‘We Are Ayenda’, the WhatsApp documentary telling the courageous story of the Afghan Youth Women’s National Football team

Words and interview by Mariam Khan, edited by AZEEMA

17 year old Fatema Erfani is a player on the Afghan Youth Women’s National Football team, who fled Afghanistan with the help of the women’s national football team’s former captain and activist Farkhunda Muhtaj. Farkhunda, 25, is an Afghan-Canadian UNHCR youth ambassador who currently plays as a midfielder with the Dutch club Fortuna Sittard. To date, she has helped over 300 Afghan football players and their families escape Afghanistan. Farkhunda is currently coaching the girls she helped escape, who have renamed their team to ‘Team Ayenda’ [Ayenda F.C.] - the word for future in Dari. The team includes some of Afghanistan’s most talented young players. In an exclusive interview, I spoke to both players about their journeys, including the recent half-hour documentary by WhatsApp titled ‘We Are Ayenda’. The documentary recreates the realities of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, through the eyes of the Afghan Youth Women’s National Football team.

Farkhunda is currently based in Holland and Fatema now in Portugal. Their first conversation took place over WhatsApp in August 2021 as the Taliban, an Islamic fundamentalist group founded in the early 90’s, took control of the country. The Taliban previously ruled Afghanistan from 1996 until 2001, before the US invasion. After two decades of devastation, the US and the Taliban signed a peace agreement to end the war in 2020, known as the Doha agreement. After the US withdrew in 2021, the Taliban returned to power. They have since restricted women’s rights, limited communication, cracked down on public protests and resumed public floggings and executions. 

Many female athletes in Afghanistan feared the Taliban would not accept their public positions, as the freedom of women has diminished since the US withdrawal. Thousands have fled the country as they, like Fatema, were unwilling to give up their passion under the Taliban’s rule. Fears were confirmed in October 2021, when Mahjabin Hakimi, a member of the Afghanistan women's youth volleyball team, was reportedly beheaded in Kabul.
One could argue that the US presence in Afghanistan allowed women to be more present in certain parts of public life - I personally wouldn’t argue this - but it would be delusional to believe that the involvement of Afghan women in public life or their empowermenthas come from Western intervention. There is a rich tapestry ofpowerfulwomen across Afghan history, for example Nazo Tokhi who fought for her tribe's independence, or Queen Soraya Tarzi who played a hand in opening the first girls school in the country. The fight for Afghan women’s rights and freedom didn’t begin with Western intervention and has certainly not ended now that the US and NATO have withdrawn. Afghan women have remained dedicated to their own empowerment and repeatedly found opportunities to succeed against the odds - Fatema, Farkhunda and Ayenda F.C’s stories are examples of this.

Fatema, who is currently in school and has recently selected her modules for the coming academic year, including Psychology and Art, states that she wants to either go to an Arts school or study Criminology. Whilst studying, Fatema is training three times a week, including games on the weekend. During our conversation, she mentions that one of her teammates has moved to a nearby neighbourhood, “I'm very excited because we're both so passionate about football. We’re pushing each other to train even when we're not feeling it. We're just trying to push each other to train harder because we have big goals and we want to reach it together”.

Farkhunda, who was contacted by the Afghan Football Federation (AFF) for help, was immediately added to a WhatsApp group. While unsure of how she could help, she was proactive from the get-go, reassuring the girls in Kabul that she would do as much as she could to help them. “I first started calling humanitarian lawyers and organisations within Canada to see if they can help. Sadly, everyone was very apologetic, they were like ‘you know, this is the reality’…”. As Farkhunda continued her own research, she got a call from a friend, “One of my good friends, Katayoun Khosrowyar - she's a former Iranian national team head coach - happened to call me”. Katayoun was able to connect Farkhunda to US intelligence officers to help evacuate the players. In the days after the phone call with her friend, Farkhunda found herself in Zoom meetings with those US intelligence officers. 

