On the morning of August 15, 2021, Fatima Yousufi was lacing up her runners, getting ready for soccer training, when one of her teammates came banging on her door. “She was yelling, ‘Have you heard what’s happened? The Taliban has arrived’,” Fatima recalls.
The 18-year-old instantly knew what she had to do. She dug a hole in the front yard of her family’s Kabul home and buried her soccer uniform, trophies and any trace of her involvement with the Afghanistan Women’s National Football Team.
“We had to hide our identity, hide anything that was related to the club or had our names on it.
We were advised to burn our uniforms, but I couldn’t bring myself to burn them, so I buried them. I felt that if I burned them, I was burning my memories.”
That morning, the world watched in horror as Taliban soldiers swept into Afghanistan’s capital, Kabul, mercilessly shooting anyone in their path.
For two decades, US Forces and their allies had
