our bodies, defying Islam. So the workforce practiced within a NATO base, the usage of hand-me-down apparatus from the federation’s males’s groups and working towards on an lively helipad. Helicopters kicked up mud that caked the avid gamers’ faces and lined their throats.
The squad as soon as misplaced a world fit by means of 17-0. But to Popal, successful was once no longer as essential because the message.
The workforce, which performed its reliable suits outdoor the rustic, first made nationwide news in 2010 when it performed NATO squaddies in Kabul. Speaking to reporters, Popal denounced the Taliban. There was once an instantaneous price.
Some of her teammates had been pressured to surrender as a result of their households hadn’t identified that they had been enjoying. Popal recalled receiving dying threats, together with from one caller who stated he would narrow her to items.
Her father and one in every of her 4 brothers had been slashed with knives and crushed with weapons as a result of, because the assailants stated to them, they “were not real men for letting their daughter and sister play football,” her father, Timor Shah Popal, recalled.
In 2011, Popal was once operating as the top of finance and ladies’s football at the differently all-male federation, seeking to mix in together with her colleagues by means of dressed in dishevelled garments and talking in tough slang, when she complained on nationwide tv that the ladies’s workforce wasn’t getting sufficient strengthen. She blamed corrupt sports activities officers for it.
Days later, she stated, a truck rammed into the auto she was once using in. Uniformed males fired pictures throughout the home windows, however she was once no longer bodily harmed. Then, when the Afghanistan Olympic committee’s headquarters had been vandalized, Popal was once amongst the ones blamed.
Though she denied involvement, the police issued a warrant for her arrest. Hours prior to the federal government barred her from touring, she boarded a aircraft to India.
The Death of a Brother
Popal was once at the run. Multiple instances, she modified her telephone quantity and her lodge, however threats discovered their solution to her. One textual content message stated, “We will not let your parents live. Come back for payback.”
The subsequent summer season, she discovered that her brother Idris had been shot and killed on easy methods to a school math elegance in Kabul, and was once positive that the dying was once attached to her activism.
She made her solution to Denmark after the sports clothing corporate Hummel, the Afghan workforce’s sponsor, helped her follow for asylum there. For a yr, she lived in a refugee heart surrounded by means of barbed twine fences. Gunfire from the adjoining army capturing vary equipped an unnerving soundtrack.
Every day, she aroused from sleep together with her eyes swollen from crying. At evening, she stored the lighting fixtures on in her barracks as a result of a routine dream {that a} guy was once at the foot of her mattress, seeking to kill her. She thought to be suicide.
“I spent a lot of time looking at the birds and feeling jealous because they have wings to fly and I was just a useless body with no identity,” she recalled.
With the assistance of a therapist and medicine, her melancholy lifted. In exile, Popal in the end volunteered because the Afghan nationwide workforce’s program director, organizing event appearances and hiring coaches. She additionally coordinated surreptitious exits to protected international locations for homosexual avid gamers who feared persecution and compelled marriages.
But even ladies who remained with the workforce weren’t protected. In 2018, Popal noticed federation officers sexually harassing avid gamers at a coaching camp in Jordan. Players advised her that they’d been sexually abused by means of the ones and different officers, together with Keramuddin Keram, who was once the federation’s president and a strong flesh presser. Popal reported what she had heard, however for 8 months FIFA officers did not anything, consistent with Popal and Lindsey, the trainer.
Popal persuaded 10 avid gamers to come back ahead and got blueprints of the federation’s headquarters. That forms confirmed Keram had a secret bed room connected to his place of job the place, avid gamers advised her, he beat and raped them.
FIFA in the end barred Keram from the game for existence and the Afghan courts punished him and 4 others. The case was once the primary of its type within the nation, stated Fawzia Amini, who was once a senior pass judgement on on Afghanistan’s splendid court docket prior to fleeing Kabul in 2021.
“Khalida is my hero,” Amini stated when she and Popal had been in Washington final yr to accept the Lantos Human Rights Prize. Amini were the pass judgement on assigned to the football federation’s sexual abuse instances.
“Because of her, girls know how to go to the courts to fight for their rights,” she stated of Popal.
News of the case reached different nationwide workforce avid gamers, together with the ones in Haiti, Argentina, Canada and Venezuela. They felt emboldened to talk up about sexual abuse dedicated by means of males of their recreation, stated Jonas Baer-Hoffmann, the overall secretary of FIFPro, the union for skilled football avid gamers that helped Popal with the abuse case.
“Khalida started a big wave,” he stated. “She’s changing the world.”
She may be making an attempt to give protection to others from what she persevered.
When she was once an adolescent, Popal stated, she aroused from sleep after a regimen surgical treatment to search out her limbs tied to the mattress. A physician was once on most sensible of her, fondling her.
He stopped, she stated, best when she vomited.
“I want to be there for the girls,” she stated, “because no one was there for me.”
When Kabul fell two years in the past, Popal anxious about the ones women. While confronted with terrifying flashbacks from her personal stories fleeing the Taliban, she felt an obligation to the generations of ladies she had advised to check society’s limits.
“Save me, sister,” the participant Nilab Mohammadi begged her one evening in a video name whilst conserving a gun. “The minute the Taliban knocks on my door, I will shoot myself in the head.”
Popal soothed her, promising lend a hand. She rushed to social media and tv to warn avid gamers to erase proof that they’d performed football. Burn your jerseys, she stated. Delete your social media accounts.
