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.
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.
