Afghan ladies soccer gamers flown to UK with Kardashian assist

Members of Afghanistan’s ladies’s youth improvement soccer crew arrived in Britain early Thursday after being flown from Pakistan with the assistance of a New York rabbi, a U.Okay. soccer membership and Kim Kardashian.
A airplane carrying greater than 30 teenage gamers and their households, about 130 individuals in all, landed at Stansted Airport close to London. The Afghans will spend 10 days in coronavirus quarantine earlier than beginning new lives in Britain.

English Premier League membership Leeds United has supplied to help the gamers.
Britain and different international locations evacuated 1000’s of Afghans in a rushed airlift as Kabul fell to Taliban militants in August. Many extra individuals have since left overland for neighbouring international locations in hopes of travelling on to the West.
Women taking part in sports activities was seen as a political act of defiance in opposition to the Taliban, and a whole lot of feminine athletes have left Afghanistan for the reason that group returned to energy and commenced curbing ladies’s training and freedoms.
“The Afghan female footballers are well-known figures in the country. Their lives were in great danger because of people in the country who opposed their activism and wanted to stop their sport and educational activities,” stated Khalida Popal, a former captain of Afghanistan’s nationwide ladies’s crew who has spearheaded evacuation efforts for feminine athletes.
Australia evacuated the members of Afghanistan’s nationwide ladies’s soccer crew, and the youth women’ crew was resettled in Portugal.
Members of the event crew, a lot of whom come from poor households within the nation’s provinces, managed to succeed in Pakistan and ultimately safe U.Okay. visas. But they had been left in limbo for weeks with no flight in a foreign country because the time restrict on their Pakistani visas ticked down.
The crew bought assist from the Tzedek Association, a nonprofit U.S. group that beforehand helped the final recognized member of Kabul’s Jewish neighborhood go away Afghanistan.
The group’s founder, Rabbi Moshe Margaretten, has labored with actuality TV star Kardashian on prison justice reform within the U.S. He reached out to her to assist pay for a chartered airplane to the U.Okay.
“Maybe an hour later, after the Zoom call, I got a text message that Kim wants to fund the entire flight,” Margaretten stated.
Kardashian’s spokeswoman confirmed that the star and her model SKIMs had made the donation.