The Afghan girl who led her cricket team's escape
An 18-year-old Benafsha Hashimi showed many fellow cricketers the way out of Afghanistan.
What if today’s most astonishing story out of Afghanistan cricket is not about white-ball success or left-arm wrist spinners? But instead features a 5ft tall teenage cricketer covered from head to toe on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, arguing with a Taliban border guard carrying a machine gun and, what she truly feared, a whip.
“We’re not afraid of guns or bombs, we’ve grown up with them. But flogging – it is merciless, vicious,” says Benafsha Hashimi. In the early hours of a September 2021 morning, she was showing her border pass to the Talib, brother Hamid at her side, the two most fluent Urdu speakers of their family. “The Talib was on the edge. He asked Hamid, who is the man here, who has given girls the right to talk that you have given this one. She should be quiet, stand aside.”
That night, Benafsha was the first of the Afghan women’s cricket team trying to escape the Taliban. Fourth among eight children of an Afghan special forces soldier’s widow, she had become the women cricketers’ point person in Kabul. At 18 she was one of their youngest players but took charge of collating information and paperwork and sharing it with a group of Australian social workers and rights activists.
After the Taliban takeover in August 21, Benafsha says she had many opportunities to get to the US, Canada, Dubai or Pakistan with just her family. “But you know how they say one person doesn’t make a team. I had spent so much time with these girls, how could I leave them?” Only perhaps teenage idealism can make the impossible a priority. When the Aussies first reached Benafsha, they weren’t promising to get the whole team out. “It had to be all of us. When I said I love my team they said, is it possible to get everyone over at once? It had to be step by step. In total secrecy”
The moment she got the signal to move, the girl called ‘choti shaitan’ (little devil) confiscated all her family’s phones. No talking to anyone. Her group was first on the road, leaving home at 3 am, (“I was crying, we left like thieves”), three more cricketers’ families following. Throughout the journey, she texted updates and warnings about the 15 or so check points ahead. Every checkpoint was told that the convoy was going to a wedding in Nangarhar before they reached the border. Failing to convince that angry Talib could ruin the entire evacuation. “I said I will sit here until you let us through.”
For a long time, I only knew Benafsha through WhatsApp voice notes. At its saddest, it was small, low, defeated after the arrival of the Taliban in August 2021, wrapped in panic and fear. It was hard to imagine that voice against the Talib. But when talking about other stuff – how cricket moves her, her love for her team, what she thought of the treatment of Afghan women – I remembered the voice became flinty, certain, unyielding.
Benafsha began playing cricket aged five and inspired by Hamid Hassan’s success, refused to stop when told that she couldn’t play in the streets anymore. Pestered the Afghan women’s cricket manager with daily calls to check when women’s practice would begin. Ignored the guards at the stadium mocking her for landing up hours early.
At the border that night, her brothers took over, and when they finally got through, “I was in shock, I didn’t know what would happen after that.” There were cars waiting to take them to Peshawar and on to Islamabad the next day. Then after a fortnight or so, onto an Australian military aircraft to Dubai, finally landing in Australia on October 8.
The Aussies who worked around the clock for the Afghan women’s cricketers prefer anonymity. The exact number of women cricketers and families that escaped out of Afghanistan thanks to the efforts of Benafsha & friends is not clear. Except an ABC news story said that 22 of the total 25 contracted women cricketers who had escaped to Pakistan were granted emergency visas to Australia. The number would have to be more than a hundred. Benafsha said, “I did what I had to do, I tried my best – I was just the bridge.”
The women are now based in Canberra and Melbourne. Last season, Benafsha played for Tuggeranong Valley Cricket Club, travelled to Fiji with Cricket Without Borders and took the Governor General’s wicket. “When I’m playing cricket, I forget everything.” But not what came out of the ICC’s March Board meeting which raised the Afghanistan Cricket Board’s budget but made no specific comments about their women. “I fell sick. Girls have been playing from 2014, they made a team then, Afghanistan ruined the team, again we built a team and now they are saying there is no team? If it is a crime to be born a girl, then say so openly.”
Responding to the Hindustan Times, an ICC spokesperson replied, “The relationship with players in any of the ICC’s Member countries is managed by the Board in that country, the ICC does not get involved. Similarly, the authority to field men’s and women’s national teams lies solely with the Member Board in any country, not with the ICC.”
Dr Catherine Ordway, associate professor, sports integrity research lead, University of Canberra, is not impressed. “The ICC can start by providing transparency on where the money has been - and will be - spent when funding member organisations. In the case of the ACB, where women were forced to flee their homeland to survive… [in a country] where women’s sport, women’s education and women’s participation in public life is banned, then how is funding the ACB acceptable?”
The Afghan women are enraged that the ACB has ghosted them: Tracey Holmes reported on ABC, that during a November 2022 visit by ACB officials before the men’s T20 World Cup, an unnamed Afghan woman cricketer tracked down chairman Mirwais Ashraf to a restaurant but, “when I got there, he got into his car and left.”
Benafsha says she is heavy-hearted because Afghan women have risked their lives for cricket. Unknown callers threatened Benafsha and her younger sister. She says kids along one route taken by the women players had been asked to pelt the cricketers with stones, so much that they opted for a longer route. They were regularly heckled as spoilt, dirty, damaged women.
“Everyone says the men have made Afghan cricket. Excuse me – you supported them, you gave them pay, they went ahead….” To get her teammates out of the Taliban’s clutches, Benafsha Hashimi didn’t weigh the consequences of the risk she was taking and doesn’t do so now. “Truth bolne main (In speaking the truth), I don’t care.”
THIS IS WHAT HAPPENED...AT THE BORDER ALSO...
Then the phone rang, its ringtone belting out a Farsi love song quite a rage in Kabul. Sending the Talib into a paroxysm of horror, shouting Astaghfirullah , seeking forgiveness for God for this heresy. Hamid stabbed at the phone with shaking fingers, trying to cut the music, muttering under his breath, “I’m going to die, we’re all going to die…” It was Benafsha’s teammate Shaziya in the cars behind the road telling her she had sent across a document that was needed.
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