In late 2020 the first professional contracts were awarded to Afghanistan’s best female cricketers. Less than a year later they were fearing for their lives. Katya Witney speaks to two players about surviving the Taliban, and what’s left of their cricketing futures.

This article was first printed in Issue 67 of Wisden Cricket Monthly.

Feroza Afghan left Kabul in the dead of night with her younger brother, three sisters, mother and aunt. The family had fled their home in Herat, the oasis city to the western part of Afghanistan, when the Taliban reclaimed power and were staying in a hotel in Kabul when that too was retaken by the new regime. It didn’t take long for the Taliban to come looking for them.

“It was like a nightmare,” she says. “They asked us for our ID cards and passports to check them out. When they found out we were from Herat, they asked us why we were staying in Kabul, and they said maybe some foreign country was supporting us or that there was something we were hiding.”

If the Taliban had found out who Feroza was, in all likelihood she would not be able to tell her story. Speaking from Melbourne, the place she now calls home, she recalls a terrifying year-long ordeal of danger and uncertainty before her family found refuge in Australia.

“It was pretty scary for us,” she says of being stopped by the Taliban. “My brother told them my mum was sick and we wanted to go to Pakistan for a hospital. When we did get to the hotel, someone told my brother that the Taliban had followed us and they might come back again.

“My family didn’t have passports so we couldn’t apply for a Pakistan visa or enter Pakistan. We had to enter illegally…We went to Kandahar and then the Spin Boldak border where we could cross. It was a really bad day, the day we left our country. We lost our dreams in Afghanistan.”

Those dreams were what made Feroza a target. When the Afghanistan national women’s team was established in November 2020, she had been one of 25 women and girls awarded a professional contract. Just 16 at the time, she was one of the country’s best fast-bowling prospects.

Less than 12 months later, following the Taliban’s power grab in the wake of the withdrawal of the last remaining US troops from Afghan soil, those women were fleeing the country in fear of their lives.

Feroza recalls the day she was selected for the national team as one of the happiest of her life. “It was the best memory. The first day of selection I was training when I went to the hotel room and my coach called me and said, ‘Feroza, you are selected for the Afghanistan national team’. I called my mum and she said she was so proud of me.”

Before cricket, she had enjoyed writing and had started penning a book at school. “But after cricket, I didn’t like anything apart from cricket. Everything is beautiful with cricket for me.”

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Another woman selected on that momentous day was Sofia Yosofzai. Now 26, she had been studying to become a dentist while also training as a boxer.

“My trainer suggested that I should join the cricket team because they wanted to have more female members,” she says, also speaking to WCM from Australia. “I visited the ACB [Afghanistan Cricket Board] in Kabul and then I wanted to join them. It was not just a game or training for us, it was our lives.”

Previous attempts to set up a women’s team in Afghanistan had been shortlived. The first was in 2010, less than a decade after the ousting of the previous Taliban regime and the subsequent US occupation. At the time it was seen as an essential part of a process that would allow Afghanistan to gain ICC full member status, which they eventually did in 2017. But, despite those contracts being introduced, Afghanistan’s female players still had to fight against ingrained cultural norms in the country to be allowed to train regularly.

“It was just one day per week, maybe, if they gave us permission,” says Sofia. “We asked them to please give us one or two days per week at least, one day is not enough. They wouldn’t accept that because their priority was the male team, not us. No one knew we even existed.”

“Seven players from Herat were selected for the national team,” adds Feroza. “When we went back to Herat, we didn’t have any place to train or a coach, so we paid for a private coach and a place to train. It really wasn’t good.”

Regardless of the barriers the players faced before 2021, when the Taliban re-established control, those challenges became a fight for their lives. The brutal repressions meted out to Afghanistan’s women and girls during the rule of the previous regime was a source of fear for the new generation. Confident and empowered young women seeking a freer future for themselves were seen as direct threats to the order which the Taliban sought to impose. The challenge that women represented to the new government’s goals left them in no doubt what would happen if they were discovered.

“I asked my mum, ‘If they come for me, will they kill me?’” says Sofia. “She wouldn’t tell me anything, she just cried. We burnt all our materials like bats and balls, anything we had from cricket. We burnt all of it so the Taliban would not know we were cricket players.”

In a desperate situation, the players turned to the ACB for help. According to Sofia and Feroza, they were met with silence.

“We had a WhatsApp group of the selected players and our coaches and our leaders left the group and blocked us,” says Sofia. “They didn’t respond to any messages or any calls, they just ignored us. It was the worst feeling ever… There was no hope for us anymore.”

The ACB did not respond to WCM’s request for comment.

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Although Feroza was separated from Sofia, living in Herat rather than Kabul, the hopelessness and isolation they both felt was equivalent.

“The cricket board knew everything about us because they had our fingerprints which were attached to all the information about ourselves on their system,” she says. “We were worried that when they [the Taliban] found out the information, they would know we were the players and they would come for us and they would definitely kill us.

