How women’s football in Afghanistan redefined itself

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. One stifling afternoon in the early 2000s in Kabul, Afghanistan, violence came to the football haven Khalida Popal and her friends had conjured for themselves on the schoolground. A group of men jumped over the concrete walls that separated the girls from the real world.

They hurled insults at the girls, kicked their school bags, and scattered the goalposts marked with stones. “The ringleader grabbed a scarf that lay on the floor and shoved it hard into the face of one of the players, stumbling her backwards," writes Popal. “Then, silent and seething, somehow more terrifying than he was before, he strode to the centre of the yard, a mixture of rage and pleasure in his expression.

Revealing a large knife that he held up in front of us dramatically, he proceeded to stab into our football, once, twice, a third time." It is just one of the harrowing pictures Popal paints in her recently released memoir, My Beautiful Sisters: A Story of Courage, Hope and the Afghan Women’s Football Team. The book spans about 25 years from 1996 when a hardline Taliban first took charge in Afghanistan till their re-instatement in 2021. As the title suggests, the book is about women’s football in a country trying to redefine itself under US occupation.

During those chaotic years in the early 2000s, Afghanistan grappled with the fall of the Taliban and with the concept of democracy. The book delves deep in the social and psychological construct of a country that leaves no space for women and their rights, where they are suffocated of all life and laughter. It sparkles briefly with the pure joy of a bunch of girls left alone to play football, to reclaim their childhood in some form, and then plunges again into