Afghanistan Women’s Youth Soccer Team Escapes To Pakistan

Feminine gamers from Afghanistan’s junior nationwide soccer group have crossed the border into Pakistan. The women had spent the previous month in hiding amid fears of a crackdown on girls’s rights by the Taliban.

Members of the senior girls’s facet flew out of Kabul final month however the youth group had been reportedly left stranded as they lacked passports and different paperwork.

An official with Pakistan’s Soccer Federation stated the group, totalling 81 individuals, could be housed on the federation’s headquarters within the japanese metropolis of Lahore. An additional 34 individuals will arrive on Thursday he stated.

The gamers will stay in Pakistan beneath tight safety for 30 days earlier than making use of for asylum in third international locations, the official stated.

The Unbiased not too long ago revealed that the gamers had written to Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan to ask for permission to urgently enter the nation.

The letter claimed that the women had been liable to “grave threats” from the Taliban.
After the autumn of Kabul a month in the past, gamers had been warned by the nationwide group’s former captain, Khalida Popal, to delete footage of themselves enjoying on social media and to burn their kits to guard themselves from potential reprisals from the brand new regime.

Final week the deputy head of the Taliban’s cultural fee, Ahmadullah Wasiq, forged doubt over the way forward for girls’s sport within the nation when he stated it was thought-about neither applicable nor obligatory in response to a query in regards to the destiny of the ladies’s cricket group.

“In cricket, they may face a scenario the place their face and physique is not going to be coated. Islam doesn’t enable girls to be seen like this,” Wasiq stated.

“It’s the media period, and there will probably be photographs and movies, after which individuals watch it. Islam and the Islamic Emirate [Afghanistan] don’t enable girls to play cricket or play the form of sports the place they get uncovered.”

Their departure is a part of a wider exodus of Afghan sports activities and cultural stars amid fears of a crackdown on girls’s rights following the takeover of the nation by the Taliban after overseas forces withdrew.

In addition to the departure of the ladies’s soccer groups, the nation’s largest pop singer Aryana Sayeed and the famed movie director Sahraa Karimi each left in the course of the evacuation final month.