They Shot at Her. They Forced Her From Her Home. She Won’t Stop Fighting for Girls. - SFFA
Khalida Popal helped save Afghan female soccer players from the Taliban. Now she
is demanding that world soccer officials let them play for their country again.
Khalida Popal, the former captain of the Afghanistan women’s national soccer
team, woke up on the floor of her apartment near Copenhagen, drenched in sweat
and shaking. She had collapsed and couldn’t speak. An ambulance rushed to her.
It was two years ago last month, and the Taliban were taking control of
Afghanistan. Female soccer players on the national team Popal helped create in
2007 were desperate to leave the country, fearing that the Taliban would kill
them for playing the sport. Players were deluging Popal with requests for help,
and she felt smothered by guilt. For more than 15 years, much of that period
spent in exile, she had encouraged Afghan girls to participate in all areas of
society, including sports, jobs and education. The message was everything the
Taliban despised. “I feel responsible for these girls,” Popal said later. “I’d
rather die than turn my back on them.” So on that blue-sky summer afternoon in
2021, Popal had a panic attack and thought she might be dying. But in a show of
her resilience in a life marked by trauma, she waved away the medical workers
and returned to her desk to continue coordinating an evacuation of players and
their families from Kabul, the Afghan capital. Relying on a network she built
through her activism, she helped rescue 87 people, including the senior national
team. Months later, another 130. ImagePopal, wearing a red jacket and surrounded
by other women in red jackets, clapping in a locker room. Popal is pushing world
soccer officials to let the exiled Afghan women’s team represent the country in
international competition. In July, she was in Melbourne for the Hope Cup, a
game between the Afghan team and a team that represented the area’s migrants and
refugees. Now Popal is on another mission, one that reached its height at this
summer’s Women’s World Cup. She is trying to convince FIFA, soccer’s global
governing body, to let players on the Afghan women’s national team represent
their country again after the Taliban barred girls and women from playing
sports. The players, after escaping Afghanistan with Popal’s help, are living in
Australia, which hosted this year’s World Cup with New Zealand. Though the team
is competing for the Melbourne Victory soccer club, FIFA refuses to recognize it
as a national team because the Afghanistan Football Federation claims it does
not exist. Under the Taliban, no women’s team does. “These players dreamed of
playing football for Afghanistan and men just came and took that dream from
them,” Popal said. “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 statement, FIFA said it cannot recognize a national
team unless it is first acknowledged by its national federation. FIFA has
declared it a priority to ensure equal access to soccer without discrimination.
But in Afghanistan’s case, it is just “monitoring the situation very closely,”
according to its statement. A spokesman for the Afghanistan Football Federation
said the organization could do nothing to help because the women’s national team
dissolved when the players fled the country — an assertion the players reject.
With coffee in hand and the energy of someone who has consumed far too much of
it, Popal, 36, has been sharing the Afghan team’s story with everyone she can,
in every way she can. While working for Right to Dream, a soccer nonprofit, and
Girl Power, her own nonprofit, she organized a petition, which has been signed
by more than 175,000 people since publishing online in late July. More than 100
politicians, across four countries, endorsed a letter she wrote to FIFA with the
British parliamentarian Julie Elliott and Malala Yousafzai, the Nobel Peace
Prize winner who was shot in the head by the Taliban when she was 15. Also, days
before the World Cup began, Popal flew to Melbourne for a match that Melbourne
Victory arranged, at her suggestion, between the exiled Afghan team and a team
that represented the area’s migrants and refugees. They called the event the
Hope Cup. Image A goalkeeper in green speaks as soccer players in red uniforms
listen. Popal founded the Afghan women’s national team in 2007. Current members
played in the Hope Cup in Melbourne in July.Credit…Isabella Moore for The New
York Times A goalkeeper in green speaks as soccer players in red uniforms
listen. About 50 fans watched the Afghan players wave their nation’s flag and
sing about their country. One Afghan wore a T-shirt that said, “Save our
families,” because many players’ relatives were still hoping to receive
humanitarian visas to live in Australia. Like a Hollywood publicist, Popal
played cheerful yet determined host, rooting for the players, taking photos and
speaking to reporters. “Khalida is reminding the world that we are still here,
don’t forget us,” said Fati Yousufi, the Afghan team’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 wants to be like Popal should understand that her
advocacy for the Afghan team has come with serious sacrifices. “It has taken a
huge toll on her,” said Kelly Lindsey, an American whom Popal recruited to coach
the Afghan national team 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 before the Taliban ruled
Afghanistan, men would throw rocks at Popal when she played soccer in the
street, claiming it was immoral for girls to play sports. Yet she always
believed women could earn respect through soccer because it was a language men
understood. During the Taliban’s first reign, from when Popal was age 9 to 14,
she was stuck in a Pakistani refugee tent city, with soccer as her only outlet.
