By Ellaha Rasa
Zakia Khudadadi has won medals and accolades since fleeing Afghanistan two years ago, but these days her sights are set on only one goal – the 2024 Paris Olympics.
Since her childhood, she has dreamed of standing on the podium as the first female Afghan Para taekwondo athlete. That dream looks finally within reach.
This month, the para taekwondo athlete clinched gold in the 47kg weight division at the European Para Championships in the Netherland’s city of Rotterdam. The path to victory has not been smooth, but Khudadadi embraces it. The only thing she wishes she could change is the fact she cannot represent Afghanistan. She competes under the Refugee Paralympic Team, a collective of exiled athletes from around the world. They have a communal symbol on the shared flag.
“When I was going to the podium and I had won the gold medal for the first time, I was really overwhelmed and sobbed because I was a refugee and both my country and I didn’t have a flag,” she says in an interview with Rukhshana Media.
Since being evacuated from Afghanistan and going straight to the Tokyo 2020 Olympics in August two years ago, Khudadadi has also competed at the World Para Grand Prix in 2022, although she failed to place, and the World Taekwondo Presidents Cup in Albania, where she gained a silver medal. Years earlier she won the 2016 African International Parataekwondo Championship held in Egypt.
Khudadadi later posted on X, formerly Twitter, that she dedicated her European Championship gold to the “brave girls and women of Afghanistan.” Afghans around the world celebrated her win.
Shahrzad Akbar, the former head of the Human Rights Commission of Afghanistan, posted on X calling Zakia’s heroism on the eve of the second-year anniversary of the fall of Kabul to the Taliban, a hopeful message of the infinite capacity and invincibility of Afghan women.
Hamid Karzai, the former Afghan president, praised Zakia’s efforts in a post on X and congratulated her for the win.
Users on social media widely shared a poem in her honour that loosely translates to mean, “Whatever they axed from you, it did not wound, it sprouted!” Which may be a reference to all the challenges and upheaval she has had to overcome in forging her path as an athlete.
Some users added the hashtag #StopHazaraGenocide to their posts in her honour, pointing to her ethnicity.
As X user Adalat Hasan Ali explained the use of the hashtag in a post: “The Hazara diaspora community, which has survived the systematic discrimination and genocide, shines in various fields and stands tall, #StopHazaraGenocide”.
With women in Afghanistan banned by the Taliban from all sporting professions and games, even for recreational purposes if in public, Khudadadi now lives and trains in France.
Zakiya Khudadadii/photo: submitted to Rukhshana media.
She says that it was a difficult task as a girl in Afghanistan to focus on sports as a profession in the highly conservative society. According to many, it was not “appropriate” for a girl to become an athlete; But with her family’s encouragement especially her mother, she entered the Ariana Club in Jibrail neighborhood of Herat at only seven years old,.
“Thanks to my enlightened family who believed that a woman can study and work in the society like a man, I was able to continue my sports in Herat,” she says.
Her first coach was Yaqub Dawlatyar, whom she still considers her main motivation. She stayed and trained for ten years at Ariana Sports Club.
Recalling the first days of her entry into para taekwondo, Khudadadi recalls how she was mocked and insulted for her disability. She has only one functional arm. “I have passed many problems and challenges. People used to insult me, “You’re disabled! What is sports and training for what? You should be at home. You don’t have the right to practice’.”
Khudadadi says a key goal for her is to prove that, “Disability is not a limitation and people with physical disabilities can exercise alongside healthy people.”
The mean-spirited comments have affected her over the years, and she admits to sometimes feeling her spirit weaken in the face of them, crying alone in her room. But she was never broken and she never gave up.
When the Taliban took control of Afghanistan on August 15, 2021, Khudadadi was also a second-year law student at a private educational institution. But with the Taliban’s ban on girls and women getting an education beyond grade six, those plans were put on hold.
She was evacuated just days after Kabul fell to the extremist group after spending two days at Kabul airport amid the crush and chaos of people desperate to get on one of the evacuation flights out. “Those terrible days and unforgettable nightmares are in my mind when I was looking for a way to enter the airport from one gate to another. With the help of Australian and French soldiers, I entered the airport and left the country on an American military plane.”
After leaving Afghanistan, Khudadadi went straight to the Tokyo Paralympics and became only the second female Afghan to participate in a Paralympic Games. Sprinter Mareena Karim was the first after competing in the Athens 2004 Paralympics.
But Khudadadi was not in the headspace to compete.
“Afghanistan had collapsed and my family still lived in Herat under the Taliban’s rule,” she says. “I entered that tournament in a bad state of mind. I fought two matches, but I was unsuccessful.”
Since the Taliban takeover, female athletes in Afghanistan have had to stop training and competing. Ahmadullah Wasiq, the deputy of the Taliban Cultural Commission, called women’s sports an “inappropriate” activity in an interview with an Australian media on September 8, 2021.
Mr Wasiq said women are not allowed to play cricket. “In cricket, they will probably be in a situation where their faces and bodies will not be covered. Islam does not want women to be seen like this.”
Drawing from her own experience of overcoming great challenges, Khudadadi encouraged girls and women to stay strong and not give under the heavy fist of Taliban rule.
“Because of Taliban restrictions, the life of women and girls under their rule is difficult. But the world has understood that the women and girls of Afghanistan are stronger than these words and I am sure that this situation will change,” she says.
She also called on the international community not to give the Taliban diplomatic recognition.
“I do not accept the Taliban, and I ask the international community not to recognize them too,” she says.
