They Shot at Her. They Forced Her From Her Home. She Won’t Stop Fighting for Girls.

Khalida Popal, the previous captain of the Afghanistan girls’s nationwide soccer workforce, awoke 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. Female soccer gamers on the nationwide workforce 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.

Players 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 every part the Taliban despised.

“I feel responsible for these girls,” Popal stated later. “I’d rather die than turn my back on them.”

So on that blue-sky summer time afternoon in 2021, Popal had a panic assault and thought she is likely to be dying. But 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.

Relying on a community she constructed by means of her activism, she helped rescue 87 individuals, together with the senior nationwide workforce. Months later, one other 130.

Now Popal is on one other mission, one which reached its peak at this summer time’s Women’s World Cup. She is making an attempt to persuade FIFA, soccer’s world governing physique, to let gamers on the Afghan girls’s nationwide workforce symbolize 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. Though the workforce is competing for the Melbourne Victory soccer membership, FIFA refuses to acknowledge it as a nationwide workforce as a result of the Afghanistan Football Federation claims it doesn’t exist. Under the Taliban, no girls’s workforce does.

“These players dreamed of playing football for Afghanistan and men just came and took that dream from them,” Popal stated. “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 assertion, FIFA stated it can not acknowledge a nationwide workforce 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. But in Afghanistan’s case, it’s simply “monitoring the situation very closely,” in accordance with its assertion.

A spokesman for the Afghanistan Football Federation stated the group may do nothing to assist as a result of the ladies’s nationwide workforce 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 workforce’s story with everybody she will, in each means she will. While working for Right to Dream, a soccer nonprofit, and Girl Power, her personal nonprofit, she organized a petition, which has been signed by greater than 175,000 individuals since publishing on-line in late July. More than 100 politicians, throughout 4 nations, 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.

Also, 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 workforce and a workforce that represented the world’s migrants and refugees. They referred to 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 families,” as a result of many gamers’ family members 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 images and chatting with reporters.

“Khalida is reminding the world that we are still here, don’t forget us,” stated Fati Yousufi, the Afghan workforce’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 needs to be like Popal ought to perceive that her advocacy for the Afghan workforce has include severe sacrifices.

“It has taken a huge toll on her,” stated Kelly Lindsey, an American whom Popal recruited to teach the Afghan nationwide workforce 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 earlier than the Taliban dominated Afghanistan, males would throw rocks at Popal when she performed soccer on the street, claiming it was immoral for women to play sports activities. Yet she at all times believed girls may earn respect by means of soccer as a result of it was a language males understood.

During 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 trainer, helped recruit gamers, usually contending with mother and father who referred to as her a prostitute making an attempt to destroy the tradition. Teachers slapped Khalida within the face and tried to expel her for her work. But from the Popals’ efforts, highschool groups had been born. Five years later, the Afghanistan Football Federation accepted Khalida’s workforce as the ladies’s nationwide workforce.

It was too harmful for the workforce 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 workforce 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 global match by 17-0. But to Popal, successful was not as necessary because the message.

The workforce, which performed its official matches outdoors the nation, first made nationwide news in 2010 when it performed NATO troopers in Kabul. Speaking to journalists, Popal denounced the Taliban. There was an instantaneous value.

Some of her teammates had been pressured to give up as a result of their households hadn’t identified that they had been enjoying. Popal recalled receiving demise threats, together with from one caller who stated he would lower her to items.

Her father and one among her 4 brothers had been slashed with knives and overwhelmed with weapons as a result of, because the assailants stated 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 pinnacle of finance and girls’s soccer on the in any other case all-male federation, making an attempt to mix in along with her colleagues by sporting saggy garments and talking in tough slang, when she complained on nationwide tv that the ladies’s workforce wasn’t getting sufficient assist. 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.

Though she denied involvement, the police issued a warrant for her arrest. Hours earlier than the federal government barred her from touring, she boarded a aircraft to India.

The Death of a Brother

Popal was on the run. Multiple instances, she modified her cellphone quantity and her lodge, however threats discovered their strategy to her. One textual content message stated, “We will not let your parents live. Come back for payback.”

The subsequent summer time, 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 demise was related to her activism.

She made her strategy to Denmark after the sportswear firm Hummel, the Afghan workforce’s sponsor, helped her apply for asylum there. For a yr, she lived in a refugee middle surrounded by barbed wire fences. Gunfire from the adjoining army capturing vary supplied an unnerving soundtrack.

Every day, she awoke along 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, making an attempt to kill her. She thought-about 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 assistance of a therapist and drugs, her despair lifted. In exile, Popal finally volunteered because the Afghan nationwide workforce’s program director, organizing match appearances and hiring coaches. She additionally coordinated surreptitious exits to secure nations for homosexual gamers who feared persecution and compelled marriages.

