Khalida Popal, the previous captain of the Afghanistan ladies’s nationwide soccer crew, wakened on the ground of her condo close to Copenhagen, drenched in sweat and shaking.
She had collapsed and couldn’t converse. An ambulance rushed to her.
It was two years in the past final month, and the Taliban had been taking management of Afghanistan. Feminine soccer gamers on the nationwide crew Popal helped create in 2007 had been determined to go away the nation, fearing that the Taliban would kill them for taking part in the game.
Gamers had been deluging Popal with requests for assist, and he or she felt smothered by guilt. For greater than 15 years, a lot of that interval spent in exile, she had inspired Afghan ladies to take part in all areas of society, together with sports activities, jobs and training.
The message was the whole lot the Taliban despised.
“I really feel liable for these ladies,” Popal stated later. “I’d moderately die than flip my again on them.”
So on that blue-sky summer season afternoon in 2021, Popal had a panic assault and thought she is perhaps dying. However in a present of her resilience in a life marked by trauma, she waved away the medical staff and returned to her desk to proceed coordinating an evacuation of gamers and their households from Kabul, the Afghan capital.
Counting on a community she constructed by means of her activism, she helped rescue 87 individuals, together with the senior nationwide crew. Months later, one other 130.
Now Popal is on one other mission, one which reached its top at this summer season’s Girls’s World Cup. She is attempting to persuade FIFA, soccer’s international governing physique, to let gamers on the Afghan ladies’s nationwide crew signify their nation once more after the Taliban barred women and girls from enjoying sports activities.
The gamers, after escaping Afghanistan with Popal’s assist, live in Australia, which hosted this yr’s World Cup with New Zealand. Although the crew is competing for the Melbourne Victory soccer membership, FIFA refuses to acknowledge it as a nationwide crew as a result of the Afghanistan Soccer Federation claims it doesn’t exist. Below the Taliban, no ladies’s crew does.
“These gamers dreamed of enjoying soccer for Afghanistan and males simply got here and took that dream from them,” Popal stated. “FIFA is saying, ‘We’re sorry that you simply’ve misplaced your proper to play soccer, ladies, when you will have finished nothing to deserve it.’ It’s disgusting.”
In an emailed assertion, FIFA stated it can not acknowledge a nationwide crew except it’s first acknowledged by its nationwide federation. FIFA has declared it a precedence to make sure equal entry to soccer with out discrimination. However in Afghanistan’s case, it’s simply “monitoring the state of affairs very carefully,” based on its assertion.
A spokesman for the Afghanistan Soccer Federation stated the group may do nothing to assist as a result of the ladies’s nationwide crew dissolved when the gamers fled the nation — an assertion the gamers reject.
With espresso in hand and the power of somebody who has consumed far an excessive amount of of it, Popal, 36, has been sharing the Afghan crew’s story with everybody she will be able to, in each method she will be able to. Whereas working for Proper to Dream, a soccer nonprofit, and Woman Energy, her personal nonprofit, she organized a petition, which has been signed by greater than 175,000 individuals since publishing on-line in late July. Greater 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 shot within the head by the Taliban when she was 15.
Additionally, days earlier than the World Cup started, Popal flew to Melbourne for a match that Melbourne Victory organized, at her suggestion, between the exiled Afghan crew and a crew that represented the realm’s migrants and refugees. They known as the occasion the Hope Cup.
About 50 followers watched the Afghan gamers wave their nation’s flag and sing about their nation. One Afghan wore a T-shirt that stated, “Save our households,” as a result of many gamers’ family had been nonetheless hoping to obtain humanitarian visas to reside in Australia.
Like a Hollywood publicist, Popal performed cheerful but decided host, rooting for the gamers, taking pictures and chatting with reporters.
“Khalida is reminding the world that we’re nonetheless right here, don’t overlook us,” stated Fati Yousufi, the Afghan crew’s captain and goalkeeper. “I do know a variety of us have stated, ‘I wish to be like Khalida at some point, a powerful and highly effective lady.’”
