When the Taliban ruled Afghanistan, soccer was often replaced by public executions

In Taliban Afghanistan, the playing field at a soccer stadium was often a very scary place.

Mohammad Isaq can attest to that. The ‘90s were slipping away and Isaq, who had left the country during the Civil War, was once again the captain of the Afghan national soccer team. The Taliban were already in control, something that was evident in Isaq’s first training session with the team, a moment he will never forget and one that haunted him for a long time.

“We did some warm-ups and went to do some shooting practice. When I lifted a barrel that was in the middle of the pitch, I found six amputated hands,” Isaq said in 2012 to the journalist Frud Bezhan, in an article for Radio Free Europe.

“When I saw them it really affected me. I left the training session and the stadium and went home. I felt sick for one or two weeks”.

Zarmina, a mother of seven children who was shot in the head at the point of the penalty shootout, cannot attest to this.

Reporter Anton Antonowicz of The Daily Mirror in London travelled to Afghanistan to investigate the story. ABC’s “Good Morning America” interviewed him in 2006 to know what he saw there.

“Footage of a faceless, nameless woman shot dead in Kabul’s Olympic Stadium was secretly smuggled out of Afghanistan by members of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), a women’s group. Before long, the images of the Nov. 17, 1999, execution became an icon for female suffering under Taliban rule”, ABC News recalled.

“Zarmina had been brought to jail along with her 1-year-old twins, a boy and a girl, and for a while, she thought her children would save her.

The 35-year-old mother of seven was accused of murdering her husband, and her only hope was to be spared on account of her children, a hope fed by the Taliban declaring that until her twins were weaned, Zarmina would live”.

“She kept repeating the same statement, and that was ‘they’re not going to kill me, they’re not going to kill me’,” Antonowicz told Good Morning America. “Who will look after my five children? I’m a mother. They would not kill a mother.”

“Though it had been announced on the radio days before, Zarmina knew nothing about her impending death. She was convinced her punishment would be 100 lashes. In fact, the morning of her execution she borrowed two extra dresses from fellow prisoners, and put them on underneath her burqa, hoping to soften the blows”, ABC News described.

Antonowicz said to Good Morning America that he was told by an eyewitness in Afghanistan about what happened that morning. In front of 30,000 spectators, Zarmina was made to kneel before the soccer goalposts.

“She was taken, made to kneel on the penalty spot, and behind her was the man with the rifle. She knew nothing still,” he said. “And then the man fired, his hand shaking so much the bullet merely creased the side of her head, cutting through the burqa but not injuring her.”

Just at that split second Zarmina realized, obviously, that she was about to be shot. The next shot did not miss.

Today, with the Taliban back in power in the Central Asian country, questions are piling up. Their spokesmen say that they are not the same, that they have come back better, that they are going to allow women to participate in government and that girls and young women will be able to continue their studies.

In the West these promises are received with logical skepticism. In Kabul, too, where thousands of Afghans are crowding the airport trying to leave the country. The statement that women will be able to work “within the framework of the Sharia” suggests that the situation will be very different from what it is today in terms of freedoms.

The Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) confirmed to Around the Rings that their officials in Afghanistan are fine.

But Samira Asghari, who is at 27 the youngest member of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), and a clear proof of how far women have progressed in recent years in Afghanistan, launched a desperate plea for help on twitter on Wednesday.

“#Please Afghanistan National Female Athletes, coaches and their entourage need your help, we must get them out of #Talibans hands means out of #Afghanistan in particular #Kabul Please do something before it is too late,” Asghari tweeted, railing at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, which is closed today and operating out of the airport, and the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee (USOPC).

A graduate in political science and international relations, former captain of her country’s basketball team and member of the coordination committee for the Los Angeles 2028 Games, among others, Asghari also played soccer and practiced skateboarding and kung fu. A far cry from the prototypical Afghan woman during the Taliban regime from 1996 to 2001.

Asghari’s plea coincides with that of Khalida Popal, a former member of Afghanistan’s women’s national soccer team, who says that women soccer players are in danger.

“I have been encouraging to take down social media channels, take down photos, escape and hide themselves,” Popal told The Associated Press in a telephone interview from Denmark. “That breaks my heart because of all these years we have worked to raise the visibility of women and now I’m telling my women in Afghanistan to shut up and disappear. Their lives are in danger.”

In the midst of the chaos that is Afghanistan today, it is difficult, and certainly not a priority, to predict what will happen to the sport in the coming months, but past experience points to one thing: cricket has the approval and enthusiasm of the old-new power in Kabul. The Taliban love the sport, introduced to neighboring Pakistan with much success by the British.

Hamid Shinwari, chief executive of the Afghanistan Cricket Board (ACB), assured the “Indian Express” that the overall situation in the country is “great” and there will be no problems in holding upcoming matches with Pakistan at the Mahinda Rajapaksa Stadium in Hambantota, Sri Lanka.

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