Earlier on Thursday, members of Afghanistan’s women’s youth development soccer team arrived in Britain. The team members were flown from Pakistan with the assistance from a New York rabbi, a UK soccer club and the reality star Kim Kardashian West.
A charter plane offered by Kim Kardashian carried more than 30 teenage female players along with their families making a total of 130 people who landed at the Stansted Airport. The players and their families will spend 10 days in quarantine due to COVID-19 and will then begin their news lives in Britain.
English Premier League club Leeds United also offered to support the players through the process.
Britain and other countries evacuated thousands of Afghans in a rushed airlift as Taliban took over the Afghan capital, Kabul in August. Many more people have since left their home country, Afghanistan for neighbouring countries in hopes of traveling to the West.
In Afghanistan, women who participated in sports were seen as a political act of defiance against the Taliban, and hundreds of female athletes have left Afghanistan since Taliban returned to power.
Khalida Popal, a former captain of Afghanistan’s national women’s team who also spearheaded the evacuation efforts for female athletes, said she felt “so happy and so relieved” that the girls and women were finally out of danger.
Australia evacuated the members of Afghanistan’s national women’s soccer team, and the youth girls’ team was resettled in Portugal.
Members of the development team, many of whom come from underprivileged backgrounds managed to reach Pakistan in the hopes of eventually securing visas to UK.
The team got help from the Tzedek Association which is a nonprofit US group that previously helped the last known member of Kabul’s Jewish community leave Afghanistan.
The group’s founder, Rabbi Moshe Margaretten, has worked with reality TV star Kardashian West on criminal justice reform in the US. He reached out to her to help pay for a chartered plane to the UK.
Margaretten said,“Maybe an hour later, after the Zoom call, I got a text message that Kim wants to fund the entire flight”.
Kardashian West’s spokeswoman confirmed that the star and her brand SKIMs had chartered the flight.