Anybody who needs to be like Popal ought to perceive that her advocacy for the Afghan crew has include critical sacrifices.
“It has taken an enormous toll on her,” stated Kelly Lindsey, an American whom Popal recruited to educate the Afghan nationwide crew in 2016. “However she received’t cease for a second to handle herself. As a result of if she did that, there could be no time for her to handle others.”
Creating the Nationwide Group
Even earlier than the Taliban dominated Afghanistan, males would throw rocks at Popal when she performed soccer on the street, claiming it was immoral for ladies to play sports activities. But she at all times believed ladies may earn respect by means of soccer as a result of it was a language males understood.
In the course of the Taliban’s first reign, from when Popal was age 9 to 14, she was caught in a Pakistani refugee tent metropolis, with soccer as her solely outlet. When her household returned to Kabul in 2002 after a U.S.-led coalition drove out the Taliban, she was desirous to develop the game.
Her mom, Shokria Popal, a bodily training instructor, helped recruit gamers, usually contending with dad and mom who known as her a prostitute attempting to destroy the tradition. Lecturers slapped Khalida within the face and tried to expel her for her work. However from the Popals’ efforts, highschool groups had been born. 5 years later, the Afghanistan Soccer Federation accepted Khalida’s crew as the ladies’s nationwide crew.
It was too harmful for the crew to play in public as a result of spiritual conservatives stated the sportswear confirmed the shapes of ladies’s our bodies, defying Islam. So the crew practiced inside a NATO base, utilizing hand-me-down tools from the federation’s males’s groups and working towards on an lively helipad. Helicopters kicked up mud that caked the gamers’ faces and coated their throats.
The squad as soon as misplaced a world match by 17-0. However to Popal, successful was not as essential because the message.
The crew, which performed its official matches exterior the nation, first made nationwide information in 2010 when it performed NATO troopers in Kabul. Chatting with journalists, Popal denounced the Taliban. There was a direct price.
A few of her teammates had been pressured to stop as a result of their households hadn’t recognized that they had been enjoying. Popal recalled receiving dying threats, together with from one caller who stated he would reduce her to items.
Her father and certainly one of her 4 brothers had been slashed with knives and overwhelmed with weapons as a result of, because the assailants stated to them, they “weren’t actual males for letting their daughter and sister play soccer,” her father, Timor Shah Popal, recalled.
In 2011, Popal was working as the pinnacle of finance and ladies’s soccer on the in any other case all-male federation, attempting to mix in together with her colleagues by carrying saggy garments and talking in tough slang, when she complained on nationwide tv that the ladies’s crew wasn’t getting sufficient help. She blamed corrupt sports activities officers for it.
Days later, she stated, a truck rammed into the automotive she was driving in. Uniformed males fired photographs by means of the home windows, however she was not bodily harmed. Then, when the Afghanistan Olympic committee’s headquarters had been vandalized, Popal was amongst these blamed.
Although she denied involvement, the police issued a warrant for her arrest. Hours earlier than the federal government barred her from touring, she boarded a airplane to India.
The Dying of a Brother
Popal was on the run. A number of occasions, she modified her telephone quantity and her lodge, however threats discovered their approach to her. One textual content message stated, “We is not going to let your dad and mom reside. Come again for payback.”
The following summer season, she realized that her brother Idris had been shot and killed on the best way to a college math class in Kabul, and was certain that the dying was linked to her activism.
She made her approach to Denmark after the sportswear firm Hummel, the Afghan crew’s sponsor, helped her apply for asylum there. For a yr, she lived in a refugee heart surrounded by barbed wire fences. Gunfire from the adjoining army taking pictures vary supplied an unnerving soundtrack.
On daily basis, she wakened together with her eyes swollen from crying. At night time, she saved the lights on in her barracks due to a recurring dream {that a} man was on the foot of her mattress, attempting to kill her. She thought-about suicide.
“I spent a variety of time trying on the birds and feeling jealous as a result of they’ve wings to fly and I used to be only a ineffective physique with no identification,” she recalled.
