Kim Kardashian and Rabbi Moshe Margaretten, fly Afghan women's youth soccer players to UK
LONDON - Members of Afghanistan’s women’s youth development
soccer team arrived in Britain early Thursday after being flown from Pakistan
with the help of a New York rabbi, a U.K. soccer club and Kim Kardashian West.
A plane chartered by the reality star and carrying more than
30 teenage players and their families, about 130 people in all, landed at
Stansted Airport near London. The Afghans will spend 10 days in coronavirus
quarantine before starting new lives in Britain.
English Premier League club Leeds United has offered to
support the players.
Britain and other countries evacuated thousands of Afghans
in a rushed airlift as Kabul fell to Taliban militants in August. Many more
people have since left overland for neighboring countries in hopes of traveling
on to the West.
Women playing sports was seen as a political act of defiance
against the Taliban, and hundreds of female athletes have left Afghanistan
since the group returned to power and began curbing women’s education and
freedoms.
Khalida Popal, a former captain of Afghanistan’s national
women’s team who has spearheaded evacuation efforts for female athletes, said
she felt "so happy and so relieved" that the girls and women were out
of danger.
"Many of those families left their houses when the
Taliban took over. Their houses were burnt down," Popal told the
Associated Press. "Some of their family members were killed or taken by
Taliban. So the danger and the stress was very high, and that’s why it was very
important to move fast to get them outside Afghanistan."
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 poor
families in the country's provinces, managed to reach Pakistan and eventually
to secure U.K. visas. But they were left in limbo for weeks with no flight out
of the country as the time limit on their Pakistani visas ticked down.
The team got help from the Tzedek Association, a nonprofit
U.S. 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 U.S. He
reached out to her to help pay for a chartered plane to the U.K.
"Maybe an hour later, after the Zoom call, I got a text
message that Kim wants to fund the entire flight," Margaretten said.
Kardashian West’s spokeswoman confirmed that the star and
her brand SKIMs had chartered the flight.
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