When her family returned to Kabul in 2002 after a U.S.-led coalition drove out
the Taliban, she was eager to grow the sport. Popal’s mother, Shokria Popal,
thumbed through an album of photos from Khalida’s childhood. When Khalida was a
girl, men threw rocks at her when she played soccer in the streets because they
believed that women playing sports offended Islam. Popal’s mother displayed a
photo album showing photos of Khalida as a child. Her mother, Shokria Popal, a
physical education teacher, helped recruit players, often contending with
parents who called her a prostitute trying to destroy the culture. Teachers
slapped Khalida in the face and tried to expel her for her work. But from the
Popals’ efforts, high school teams were born. Five years later, the Afghanistan
Football Federation accepted Khalida’s team as the women’s national team. It was
too dangerous for the team to play in public because religious conservatives
said the sportswear showed the shapes of women’s bodies, defying Islam. So the
team practiced inside a NATO base, using hand-me-down equipment from the
federation’s men’s teams and practicing on an active helipad. Helicopters kicked
up dust that caked the players’ faces and coated their throats. The squad once
lost an international match by 17-0. But to Popal, winning was not as important
as the message. The team, which played its official matches outside the country,
first made national news in 2010 when it played NATO soldiers in Kabul. Speaking
to journalists, Popal denounced the Taliban. There was an immediate cost. Some
of her teammates were forced to quit because their families hadn’t known that
they were playing. Popal recalled receiving death threats, including from one
caller who said he would cut her to pieces. Her father and one of her four
brothers were slashed with knives and beaten with guns because, as the
assailants said 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 working as the head of finance and women’s soccer at the otherwise all-male
federation, trying to blend in with her colleagues by wearing baggy clothes and
speaking in rough slang, when she complained on national television that the
women’s team wasn’t getting enough support. She blamed corrupt sports officials
for it. Days later, she said, a truck rammed into the car she was riding in.
Uniformed men fired shots through the windows, but she was not physically
harmed. Then, when the Afghanistan Olympic committee’s headquarters were
vandalized, Popal was among those blamed. Though she denied involvement, the
police issued a warrant for her arrest. Hours before the government barred her
from traveling, she boarded a plane to India. The Death of a Brother Popal was
on the run. Multiple times, she changed her phone number and her hotel, but
threats found their way to her. One text message said, “We will not let your
parents live. Come back for payback.” The next summer, she learned that her
brother Idris had been shot and killed on the way to a university math class in
Kabul, and was sure that the death was connected to her activism. She made her
way to Denmark after the sportswear company Hummel, the Afghan team’s sponsor,
helped her apply for asylum there. For a year, she lived in a refugee center
surrounded by barbed wire fences. Gunfire from the adjacent military shooting
range provided an unnerving soundtrack. Every day, she woke up with her eyes
swollen from crying. At night, she kept the lights on in her barracks because of
a recurring dream that a man was at the foot of her bed, trying to kill her. She
considered 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 help of a therapist and medication, her
depression lifted. In exile, Popal eventually volunteered as the Afghan national
team’s program director, organizing tournament appearances and hiring coaches.