“At the time, me and my teammates in Herat City called our manager in Kabul and she didn’t answer us. No one when the Taliban came wanted to speak about the women’s national team because it was a big danger.”

As the players faced an unimaginable situation, the world watched the chaos unfold in the country. Images of terror and desperation from Kabul airport were broadcast on global news channels as citizens rushed to leave the country, some secreting themselves inside plane wheels as they attempted to escape. Amid the mayhem Sofia was able to make her escape.

“It was an accident,” she says. “Luckily we received a call from people in Australia – one of our players [already in Australia] had joined women’s sports management and we got her email by chance. If we hadn’t received that email I don’t know what would have happened.

“We were told one night that we should leave. There was an explosion in the airport which meant we could go from there. We decided we needed to cross the border. We were hiding our faces and dressing so they couldn’t recognise our faces. We got in the car and we only had one person with us to help us cross the border. When we got to Pakistan they read our names out and we crossed the border. We thought it was the last time we would leave our country and see our people.”

Sofia stayed for three months in a hotel in Islamabad before she was able to travel to Australia. She arrived in Canberra in October 2021 with her two brothers, younger sister and her mother. Feroza arrived nine months later. She and her family’s visa applications had been complicated by entering Pakistan illegally.

Despite their ordeals, the women are full of hope and determination for what their new futures can bring in Australia. Cricket is an essential part of that future. Their immediate focus is picking up the fight to play under the Afghan flag once more.

“We wrote to the ICC a few months ago to ask them to allow us to play here [in Australia] for our country,” says Feroza. “But unfortunately they told us they want the Afghanistan national team to be in Afghanistan and they don’t accept the team here.”

According to UNESCO, nearly 30 per cent of girls in Afghanistan have never entered primary education. Now university education has been suspended indefinitely, affecting over 100,000 young Afghan women. “So how is it possible for women to play cricket again?” says Feroza. “How many years should we wait for the Taliban to allow girls to play cricket again? It’s impossible. The ICC always says that everyone, everywhere can play, so why can’t we play for Afghanistan in Australia?”

A key part of the ICC’s criteria for full member status is the existence of a women’s national team and the pathways to support that. Despite this being an impossibility under a Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, where in the past weeks even further crackdowns have been levied on women’s rights to work and education, at its latest board meeting the ICC agreed to a significant increase to the ACB’s budget.

The implication is that any action the ICC takes will not have any bearing on the situation for women in Afghanistan. Not allowing the men’s team to compete would deprive Afghanistan’s citizens of their hugely popular national team. But while neither Sofia or Feroza want to see the men’s team become international pariahs, they find themselves cast aside, in limbo, thwarted by the inactions of the powers-that-be.

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When the men’s team came to Australia for the T20 World Cup last year, both Feroza and Sofia went to watch them play in Melbourne.

“I had already met all of them in Afghanistan,” Sofia says. “But we haven’t had any contact with them since. We weren’t allowed to contact them.”

“They also don’t want to talk about us,” adds Feroza. “We support our men’s team, go to matches but now it’s time they support us too. One day in Melbourne during the World Cup, I went to the hotel where the players were staying. I saw Rashid Khan there and I went to speak with him and asked him why he didn’t support us now. He was just silent and didn’t say anything.

“I asked him to please support us, if you support us maybe the ICC would allow us to play cricket here for Afghanistan. He was silent and then he said to me, ‘I try my best’.

“I said to him, you are a player and I am also a player. I know you but you don’t know me. If the men’s team and the players and everyone is silent, what’s going to happen for us?”

Australia’s men now won’t be playing Afghanistan in the white-ball series that was meant to happen this year. At the time of the announcement, Rashid – a symbol of hope for Afghanistan, and the frontman of a men’s team which has been publicly endorsed by the Taliban – put out a statement asking for politics to be kept out of cricket. For the players who fled their home country because its politics wanted to murder them for playing sport, such a statement doesn’t so much border on the absurd as embody it.

“We don’t want for the men’s team ever to be banned or not play,” Feroza says. “But we want them to support us and stand with us because it’s our right to play cricket. I think they’re feeling what we’re feeling for the first time.”

“At least we have a national male team,” Sofia says. “It’s not a bad feeling, it’s a good feeling. But the equality must be the same for us.”

For now, along with their other teammates, Sofia and Feroza are building their new lives in Australia. These two courageous individuals can restore the hopes and dreams they thought had been extinguished when they fled their homeland over a year ago.

“We will educate ourselves and train ourselves and achieve the goals that we have in cricket,” says Sofia. “I will do my best to achieve my goals, Inshallah.”

Feroza too is focusing on her cricket. “I love Melbourne and I’ve decided that after Ramadan is done I will get a private coach to continue my training in the indoor academy until the summer season. Next summer, I will try to find a way to play for Victoria.

“I want to play in the Big Bash one day, and show the world Afghanistan women have talent and they are powerful.”

This article was first printed in Issue 67 of Wisden Cricket Monthly.