Nahida Sapan, an all-rounder in Afghanistan ladies’s cricket workforce, was at college in Kabul when the Taliban retook management of the nation on 15 August 2021.
“My trainer mentioned you all need to go to your properties. All of us bought up and I noticed the Taliban on the way in which residence. I used to be actually, actually scared,” she tells the BBC.
As soon as she bought residence, Sapan grabbed her cricket package and hid it within the basement. She was additionally the scorer for the workforce, so she went into the yard and burned all her scorebooks.
Sapan, whose brother labored for the earlier authorities, says her household then began receiving calls and messages from the Taliban.
“They had been direct threats. They had been saying: ‘we are going to discover you and if we discover you, we won’t allow you to reside. If we discover one among you we are going to discover all of you,'” she says.
“I had a panic assault, my palms had been shaking. I used to be so scared, I used to be traumatised. Each time I heard a knock on the door, all I might assume was ‘they’ve discovered us, they will kill us.'”
The folks sending her threats at the moment are serving in authorities, she says.
Over the approaching months, Sapan and her household moved from home to deal with to keep away from detection. Ultimately she managed to flee over the border to Pakistan, earlier than assembly up with the remainder of her workforce in Australia.
They’re now past the clutches of the Taliban, however Sapan and her team-mates are nonetheless ready, their careers resting on the whims of others.
Afghanistan’s first nationwide ladies’s workforce was shaped in 2010, 9 years after the Taliban fell within the face of a US-led navy coalition.
Within the early years the Afghanistan Cricket Board (ACB) prevented the ladies’s workforce from enjoying at a number of worldwide tournaments, saying it acquired “Taliban threats”.
However because the profile of the boys’s workforce grew, the ACB needed to begin taking the ladies’s recreation extra significantly. The Worldwide Cricket Council (ICC) requires its 12 full members – Afghanistan turned one in 2017 – to have a nationwide ladies’s workforce. This led to 25 feminine cricketers being awarded contracts in November 2020.
The Taliban’s return to energy lower than a 12 months later destroyed the goals of ladies throughout Afghanistan, together with its cricketers. The Taliban has banned ladies from universities, parks and sports activities and raided the properties of feminine athletes.
Sapan, 20, is one among greater than 20 members of the Afghan ladies’s cricket workforce now residing in Australia after fleeing Afghanistan.
One other who escaped was 17-year-old bowler Aysha Yousofzai.
She remembers her terrifying journey by means of Taliban checkpoints as she made her approach to Pakistan.
“We had our faces coated as a result of we weren’t allowed to indicate our faces to males, so that they did not know who we had been. We had been scared however fortunately they did not say we needed to present our faces,” she says.
Yousofzai managed to make it to Pakistan, and the Australian authorities organized a flight for her and different members of the squad to come back to Australia. However a few of her family and friends weren’t as fortunate.
“No person is doing good now in Afghanistan, particularly ladies. They do not have the best to check, work, or journey with out a man,” she says.
Yousofzai and Sapan have settled into life in Australia. They’re each finding out and are appreciative of the freedoms they’ve as compared with ladies again in Afghanistan.
“Residing in Australia truly looks like residing. Once we had been in Afghanistan it was like we had been simply current,” Sapan says. “Now I really feel hope for my future, I really feel hope for tomorrow, I really feel hope that I could make my goals come true.”
However whereas they’re grateful to the Australian authorities, they’ve been left feeling let down by cricket’s world governing physique, the ICC.
Members of the Afghanistan ladies’s workforce say they’ve nonetheless had no contact from the ICC, regardless of it organising the Afghanistan Working Group in 2021 to “assessment the standing of the Afghanistan Cricket Board (ACB) and cricket in Afghanistan”. The ladies’s workforce wrote to the ICC in December however the physique mentioned their standing is a matter for the ACB.
“They did not let any of our workforce know in regards to the choices they’re making about our future,” Sapan says. “They went to Dubai twice to speak about us however we did not even know, we simply heard by means of the web. No person has contacted us to ask how we really feel, or what we would like.”
As a full member of the ICC, Afghanistan ought to have a ladies’s aspect in place.
The Afghan ladies’s workforce has requested that the ICC recognises them because the official ladies’s workforce in Australia, and for a number of the funds allotted to the ACB be redirected to them.
However in March, the ICC “considerably” raised the ACB’s price range with out offering any replace on the ladies’s workforce.
The dearth of assist means the ladies can’t usually practice collectively and have been unable to rearrange any official matches.
“I are not looking for the ICC to neglect us or neglect the ladies in Afghanistan that also have hope of enjoying cricket. There are lots of women in Afghanistan who dream of turning into cricket gamers,” Sapan says.
Minky Worden, director of world initiatives at marketing campaign group Human Rights Watch, mentioned the ICC must recognise the ladies’s nationwide workforce in Australia, but additionally press for ladies to have the ability to play in Afghanistan.
If the ACB fails to conform, Worden says Afghanistan must be suspended by the ICC, which might imply the boys’s workforce would even be unable to play.
“Guidelines are guidelines. That is what sport is about,” Worden says.
“As an example if New Zealand impulsively mentioned we’re solely sending our male workforce to compete in worldwide competitions, the ICC would and may have one thing to say about that.
“Why is there an unsightly double normal on Afghanistan?”
The Taliban has brazenly supported males’s cricket, understanding how extensively cherished the sport is by Afghans. Worden believes that the specter of the boys being suspended from the worldwide recreation might act as a “strain level” on the Taliban to elevate restrictions on ladies enjoying sport.
“Proper now it is price free for the Taliban to ban Afghan ladies gamers from sport,” she mentioned.
Each Yousofzai and Sapan say they don’t need to see the boys’s workforce affected.
A spokesman for the ICC mentioned it “stays dedicated to supporting the Afghanistan Cricket Board and should not penalising the ACB, or their gamers for abiding by the legal guidelines set by the federal government of their nation”.
“The connection with gamers in any of the ICC’s Member nations is managed by the Board in that nation, the ICC doesn’t become involved. Equally, the authority to area males’s and girls’s nationwide groups lies solely with the Member Board in any nation, not with the ICC.
“The ICC will proceed to constructively use its affect to help the ACB in growing cricket and enjoying alternatives for each women and men in Afghanistan.”
The ACB didn’t reply to a request for remark.
Sapan and Yousofzai each dream of at some point returning to their homeland.
“I’d like to be in Afghanistan and play for Afghanistan as a result of that is the place I used to be born, that is the place I really feel I belong,” Yousofzai says. “If there may be freedom of speech, gender equality, the alternatives I’ve in Australia … I would like to be there. But when there may be not, then no.”
Each ladies need to at some point turn out to be psychologists, and to be energetic in selling gender equality in Afghanistan and Australia.
However proper now they merely need to have the ability to play the sport they love.
“I need my workforce again as a result of I labored actually exhausting. I confronted many challenges to realize my dream to be a part of the nationwide workforce … however now I can not play below the title of Afghanistan,” Yousofzai says.
“I simply need my rights and to be handled as a human. I simply need them to deal with me like they deal with male gamers in Afghanistan.”