With the assistance of a therapist and drugs, her despair lifted. In exile, Popal ultimately volunteered because the Afghan nationwide crew’s program director, organizing match appearances and hiring coaches. She additionally coordinated surreptitious exits to secure international locations for homosexual gamers who feared persecution and compelled marriages.
However even ladies who remained with the crew weren’t secure. In 2018, Popal noticed federation officers sexually harassing gamers at a coaching camp in Jordan. Gamers advised her that they’d been sexually abused by these and different officers, together with Keramuddin Keram, who was the federation’s president and a strong politician. Popal reported what she had heard, however for eight months FIFA officers did nothing, based on Popal and Lindsey, the coach.
Popal persuaded 10 gamers to return ahead and obtained blueprints of the federation’s headquarters. That paperwork confirmed Keram had a secret bed room connected to his workplace the place, gamers advised her, he beat and raped them.
FIFA ultimately barred Keram from the game for all times and the Afghan courts punished him and 4 others. The case was the primary of its variety within the nation, stated Fawzia Amini, who was a senior decide on Afghanistan’s supreme courtroom earlier than fleeing Kabul in 2021.
“Khalida is my hero,” Amini stated when she and Popal had been in Washington final yr to just accept the Lantos Human Rights Prize. Amini had been the decide assigned to the soccer federation’s sexual abuse circumstances.
“Due to her, ladies know tips on how to go to the courts to battle for his or her rights,” she stated of Popal.
Information of the case reached different nationwide crew gamers, together with these in Haiti, Argentina, Canada and Venezuela. They felt emboldened to talk up about sexual abuse dedicated by males of their sport, stated Jonas Baer-Hoffmann, the overall secretary of FIFPro, the union for skilled soccer gamers that helped Popal with the abuse case.
“Khalida began a giant wave,” he stated. “She’s altering the world.”
She can also be attempting to guard others from what she endured.
When she was a youngster, Popal stated, she wakened after a routine surgical procedure to search out her limbs tied to the mattress. A physician was on prime of her, fondling her.
He stopped, she stated, solely when she vomited.
“I wish to be there for the women,” she stated, “as a result of nobody was there for me.”
When Kabul fell two years in the past, Popal anxious about these ladies. Whereas confronted with terrifying flashbacks from her personal experiences fleeing the Taliban, she felt an obligation to the generations of ladies she had urged to check society’s limits.
“Save me, sister,” the participant Nilab Mohammadi begged her one night time in a video name whereas holding a gun. “The minute the Taliban knocks on my door, I’ll shoot myself within the head.”
Popal soothed her, promising assist. She rushed to social media and tv to warn gamers to erase proof that they’d performed soccer. Burn your jerseys, she stated. Delete your social media accounts.
Fingers trembling and coronary heart racing, she known as her extensive community. A crew of attorneys, politicians and human rights advocates joined her to evacuate the gamers. A few of these gamers had been pressured to go away members of the family behind, and Popal empathized. When she left Afghanistan, she by no means once more noticed her grandfather, whom she known as the love of her life. He had advised her she may turn into an impartial lady and make a distinction on the planet as a substitute of marrying at 13 or 14 and counting on a husband.
Finally, Popal helped greater than 200 gamers and their members of the family make it safely out of Afghanistan, the place women and girls have since misplaced the liberty to work, attend college and even to go exterior with out a man.
“Folks fail to acknowledge what a strategically sensible thoughts she is,” Lindsey stated. “With out her, none of this occurs.”
‘Like a Mom Combating for Her Children’
Popal’s work continues. On any given day, she could also be on a practice to Berlin or a long-haul flight to Australia, off to just accept awards or converse at conferences or meet with refugees. She usually wears attire or skirts, together with her lengthy, wavy black hair flowing over her shoulders, to make up for the years she needed to costume like a person.
