RASC News Agency: In a historic and deeply symbolic resurgence, the Afghanistani Women’s Football Team has triumphantly returned to the field after four years of forced silence this time, not in Kabul but on the soil of Morocco. Their comeback, hailed by Human Rights Watch as “a triumph of resilience, dignity, and defiance,” stands as a powerful counter-narrative to the Taliban’s systematic campaign of erasure and repression against women.
In its official statement released on Saturday, November 1st, Human Rights Watch declared that the women’s return to the pitch represents “far more than a sporting milestone it is a declaration of survival, identity, and national pride against tyranny.”
Now competing under the banner of “Afghanistani Women’s Unity,” the team’s reappearance in an international arena marks a rebirth forged in exile the rebirth of a people’s voice that the Taliban sought to extinguish through intimidation, gender apartheid, and cultural annihilation.
The organization’s statement recalled that one of the Taliban’s very first edicts upon retaking power in August 2021 was the absolute prohibition of women’s participation in sports an order emblematic of their broader war against women’s rights, education, and visibility. Under this regressive rule, hundreds of female athletes footballers, basketball players, volleyball and cricket champions were driven into hiding, their careers destroyed, their dreams criminalized. Many were forced to burn their uniforms, trophies, and personal records to avoid being hunted and humiliated by the so-called “Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice.”
“The return of Afghanistani women to football is the return of an entire nation’s silenced soul,” Human Rights Watch wrote. “These women have refused to surrender. They have risen against a machinery of fear designed to erase them from history.”
Having escaped persecution, the players scattered across continents from Europe to Australia where they rebuilt their lives and, against all odds, reconstructed their team from exile. Supported by global women’s rights defenders and sports organizations, they revived their spirit of unity and defiance under the new name ‘Afghanistani Women’s Unity Team’.
Their journey, however, remains one of both inspiration and injustice. Despite their international recognition and moral legitimacy, FIFA has yet to officially acknowledge them as Afghanistan’s rightful national team a hesitation many critics interpret as political cowardice in the face of Taliban pressure. Human Rights Watch urged FIFA to take an unequivocal stand on the side of freedom and equality, not with those “who have expelled women from stadiums, classrooms, and society itself.”
Fatema Fouladi, a former player for Afghanistan’s under-19 national team, told RASC News:
“Playing football for my country is an act of defiance a message to every girl in Afghanistan that her voice still matters. My dream is to reunite with my teammates from around the world and to restore what the Taliban tried to destroy.”
Observers say the rebirth of the Afghanistani women’s football team transcends sport. It is a symbolic act of rebellion a challenge to a regime that thrives on fear and silencing women. Their return to the field is an assertion that Afghanistani women will not be written out of their nation’s story.
Human Rights Watch concluded:
“The re-emergence of Afghanistani women on the world’s playing field is a cry of defiance and hope. It sends a message to the Taliban and to the world that oppression can never extinguish courage, and that no regime, however brutal, can suppress the human will to rise again.”
As the world watches, these women do more than play football. They play for a nation’s lost freedom, for every girl banned from school, for every woman silenced by fear transforming every pass, every goal, every step on the field into a powerful act of resistance against one of the darkest chapters in Afghanistani history.