Throughout the documentary Farkhunda is seen instructing Fatema and her teammates to Kabul airport, in an attempt to escape their homeland as Kabul collapses around them. Their first two attempts to access the airport fail, leading the 25 girls and their families to a safe house where they remain for 21 days before the third and final successful attempt.
Fatema, who was 15 years old at the time, addedthat it would have been impossible to convince her parents to follow Farkhunda’s instructions via WhatsApp, so she told her parents that FIFA were the ones navigating the entire mission. "I told my family that this is FIFA trying to help us for them to believe it [...] I was very young at that time”. She continues, “Now I think about it and I'm like, how did I do that? But at that time I was in survival mode, so I thought ‘I'm going to do everything that it takes for me to save myself and my family’. I thought if there is someone that’s trying to help, I’m going to go with that. It was hard. I was feeling the source of responsibility towards my family. Because if anything went wrong, I was responsible, and I would have never forgiven myself for putting my family's life in danger. I'm glad it worked out. I'm glad that my family trusted me”.

While Fatema’s parents were ready to believe her FIFA story even for a short while, FIFA are still unwilling to support the Afghan national team. Despite international pressure from bipartisan law makers, activists, and organisations, FIFA has so far ignored pleas to recognise Afghanistan’s exiled women’s football team. Without FIFA recognition, the Afghan team can’t access funding, represent their own countries or compete in professional matches. 

Along with being a professional footballer and coach to Team Ayenda, Farkhunda is also lobbying for her sport both in her country and outside as a social activist. She spoke of a campaign led by the AFF which she supported to get the women’s national team running again. However, despite the campaign being made public and content being shared across different social media channels including her own, they were forced to delete their posts. 

“I was actually in very close contact with the AFF in order to get the women's national team running. We got very close. We had campaigns go out on our social platforms. We were connected to FIFA in order to make this happen. However, as soon as it became public, the Taliban forced the Football Federation to delete everything and placed a lot of pressure on them. There were [otherwise] going to be a lot of safety issues that arose from it. Afterwards the idea of us getting back onto the pitch kind of deteriorated”.

Farkhunda continues, “I do believe that FIFA has a responsibility to intervene and make sure that we can return to the sport safely, whether that's through the Football Federation, or through another mechanism that will allow us to have funding to operate…Of course, we are very frustrated that the Women's World Cup is going on, yet there's nations like us that can't even kick a ball [participate]. And it's not because we don't have a national team, it's because of the restrictions within our country”.

In a letter to the nations competing in the Men’s World Cup in 2022, FIFA's president Gianni Infantino and secretary general Fatma Samoura wrote, “Please do not allow football to be dragged into every ideological or political battle that exists”. Call me a pessimist, but I don’t think FIFA will embroil itself in the politics of supporting the Afghan National Football team any time soon. Whilst representation is important and necessary, especially when opposing the tyranny the Taliban has imposed on women representing Afghanistan inside and outside the country, when representation doesn’t come easy, it’s often ignored. Even until this very day, FIFA has not publicly acknowledged the Afghan National Football team despite their trials. 

Asking both players what football and representing their country means to them, Farkhunda expressed, “Representing Afghanistan has always been more than football. For me, it's been about changing gender norms, shifting ideologies, really pushing gender equality and women's rights issues. It’s showing young ladies that they are capable of doing so much. We want to be role models for them. I believe that the Afghanistan women's national team really led other female athletes to create their own national teams or national programmes. I would say playing for Afghanistan has always been bigger than ourselves. It's been for our people and to bring pride to the nation”.

Speaking to Fatema about representation, she explains that representing Afghanistan is like showing another side to the country, one which involves sport. “I don't want them [people] to think that Afghanistan is just about war. I think that people have a very negative view of women and people in Afghanistan”. 

Both women are currently practising the sport that they love and have fought hard for, with Fatema currently training to join another club and Farkhunda playing professionally in Holland. Although the talent amidst these players will never cease to exist, the future of female footballers in Afghanistan remains unknown. Under the Taliban rule, women and their presence in sports will continue to be seen as an act of disobedience and rebellion, a place in society where women are not supposed to be. Despite this, we’re hopeful that the actions of courageous women like Farkhunda and Fatema will someday inspire change to take place.  

‘We Are Ayenda’ was released on August 2nd, produced by Anonymous Content and Whatsapp, and directed by award-winning Lebanese-Canadian documentary filmmaker Amber Fares. The documentary is available to watch on Prime Video.