After one journey within the fall of 2021, Popal and her boyfriend, Russell Pakzad, visited her dad and mom, who had obtained asylum in Denmark in 2016. The scent of lamb simmering on the stovetop wafted by means of the condo as Khalida gave her mom, Shokria, the newest honor she had received, the FIFPro Hero Award.
With a bittersweet smile, Shokria leafed by means of 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 crew in Pakistan. Her solely daughter at all times gave her hassle, she stated, beginning when Khalida was a schoolgirl who refused to maintain her opinions to herself.
“I simply suppose you might be so courageous and fearless,” she advised Khalida. “I don’t know the place it comes from.”
The following day, Khalida Popal’s telephone had 252 unread messages, many from gamers on Afghanistan’s developmental crew. Popal helped evacuate these gamers from Kabul by choreographing a journey to Pakistan that included the women huddling inside an deserted home whereas Taliban fighters roamed exterior.
Popal had relied on a connection on the Pakistan Soccer Federation to assist the crew cross the border and right into a government-sponsored lodge. However now the Pakistani authorities wished the gamers to maneuver alongside.
Popal sought assist from Rabbi Moshe Margaretten of the Tzedek Affiliation, a Brooklyn-based social justice group she labored with in the course of the preliminary evacuation of gamers. “She actually impressed me as a result of she was like a mom combating for her youngsters,” he stated.
Popal was on a practice to Brussels from Paris when the rabbi bought again to her.
“Kim Kardashian paid for the women’ flight!” Popal stated, laughing loudly sufficient to startle different passengers.
The gamers flew to London, after which settled in Doncaster, about 50 miles east of Manchester. It’s only one place Popal routinely visits newly transplanted Afghans.
Although the gamers’ lodge was not open to the general public, Popal strolled by the safety guards in the summertime of 2022 as if she had been in cost. She had work to do: hyperlink the gamers to native soccer groups, arrange job coaching and be certain that they’d psychological well being providers — the identical assist she had given the nationwide crew in Australia. That weekend, she took the gamers to the seashore and to the European ladies’s soccer championship, pulling a number of coffee-fueled all-nighters to suit it in. Nobody gave her that form of consideration, she stated, when she was a refugee.
Narges Mayeli, one of many gamers, stated Popal supplied hope.
“I’ve nothing in my life proper now,” Mayeli stated. “However the one factor that I do know is that if I put Khalida as my function mannequin, I’m going to achieve success sometime.”
Gaining Allies
The Girls’s World Cup was ending in a day and Popal was eking out all of the publicity she may get for the Afghan crew earlier than the world stopped watching.
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 sport. After studying in The New York Instances about Fati Yousufi and the Afghan crew, she wished to satisfy the gamers and assist Popal in her efforts.
On a tiny indoor subject, with a couple of dozen tv cameras current, Popal listened as Malala and Yousufi, the crew captain, gave speeches. She took deep breaths and stared on the floor to battle again tears.
Malala, who wore the Afghan crew’s jersey to the World Cup last the following day, stated FIFA wanted to alter its rules to let the crew compete as a result of enjoying a sport is a fundamental human proper.
“It’s time for individuals to determine that they don’t seem to be standing on the Taliban’s aspect,” she stated.
Yousufi was subsequent. Since her story grew to become public, she had been featured at human rights and ladies’s rights conferences, and final Could gave the graduation speech for Chapman College’s legislation college close to Anaheim, Calif. (Yousufi as soon as didn’t use her surname publicly, however does so now that her household has safely left Afghanistan.)
“We’re asking them to open the door, open the door for our crew, open the door for Afghanistan ladies,” Yousufi stated, referring to FIFA, as Popal and Malala nodded. “We don’t wish to lose this chance.”
Popal by no means thought she would work alongside somebody with Malala’s stature, or that gamers, like Yousufi, would turn into forceful leaders worldwide.
“It’s so lonely and tiring to do that by yourself, which was what I did for a very long time, however now I see that the brand new technology will get it,” she stated, choking up. “It’s not all on my shoulders anymore.”
Safiullah Padshah contributed reporting from Kabul.