Photo: AP
After five unsuccessful rescue attempts, another effort has been underway to help evacuate members of the Afghanistan national girls soccer team from the country after it fell to the Taliban last month,the Associated Press reports.
A group of former U.S. military and intelligence officials, congressmen, allies and humanitarian groups has, according to the AP, been working to rescue some of the team and their family after the girls were unable to leave the country due toa suicide bombing at the Kabul airportthat had been the center of international evacuation efforts.
The girls soccer team was “footsteps from freedom” when the bombing occurred on Aug. 26, greatly disrupting the evacuation operation, the Afghanistan women’s national team captain Farkhunda Muhtaj, who now lives in Canada, told the AP in a story published Thursday.
While most members of the women’s national team weresuccessfully evacuated to Australia, the remaining girls who could not yet get out felt “devastated,” Muhtaj said.
“They’re hopeless, considering the situation they’re in,” Muhtaj added, although she said she has tried to keep the team calm while they remain in Afghanistan.
The group is made up of 133 people, including 26 team members between the ages of 14 and 16, plus adults and children, according to the AP.
Both the players and their families could become Taliban targets, Muhtaj explained to the AP, because of their work as women’s advocates. While the Taliban has not yet issued formal guidance for women and girls living under their rule — and while leaders claim they are more moderate than when they were last in power — they previously banned women and girls from school and work while controlling Afghanistan from 1996 through 2001.
Robert McCreary, a former congressional chief of staff and Bush administration official, said Australia, France and Qatar had offered their help in evacuating the girls as part of the rescue mission, which has been named Operation Soccer Balls.
AP
“They’re just unbelievable young ladies who should be playing in the backyard, playing on the swing set, playing with their friends, and here they’re in a very bad situation for doing nothing more than playing soccer,” he told the AP. “We need to do everything that we can to protect them, to get them to a safe situation.”
Insisting it would create goodwill, McCreary, who previously worked with special forces in Afghanistan, urged the Taliban to make it easier for the soccer team to leave the country.
“If we can put a protective bubble around these women and young girls … I really believe the world will stand up and take notice and have a lot of offers to take them in and host them,” McCreary said.
Because the U.S. helped make it possible for the girls to attend school and play the sport they love, McCreary said, “We need to protect them now,” adding, “They should not be in harm’s way for things that we helped them do.”
Senior Airman Taylor Crul/AP/Shutterstock
Julie Foudy, a former captain of the U.S. women’s national soccer team, told the AP that the rescue mission helped “raise the visibility of these young women and their importance to equality and democracy and all these things that we value in this country.”
Foudy, who is also a two-time World Cup champion and two-time Olympic gold medalist, added, “As many of us who can stand up as female athletes — as humans — and say, ‘This is a moment we need to come together and do what’s right,’ then we absolutely should.”
Former and current United States women’s national team players signed a letter asking the U.S. State Department to grant humanitarian parole to members of the Afghanistan women’s national team who had been trying to flee Kabul,per ESPN.
source: people.com
