'Delete Photos, Burn Kits': Ex-Afghanistan Women's Captain Khalida Popal Tells Footballers - Watch Video

Khalida Popal urged sportswomen to delete their social media accounts, erase their social identity and burn their kits to protect them from Taliban.

Ex-Afghanistan Women's Captain Khalida Popal, Photo Courtesy: Getty Images

New Delhi: Afghanistan is currently facing a huge crisis. The country was taken over by the Taliban just two weeks before the United States (US) was ready to withdraw its troops after almost a two-decade war. Pictures and videos of bloodshed in Afghanistan surface every day. People are forced to flee their homeland due to the fear of terrorists. Post the dreaded Taliban takeover, everything in Afghanistan has come to a standstill.

Meanwhile, Khalida Popal, former high-profile captain of the Afghanistan women's football team, who once inspired her country's young girls to take up sports, has come up with a shocking appeal. Speaking from Copenhagen, Khalida urged sportswomen to delete their social media accounts, erase their social identity and burn their kits to protect them from Taliban.

“Today I’m calling them and telling them, take down their names, remove their identities, take down their photos for their safety. Even I’m telling them to burn down or get rid of your national team uniform,” she told Reuters.

“And that is painful for me, for someone as an activist who stood up and did everything possible to achieve and earn that identity as a women’s national team player. To earn that badge on the chest, to have the right to play and represent our country, how much we were proud.”

In 2016, Popal, who was then the event director of the Afghanistan's women's football association, had fled Afghanistan and sought asylum in Denmark after she received death threats for speaking against Taliban on national television.

"(Women) are like a hand. If we are standing up as an individual, as in one finger, it is not strong enough. If it is two fingers, it is not strong enough," she told the AFP. "We have to be together like a punch. And if anyone stands in our way, to be like a punch in their face."