Hands trembling and middle racing, she referred to as her broad community. A workforce of legal professionals, politicians and human rights advocates joined her to evacuate the avid gamers. Some of the ones avid gamers had been pressured to go away members of the family in the back of, and Popal empathized. When she left Afghanistan, she by no means once more noticed her grandfather, whom she referred to as the affection of her existence. He had advised her she may change into an unbiased lady and make a distinction on the planet as a substitute of marrying at 13 or 14 and depending on a husband.
Eventually, Popal helped greater than 200 avid gamers and their members of the family make it safely out of Afghanistan, the place women and girls have since misplaced the liberty to paintings, attend faculty or even to move outdoor with no guy.
“People fail to acknowledge what a strategically brilliant mind she is,” Lindsey stated. “Without her, none of this happens.”
‘Like a Mother Fighting for Her Kids’
Popal’s paintings continues. On any given day, she is also on a teach to Berlin or a long-haul flight to Australia, off to just accept awards or talk at meetings or meet with refugees. She incessantly wears clothes or skirts, together with her lengthy, wavy black hair flowing over her shoulders, to make up for the years she needed to get dressed like a person.
After one travel within the fall of 2021, Popal and her boyfriend, Russell Pakzad, visited her oldsters, who had gained asylum in Denmark in 2016. The odor of lamb simmering at the stovetop wafted throughout the condominium as Khalida gave her mom, Shokria, the newest honor she had received, the FIFPro Hero Award.
With a bittersweet smile, Shokria leafed via a pile of Khalida’s accomplishments: {a magazine} article from Afghanistan, with a portrait of Khalida clutching a trophy; a photograph of Khalida and the nationwide workforce in Pakistan. Her best daughter all the time gave her hassle, she stated, beginning when Khalida was once a schoolgirl who refused to stay her critiques to herself.
“I just think you are so brave and fearless,” she advised Khalida. “I don’t know where it comes from.”
The subsequent day, Khalida Popal’s telephone had 252 unread messages, many from avid gamers on Afghanistan’s developmental workforce. Popal helped evacuate those players from Kabul by means of choreographing a adventure to Pakistan that incorporated the ladies huddling within an deserted area whilst Taliban warring parties roamed outdoor.
Popal had depended on a connection at the Pakistan Football Federation to lend a hand the workforce move the border and right into a government-sponsored lodge. But now the Pakistani authorities sought after the avid gamers to transport alongside.
Popal sought lend a hand from Rabbi Moshe Margaretten of the Tzedek Association, a Brooklyn-based social justice team she labored with all through the preliminary evacuation of avid gamers. “She really inspired me because she was like a mother fighting for her kids,” he stated.
Popal was once on a teach to Brussels from Paris when the rabbi were given again to her.
“Kim Kardashian paid for the girls’ flight!” Popal stated, giggling loudly sufficient to startle different passengers.
The avid gamers flew to London, after which settled in Doncaster, about 50 miles east of Manchester. It’s only one position Popal mechanically visits newly transplanted Afghans.
Though the avid gamers’ lodge was once no longer open to the general public, Popal strolled by means of the safety guards in the summertime of 2022 as though she had been in fee. She had paintings to do: link the avid gamers to native football groups, arrange task coaching and make sure that they’d psychological well being products and services — the similar lend a hand she had given the nationwide workforce in Australia. That weekend, she took the avid gamers to the seashore and to the European ladies’s football championship, pulling a number of coffee-fueled all-nighters to suit it in. No one gave her that more or less consideration, she stated, when she was once a refugee.
Narges Mayeli, one of the most avid gamers, stated Popal equipped hope.
“I have nothing in my life right now,” Mayeli stated. “But the only thing that I know is that if I put Khalida as my role model, I’m going to be successful someday.”
Gaining Allies
The Women’s World Cup was once finishing in an afternoon and Popal was once eking out the entire exposure she may get for the Afghan workforce prior to the sector stopped gazing.
Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani activist, helped with that.
Malala had flown to Melbourne from Sydney, the place she and her husband, Asser Malik, had attended a World Cup recreation. After studying in The New York Times about Fati Yousufi and the Afghan workforce, she sought after to satisfy the avid gamers and lend a hand Popal in her efforts.
On a tiny indoor box, with a few dozen tv cameras provide, Popal listened as Malala and Yousufi, the workforce captain, gave speeches. She took deep breaths and stared at the bottom to struggle again tears.
Malala, who wore the Afghan workforce’s jersey to the World Cup ultimate the next day to come, stated FIFA had to trade its laws to let the workforce compete as a result of enjoying a recreation is a elementary human proper.
“It is time for people to decide that they are not standing on the Taliban’s side,” she stated.
Yousufi was once subsequent. Since her tale become public, she were featured at human rights and ladies’s rights meetings, and final May gave the graduation speech for Chapman University’s regulation faculty close to Anaheim, Calif. (Yousufi as soon as didn’t use her surname publicly, however does so now that her circle of relatives has safely left Afghanistan.)
“We are asking them to open the door, open the door for our team, open the door for Afghanistan women,” Yousufi stated, relating to FIFA, as Popal and Malala nodded. “We don’t want to lose this opportunity.”
Popal by no means idea she would paintings along somebody with Malala’s stature, or that avid gamers, like Yousufi, would change into forceful leaders international.
“It’s so lonely and tiring to do this on your own, which was what I did for a long time, but now I see that the new generation gets it,” she stated, choking up. “It’s not all on my shoulders anymore.”
Safiullah Padshah contributed reporting from Kabul.