She also coordinated surreptitious exits to safe countries for gay players who
feared persecution and forced marriages. But even women who remained with the
team were not safe. In 2018, Popal saw federation officials sexually harassing
players at a training camp in Jordan. Players told her that they had been
sexually abused by those and other officials, including Keramuddin Keram, who
was the federation’s president and a powerful politician. Popal reported what
she had heard, but for eight months FIFA officials did nothing, according to
Popal and Lindsey, the coach. Popal persuaded 10 players to come forward and
obtained blueprints of the federation’s headquarters. That paperwork showed
Keram had a secret bedroom attached to his office where, players told her, he
beat and raped them. FIFA eventually barred Keram from the sport for life and
the Afghan courts punished him and four others. The case was the first of its
kind in the country, said Fawzia Amini, who was a senior judge on Afghanistan’s
supreme court before fleeing Kabul in 2021. “Khalida is my hero,” Amini said
when she and Popal were in Washington last year to accept the Lantos Human
Rights Prize. Amini had been the judge assigned to the soccer federation’s
sexual abuse cases. “Because of her, girls know how to go to the courts to fight
for their rights,” she said of Popal. In Washington in 2022, Popal and Judge
Fawzia Amini accepted the Lantos Human Rights Prize for championing human rights
and women’s rights in Afghanistan and around. Popal travels extensively to
accept awards, speak at conferences and meet with refugees.Credit…Kenny Holston
for The New York Times Popal standing at a podium accepting a human rights prize
while two other women watch. News of the case reached other national team
players, including those in Haiti, Argentina, Canada and Venezuela. They felt
emboldened to speak up about sexual abuse committed by men in their sport, said
Jonas Baer-Hoffmann, the general secretary of FIFPro, the union for professional
soccer players that helped Popal with the abuse case. “Khalida started a big
wave,” he said. “She’s changing the world.” She is also trying to protect others
from what she endured. When she was a teenager, Popal said, she woke up after a
routine surgery to find her limbs tied to the bed. A doctor was on top of her,
fondling her. He stopped, she said, only when she vomited. “I want to be there
for the girls,” she said, “because no one was there for me.” When Kabul fell two
years ago, Popal worried about those girls. While faced with terrifying
flashbacks from her own experiences fleeing the Taliban, she felt a duty to the
generations of girls she had urged to test society’s limits. “Save me, sister,”
the player Nilab Mohammadi begged her one night in a video call while holding a
gun. “The minute the Taliban knocks on my door, I will shoot myself in the
head.” Popal soothed her, promising help. She rushed to social media and
television to warn players to erase evidence that they had played soccer. Burn
your jerseys, she said. Delete your social media accounts. Image Popal, in a
green “Girl Power” T-shirt, spoke on the phone while her mother prepared dinner
in the kitchen. Popal on the phone at her parents’ home in Denmark while her
mother, Shokria Popal, prepared dinner. Shokria Popal encouraged Khalida’s
soccer ambitions and helped her recruit players in Afghanistan.Credit…Charlotte
de la Fuente for The New York Times Popal, in a green “Girl Power” T-shirt,
spoke on the phone while her mother prepared dinner in the kitchen. Hands
trembling and heart racing, she called her wide network. A team of lawyers,
politicians and human rights advocates joined her to evacuate the players. Some
of those players were forced to leave family members behind, and Popal
empathized. When she left Afghanistan, she never again saw her grandfather, whom
she called the love of her life. He had told her she could become an independent
woman and make a difference in the world instead of marrying at 13 or 14 and
relying on a husband. Eventually, Popal helped more than 200 players and their
family members make it safely out of Afghanistan, where girls and women have
since lost the freedom to work, attend school and even to go outside without a
man. “People fail to acknowledge what a strategically brilliant mind she is,”
Lindsey said. “Without her, none of this happens.” ‘Like a Mother Fighting for
Her Kids’ Popal’s work continues. On any given day, she may be on a train to
Berlin or a long-haul flight to Australia, off to accept awards or speak at
conferences or meet with refugees. She often wears dresses or skirts, with her
long, wavy black hair flowing over her shoulders, to make up for the years she
had to dress like a man. After one trip in the fall of 2021, Popal and her
boyfriend, Russell Pakzad, visited her parents, who had received asylum in
Denmark in 2016. The smell of lamb simmering on the stovetop wafted through the
apartment as Khalida gave her mother, Shokria, the latest honor she had won, the
FIFPro Hero Award. With a bittersweet smile, Shokria leafed through a pile of
