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With kicking, hooting and jumping, Afghan women held their football finals in a stadium where the Taliban meted out gruesome punishments. Now the plucky players of the football league face their next big hurdle: Afghan peace talks.
With @KhwaGhani: https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/11/08/932068805/women-of-afghanistan-wont-give-up-their-soccer-dreams
With @KhwaGhani: https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/11/08/932068805/women-of-afghanistan-wont-give-up-their-soccer-dreams
The captain of Herat Storm, Sabria Nawruzi, played football as a teen, despite what she says were threats from militants to dispatch suicide bombers to stop women from openly playing.
She faced scorn and pressure from neighbours who tried to bully her mother into stopping her from playing, because a girl or woman playing in public is still associated with shameful behaviour in Afghanistan and in many conservative Muslim societies.
"Women being in public itself, despite all the progress that we have made, remains challenging in Afghanistan," says @ShaharzadAkbar of @AfghanistanIHRC. Especially sports, because it's a show "in a society where women are expected to be invisible in public."
Nawruzi her led her team to victory in a stadium where the Taliban once meted out gruesome punishments. "Now when I see it, it's a green place. It brings joy to people. They come to be happy and cheer on the teams they love."
@heatherbarr1, of @HRW, says this is exhilarating: "You have teams of...young women running around and screaming and jumping and kicking and hollering and hugging each other and crowds of women in the stands cheering them on is – yeah – it's exhilarating."
The women note, it took years of struggle for this tenuous success. The Taliban were pushed out. They faced threats of violence. Family and community pressure to stop. The league shut down for a while because it was out of money.
Then there's the matter of the chief of the Afghan football federation. Last year, @KhalidaPopal, a former player of the national team, helped raise attention to accusations by multiple players that he raped, sexually assaulted and physically harmed them.
But Popal says the scandal surrounding the ex-chief pressured the Afghan government to treat women's football with more respect - and give them money.
So this is all tenuous, as everything in Afghanistan honestly feels these days (and not just these days).
And now they face new challenges.
And now they face new challenges.
