Zakia Khudadadi just won the first ever medal for the Refugee Paralympic Team, and she did it for Afghan women. Khudadadi, a Taekwondo fighter, won Bronze in Paris.
Khudadadi fled her native Kabul in 2021 after the Taliban recaptured Afghanistan's capital city. Initially, CNN reports that Khudadadi was in hiding from the Taliban, forced to pause her training for the 2021 Tokyo Paralympics. When she was able to leave the country, she went to Tokyo to compete for the country she'd just fled. Khudadadi now calls Paris home, but she told CNN before the Paris Games that she was competing with the Refugee Team to show Afghan women they are strong.
“This is a chance to inspire,” she told CNN. “To show women and girls that they are more than they’re made [to] feel by the Taliban. To show that the women of Afghanistan are strong and can achieve great things.”
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Just a week before Khudadadi's win at the Paralympics 2024, the Taliban banned the sound of women's voices in public in Afghanistan, mandating that they cover themselves from head to toe and avoid speaking, reading, or singing in public. This came along with a list of other restrictions, according to the Associated Press.
Previously, women have been blocked from education, banned from universities, and had “virtually every aspect” of their human rights violated, according to the Human Rights Watch, leading to what many agree is "the most serious women’s rights crisis in the world."
“This means more to me than I am able to describe. I am competing for a cause bigger than myself," Khudadadi told CNN before her win. "I am here to battle for Afghan women and to show that even in the face of war, that we are strong and cannot be silenced.”
We stand with the women of Afganistan.
At the Olympics, Manizha Talash, a breakdancer competing for the Refugee Team, was disqualified for wearing a cape made from a burqa that said “Free Afghan Women.” Political statements by athletes are banned at the Olympics, but Talash argues her cape was “a statement about basic human rights.”
“With the fabric of this burqa that represents so much, I want to show the girls back home that even in the most difficult circumstances, they have the strength to transform things,” she wrote in a statement, according to Dazed. “From a burqa they can make wings. If they are in a cocoon, one day soon they can fly.”
Khudadadi is no stranger to making history. According to the Associated Press, her performance in Tokyo in 2021 made her the first woman to compete internationally after the Taliban takeover. Her appearance at those Games was made possible by a video she made that went viral. With her rights stripped by the Taliban, she said she didn't want her right to compete to be taken away as well.
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“Please, I urge you all, from the women around the globe, institutions for the protection of women, from all government organisations, to not let the rights of a female citizen of Afghanistan in the Paralympic movement to be taken away, so easily,” she said. “I don’t want my struggle to be in vain.”
This article originally appeared on Teen Vogue.