But even girls who remained with the workforce weren’t secure. In 2018, Popal noticed federation officers sexually harassing gamers at a coaching camp in Jordan. Players 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, in accordance with Popal and Lindsey, the coach.

Popal persuaded 10 gamers to come back 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 finally barred Keram from the game for all times and the Afghan courts punished him and 4 others. The case was the primary of its sort 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 settle for the Lantos Human Rights Prize. Amini had been the decide assigned to the soccer federation’s sexual abuse instances.

“Because of her, girls know how to go to the courts to fight for their rights,” she stated of Popal.

News of the case reached different nationwide workforce 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 started a big wave,” he stated. “She’s changing the world.”

She can be making an attempt to guard others from what she endured.

When she was an adolescent, Popal stated, she awoke after a routine surgical procedure to seek 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 want to be there for the girls,” she stated, “because no one was there for me.”

When Kabul fell two years in the past, Popal anxious about these ladies. While confronted with terrifying flashbacks from her personal experiences fleeing the Taliban, she felt an obligation to the generations of women 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 will shoot myself in 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.

Hands trembling and coronary heart racing, she referred to as her extensive community. A workforce of legal professionals, politicians and human rights advocates joined her to evacuate the gamers. Some 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 referred to as the love of her life. He had advised her she may grow to be an impartial lady and make a distinction on the earth as an alternative of marrying at 13 or 14 and counting on a husband.

Eventually, 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 outdoors with out a man.

“People fail to acknowledge what a strategically brilliant mind she is,” Lindsey stated. “Without her, none of this happens.”

‘Like a Mother Fighting for Her Kids’

Popal’s work continues. On any given day, she could also be on a prepare to Berlin or a long-haul flight to Australia, off to simply accept awards or converse at conferences or meet with refugees. She usually wears attire or skirts, along with her lengthy, wavy black hair flowing over her shoulders, to make up for the years she needed to gown like a person.

After one journey within the fall of 2021, Popal and her boyfriend, Russell Pakzad, visited her mother and father, who had obtained asylum in Denmark in 2016. The odor of lamb simmering on the stovetop wafted by means of the condo as Khalida gave her mom, Shokria, the most recent 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 workforce in Pakistan. Her solely daughter at all times gave her bother, she stated, beginning when Khalida was a schoolgirl who refused to maintain her opinions to herself.

“I just think you are so brave and fearless,” she advised Khalida. “I don’t know where it comes from.”

The subsequent day, Khalida Popal’s cellphone had 252 unread messages, many from gamers on Afghanistan’s developmental workforce. 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 outdoors.

Popal had relied on a connection on the Pakistan Football Federation to assist the workforce cross the border and right into a government-sponsored lodge. But now the Pakistani authorities needed the gamers to maneuver alongside.

Popal sought assist from Rabbi Moshe Margaretten of the Tzedek Association, a Brooklyn-based social justice group she labored with in the course of the preliminary evacuation of gamers. “She really inspired me because she was like a mother fighting for her kids,” he stated.

Popal was on a prepare to Brussels from Paris when the rabbi acquired again to her.

“Kim Kardashian paid for the girls’ 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.

Though 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 sure that they’d psychological well being companies — the identical assist she had given the nationwide workforce in Australia. That weekend, she took the gamers to the seashore and to the European girls’s soccer championship, pulling a number of coffee-fueled all-nighters to suit it in. No one gave her that sort of consideration, she stated, when she was a refugee.

Narges Mayeli, one of many gamers, stated Popal supplied hope.

“I have nothing in my life right now,” Mayeli stated. “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 of the publicity she may get for the Afghan workforce 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 recreation. After studying in The New York Times about Fati Yousufi and the Afghan workforce, she needed to fulfill the gamers and assist Popal in her efforts.

On a tiny indoor discipline, with a few dozen tv cameras current, Popal listened as Malala and Yousufi, the workforce captain, gave speeches. She took deep breaths and stared on the floor to battle again tears.

Malala, who wore the Afghan workforce’s jersey to the World Cup closing the following day, stated FIFA wanted to vary its laws to let the workforce compete as a result of enjoying a sport is a fundamental human proper.

“It is time for people to decide that they are not standing on the Taliban’s side,” she stated.

Yousufi was subsequent. Since her story grew to become public, she had been featured at human rights and girls’s rights conferences, and final May gave the graduation speech for Chapman University’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 are asking them to open the door, open the door for our team, open the door for Afghanistan women,” Yousufi stated, referring to FIFA, as Popal and Malala nodded. “We don’t want to lose this opportunity.”

Popal by no means thought she would work alongside somebody with Malala’s stature, or that gamers, like Yousufi, would grow to be 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 stated, choking up. “It’s not all on my shoulders anymore.”

Safiullah Padshah contributed reporting from Kabul.