India should not support Afghan cricket team at the cost of Afghan women, normalising Taliban, says exiled sportswoman

Olympics athlete Marzieh Hamidi fled from Afghanistan in 2021 after the Taliban regime took over
| Photo Credit: Special arrangement

Even as the Afghan cricket team wins accolades for its performance in the ICC Champion’s Cup Trophy in Pakistan, 22-year-old Olympics athlete Marzieh Hamidi faces death threats for calling for a boycott against the team. Ms. Hamidi, who fled from Afghanistan in 2021 after the Taliban regime took over, says the ICC must enforce its rule against recognising cricketing countries that don’t have both men’s and women’s teams. In addition, she says that teams promoted by the Taliban should be boycotted, as South African teams once were, given that the Taliban regime practices “gender apartheid”, banning women and girls from education, sports, and all outdoor activities. 

Speaking to The Hindu on the sidelines of the Herat Security Dialogue held in Madrid, where she gave a speech about her campaign called ‘Let Us Exist’, Ms. Hamidi, a taekwondo champion who was Afghanistan’s flag-bearer at the Tokyo Olympics in 2020, now lives with police protection in France.

“When I spoke out against the Afghan cricket team, their fans first attacked me on social media,” she said, describing how within days she received more than 5,000 phone calls and messages with death threats and rape threats after she was ‘doxxed’ (had all her personal information leaked over the Internet) in September 2024.  “All I said was that the Taliban is not recognised, and that the team must not be allowed to normalise them by competing in international sport,” Ms. Hamidi said.

In Pakistan, where his team won a thrilling match against England on February 26, Afghanistan captain Hashmatullah Shahidi said he supported the women’s team’s right to play, but the situation was beyond their control.

“We are sportspersons. We control what we can do inside the ground, and we can’t worry about what’s happening out of the ground,” Mr. Shahidi told The Hindu. “Everyone likes to see everyone play. When it comes to politics and those things which we cannot control, we are only cricket players, we can control things on the ground,” he added. 

Although both the English and Australian teams have played matches with Mr. Shahidi’s team at the ICC tournament in Pakistan, their boards have called on the ICC to review its recognition of the team. In 2024, Cricket Australia cancelled a T20 series against Afghanistan citing a “deteriorating human rights situation for women and girls”. In January this year, after 160 British MPs signed a petition calling for their team to boycott the game on February 26, U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer said that the ICC “should clearly deliver on their own rules and make sure that they (the Afghanistan Cricket Board) are supporting women’s cricket as the England Cricket Board does”.  

Several boards have also suggested that the ICC consider recognising the 2020 Afghan women’s team, who are now refugees and reunited in Melbourne for a match on January 30 this year.

ICC President Jay Shah, however, overruled the objections. In statements to Reuters and the BBC, Mr. Shah said that the ICC was “reviewing certain communications concerning Afghanistan women’s cricket and exploring how they can be supported within ICC’s legal and constitutional framework”, and would continue to engage the Afghanistan Cricket Board on the issue.

The decision was a disappointment, said Ms. Hamidi, who is now training for the Los Angeles Olympics in 2028, but is uncertain about the future, given the threats over her boycott calls. She said India has a particular responsibility to ensure justice for women in sports in Afghanistan, given the role played by India in training the Afghan team from its start in 2001; BCCI’s support in the Afghanistan Cricket Board gaining recognition; and in providing a home ground in Dehradun when the fighting between Taliban and Afghan national forces made it difficult to play in their country.

“It was wonderful that India helped build the team of its neighbour, of Afghanistan. But supporting it today comes at a cost — they [the Afghan cricketers] are normalising a group of terrorists. It isn’t just gender apartheid that is a problem in Afghanistan; the treatment of all Afghans by the Taliban is a problem,” she told The Hindu.

When asked how she focuses on her training, Ms. Hamidi said she has learnt to roll with the punches. Born to an Afghan refugee family living in Iran in 2002, she moved between Iran and Afghanistan throughout her childhood. In 2020, she moved back to Kabul and pursued her Taekwondo skills, representing her country at international championships until the Taliban took control of Afghanistan in August 2021. “It was a choice between silence and exile,” she says of her decision to flee to France.

(With inputs from Shayan Acharya, Lahore)