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Tuba Jan Sangar was in her workplace on the Afghanistan Cricket Board final month when her supervisor referred to as. “She mentioned, ‘The place are you?’ She simply advised me to go residence,” Sangar mentioned. “Everybody was afraid that the Taliban would kill us. I didn’t sleep for one week and I didn’t eat something.”
For seven years 28-year-old Sangar labored to develop ladies’s cricket within the nation, from creating school-level groups to lastly awarding contracts final yr to the nationwide squad.
However Taliban fighters have been streaming into Kabul, sealing their conquest of Afghanistan and spelling the potential finish of ladies’s rights to review, work and play sport. Sangar and her colleagues, who had for years battled resistance from throughout Afghan society, were devastated.
She is now in Canada together with her household, one in all scores of ladies athletes and sports activities officers evacuated. Many others stay inside Afghanistan, fearing for his or her lives and the way forward for sports activities within the nation, one in all its nice post-2001 success tales.
“Cricket isn’t just a recreation for Afghan individuals. Everybody loves cricket,” Sangar mentioned. “Now there isn’t a hope. Our gamers, our workers, they’re caught in Kabul. They’re simply nervous about their very own lives.”
The Taliban, which positioned restrictions on sports activities after they dominated Afghanistan within the Nineteen Nineties, have made ostensible assist for athletes a bedrock of their charm offensive. Nevertheless it stays unclear whether or not ladies, who have been barred from sports activities outright after they have been final in energy, can be allowed to proceed enjoying in any respect.
How the Taliban deal with sports activities in Afghanistan will show an essential check of what kind of society they wish to create, and whether or not their vows of moderation and reform will maintain true. It is usually unclear if the worldwide success that athletes reminiscent of the lads’s cricket workforce have loved can proceed beneath the Taliban. Australia has already threatened to cancel a check in November if ladies should not allowed to play.
Sharda Ugra, a sports activities author in India, mentioned the Taliban needed to make sports activities their “Potemkin village”.
“Cricket is their large forex to take care of the world. Their response to cricket can be fairly key as to whether or not they wish to have interaction with the remainder of the world or not,” she mentioned.
“If they are saying, ‘We don’t care what the world thinks about us,’ then everyone is doomed collectively.
“The scary factor is they will do a number of shit by doing sports activities proper and getting away with different [things].”
After they first ran Afghanistan, the Taliban banned video games reminiscent of chess and buzkashi, a standard sport through which groups on horseback compete for management of a goat carcass. Others, reminiscent of soccer, have been allowed to proceed, although the Islamists used stadiums for public executions.
Cricket took off in recognition in latest a long time, picked up by Afghan refugees in Pakistan reminiscent of Mohammad Nabi, a veteran of the nationwide workforce whereas famous person gamers reminiscent of Rashid Khan emerged within the post-Taliban period. Afghanistan acquired full membership of the Worldwide Cricket Council in 2017 and performed a Check towards India a yr later.
Ladies’s sports activities additionally grew, with the nation sending athletes to the Olympic Video games and forming worldwide groups.
“Our gamers are activists . . . Feminine soccer has been very political in Afghanistan,” mentioned Khalida Popal, the Denmark-based former captain of the ladies’s nationwide soccer workforce. “They have been in nice hazard, not solely from the Taliban however the males in authorities and society who hated the participation of ladies.”
When the Taliban retook management final month, they rapidly offered themselves as patrons of sport, sending leaders to satisfy athletes and internet hosting every part from cricket matches to wrestling bouts. The group appointed Naseebullah Haqqani, a masters-educated Talib, as chief government of the cricket board.
The Taliban’s efforts to current a extra reasonable picture have been repeatedly contradicted by proof of revenge killings and public executions of alleged criminals.
Their overtures have been of little consolation to many athletes. Stars reminiscent of Khan publicly expressed alarm and dismay on the Taliban’s takeover whereas Zaki Anwari, a youth footballer, fell to his dying after clinging to a US evacuation airplane final month.
Popal and others organised mass evacuation efforts, serving to to get scores of ladies athletes in another country.
The Taliban have given blended messages on whether or not ladies can be allowed to proceed enjoying sports activities. Worldwide our bodies such because the ICC and Fifa, nevertheless, haven’t commented on whether or not they may proceed permitting the lads’s groups to play if ladies are banned.
However with the Taliban already barring ladies from work and training, Afghan athletes have little doubt about what to anticipate.
“Right here, ladies can by no means go into sports activities. No and by no means,” mentioned a cricketer on the ladies’s workforce, who remains to be within the nation however hopes to go away. “The lads’s cricket workforce makes some huge cash, so [the Taliban] will advertise.”
“If they need us to put on lengthy garments and play, we are going to settle for all that,” she added. “It hurts loads when your dream crashes. I don’t need my dream to stay unfulfilled. Not simply mine. It’s . . . my whole workforce’s dream to play once more.”
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