AFGHANISTAN WOMEN

More than three years have passed since the US withdrawal from Afghanistan sparked a resurgence of the Taliban. It forced the country’s women’s team to flee, but they’ve inspired many since setting up home at Australian club Melbourne Victory. This is their remarkable story...

Words Ed McCambridge

K halidaPopalcanscarcelyrecallatimebeforetheTaliban.BorninAfghanistan’scapital,Kabul,in1987,shewasjustachildwhentheIslamistmilitantgrouprosetopower,spreadingtheirultraconservativeideologyacrossthecountry.UndertheTaliban’sbrutalgovernance,womensawtheirindividualfreedomsheavilyrestricted.Beingbannedfromparticipatinginsportorattendingstadiumsbecameonlytheveryleastoftheirconcerns.

As a young woman, Popal was expected to stay at home with her mother, cooking, cleaning and taking care of the household. But football so often finds a way. The youngster fell in love with the beautiful game and began meeting with friends in a secluded yard for clandestine kickabouts – keeping noise to a minimum to avoid detection. She knew the consequences could be severe, but resistance was futile.

“Football was an escape for me,” Popal tells FourFourTwo now. “It served as a gateway to a place where I could get away from those pressures, in a country where you’re told as a little girl that you can’t do certain things because of your gender. Society and those in power decide on your behalf that you can’t live your life the way you want to – that we don’t have the same freedoms as boys.”

Attendance to those forbidden games swelled after the Taliban’s 2001 ousting, following Afghanistan’s occupation by US-led forces. With the threat of corporal punishment – or worse – removed, the girls felt emboldened to take to public playing fields, even challenging boys to games. Yet their courage faced significant backlash, as neighbours branded them ‘prostitutes’ for simply playing the game they loved. “Not only had those in power tried to stop us from playing, but so too did people who shared our community,” laments Popal. “They’d see girls like me playing football with boys in the street and tell us we should stop – they’d shout at us and threaten us. It was difficult to continue fighting against all of those odds.”

The Taliban may have scattered, but the deeply conservative mentality they’d instilled in Afghanistan remained. The girls eventually made an acquaintance at the local NATO base, who offered to let them play inside the compound, free from judgement. The only condition? They’d need to get out of the way whenever a helicopter was landing. The arrangement ultimately led to the foundation of the Afghanistan women’s team in 2007, with Popal and her mother playing a key role in establishing the hitherto non-existent national side. It was about more than playing matches. “Football has the power to serve as a movement,” she tells us. “It’s always been that for me. When I started the national side together with my mum and the amazing women and girls in my team, it was about standing up for our human rights. Our basic rights were being denied by those in power – the right to play the sport we love and follow our passions.