Zarguna Nouri is a 22-year-old Afghan taekwondo champion who had the ambition to represent Afghanistan at the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris. But since they came to power Taliban, who seem determined to ban women from sporting, feels defeated.
“All our lives have been turned upside down”, she explains to the French news agency (AFP) from her home in the city of Herat, the capital of western Afghanistan and continues: “In sports, when we lose, we feel terribly bad. Here, we were defeated by the Taliban government. Every member of the taekwondo team dreamed that one day he would participate in the Olympics or that we would raise the Afghan flag in international competitions. But now we all have to stay home. “Every day the depression gets bigger.”
About 130 girls are no longer allowed to train
About 130 girls, aged 12 to 25, are members of the Afghan academy in Herat. But, now, they are not allowed to train. Last week, Afghanistan’s new director of sports and physical education, Bashir Ahmad Rustamzai, said the Taliban would allow him to train in 400 sports, but declined to say whether women could take part in training.
The Islamists, who practiced strict segregation between 1996 and 2001, effectively excluding women from all sports, have sought to portray a more moderate figure in the international community since taking power in mid-August.
Their government appears to have recorded the return to school of high school and high school girls who were deprived of school during the Taliban’s first term in power. But the outlook looks bleak for women’s sports.
“Women do not have to play sports”
Ahmadullah Wasik, a member of the Taliban Cultural Committee, recently considered it “not necessary” for women to exercise. Sharia, Islamic law, according to fundamentalists, excludes co-education and forces women to hide their form.
“We all trained and did what we could. “But it was all for nothing,” said Nouri, who is in her fourth year of physical education at Kabul University. And when they go out, they dress in burqas and can not even wear sneakers.
The former Afghan champion, however, wants to resume training so that “ten years of hard work are not lost”. Although he believes he will be forced to leave Afghanistan: “Conditions are such that we do not see how to move forward in the country.”
At the same time, Nouri calls for help “all international and Olympic athletes and members of the Olympic Committee, to help her sisters and herself, in order to go to a better place, even abroad.”
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