Khalida’s accomplishments: a magazine article from Afghanistan, with a portrait
of Khalida clutching a trophy; a photo of Khalida and the national team in
Pakistan. Her only daughter always gave her trouble, she said, starting when
Khalida was a schoolgirl who refused to keep her opinions to herself. Image
Popal holding a silver plate bearing the words “FIFPro Hero.” Popal holding her
award from FIFPro.Credit…Charlotte de la Fuente for The New York Times Popal
holding a silver plate bearing the words “FIFPro Hero.” “I just think you are so
brave and fearless,” she told Khalida. “I don’t know where it comes from.” The
next day, Khalida Popal’s phone had 252 unread messages, many from players on
Afghanistan’s developmental team. Popal helped evacuate those players from Kabul
by choreographing a journey to Pakistan that included the girls huddling inside
an abandoned house while Taliban fighters roamed outside. Popal had relied on a
connection at the Pakistan Football Federation to help the team cross the border
and into a government-sponsored hotel. But now the Pakistani government wanted
the players to move along. Popal sought help from Rabbi Moshe Margaretten of the
Tzedek Association, a Brooklyn-based social justice group she worked with during
the initial evacuation of players. “She really inspired me because she was like
a mother fighting for her kids,” he said. Popal was on a train to Brussels from
Paris when the rabbi got back to her. “Kim Kardashian paid for the girls’
flight!” Popal said, laughing loudly enough to startle other passengers. The
players flew to London, and then settled in Doncaster, about 50 miles east of
Manchester. It’s just one place Popal routinely visits newly transplanted
Afghans. Though the players’ hotel was not open to the public, Popal strolled by
the security guards in the summer of 2022 as if she were in charge. She had work
to do: link the players to local soccer teams, set up job training and ensure
that they had mental health services — the same help she had given the national
team in Australia. That weekend, she took the players to the beach and to the
European women’s soccer championship, pulling several coffee-fueled all-nighters
to fit it in. No one gave her that kind of attention, she said, when she was a
refugee. Image Popal sitting in a restaurant booth surrounded by members of
Afghanistan’s developmental soccer team. Popal, at center in the booth, enjoying
a meal with members of Afghanistan’s developmental team in Doncaster, England in
July 2022. She helped plan their escape from Afghanistan through Pakistan and
then to England.Credit…Mary Turner for The New York Times Popal sitting in a
restaurant booth surrounded by members of Afghanistan’s developmental soccer
team. Narges Mayeli, one of the players, said Popal provided hope. “I have
nothing in my life right now,” Mayeli said. “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 ending in a day and Popal was eking out
all the publicity she could get for the Afghan team before the world stopped
watching. Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani activist, helped with that. Malala had
flown to Melbourne from Sydney, where she and her husband, Asser Malik, had
attended a World Cup game. After reading in The New York Times about Fati
Yousufi and the Afghan team, she wanted to meet the players and help Popal in
her efforts. On a tiny indoor field, with about a dozen television cameras
present, Popal listened as Malala and Yousufi, the team captain, gave speeches.
She took deep breaths and stared at the ground to fight back tears. Malala, who
wore the Afghan team’s jersey to the World Cup final the next day, said FIFA
needed to change its regulations to let the team compete because playing a sport
is a basic human right. Image Malala Yousafzai, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize,
received a jersey from Fatima Yousufi, captain of the Afghan team, while Popal
stood and watched. Malala Yousafzai, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, received a
jersey from Fatima Yousufi, captain of the Afghan team, last month in
Melbourne.Credit…Kelly Defina/Getty Images Malala Yousafzai, winner of the Nobel
Peace Prize, received a jersey from Fatima Yousufi, captain of the Afghan team,
while Popal stood and watched. “It is time for people to decide that they are
not standing on the Taliban’s side,” she said. Yousufi was next. Since her story
became public, she had been featured at human rights and women’s rights
conferences, and last May gave the commencement speech for Chapman University’s
law school near Anaheim, Calif. (Yousufi once did not use her surname publicly,
but does so now that her family 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 said, referring to FIFA, as Popal and Malala nodded. “We don’t
want to lose this opportunity.” Popal never thought she would work alongside
someone with Malala’s stature, or that players, like Yousufi, would become
forceful leaders worldwide. “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 said, choking up. “It’s not all on my shoulders anymore.” Safiullah
Padshah contributed reporting from Kabul.
