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Andrew Feinberg
White Home Correspondent
“Wh***”, “Prostitute”, “Sl**”. Taekwondo champion Marzieh Hamidi has come to anticipate this sort of language, ready to greet her at any time when she opens social media, after two years of advocating for the rights of Afghan ladies and criticising the nation’s misogynist Taliban regime.
When she competed at this summer time’s Paris Olympics as a part of the worldwide refugee group, Hamidi spoke about her dream of profitable a medal “for all Afghan ladies” and of her ache at seeing her nation taken over by an Islamist militant group that has imposed restrictions on virtually each facet of ladies’s lives.
The Taliban revealed its first detailed set of written legal guidelines final week, that includes a authorized requirement for girls to cowl their total our bodies, together with faces, when stepping out of the house. Girls are additionally banned from studying, singing, or talking in public.
Hamidi anticipated the same old response from Taliban supporters when she criticised these legal guidelines in a media interview. What she didn’t foresee was the brand new torrent of abuse she obtained for suggesting that the nation’s profitable males’s cricket group ought to do extra to sentence the abuse of ladies in Afghanistan, after captain Rashid Khan was pictured assembly with members of the highly effective Taliban-linked Haqqani household.
The backlash was rapid. “They’re sending me photos of their personal components, threatening to hunt me down and rape me. They are saying they’re ready in mattress for me and ship me emoji of a pregnant woman. In one of many pictures, the place I’m sporting a prime, they inform me they are going to reduce my nipples and different physique components.”
Hamidi took concern with members of the Afghan cricket group assembly with and being congratulated by Taliban leaders after their robust efficiency on the T20 World Cup in June this yr. It isn’t the primary time members of the group or the nation’s cricketing board have met with Taliban officers, with senior gamers beforehand responding to the backlash by saying they “don’t need politics introduced into sports activities”.
Pictures have proven Khan within the firm of Anas Haqqani – a frontrunner within the hardline Islamist authorities and brother of Sirajuddin Haqqani, a senior Taliban minister who’s topic to a $10m (£7.6m) bounty from the US State Division. The Impartial has approached Khan’s representatives for remark.
Followers of Khan and the Afghan cricket group began flooding Hamidi’s inbox with “d*** pics”, she tells The Impartial over a video name from France, the place she was granted asylum after the autumn of Kabul in August 2021. “I often don’t test my DMs, they’re full of trashy messages from Taliban supporters.”
The Impartial has seen examples of the dying and rape threats made to Hamidi, together with graphic photos, and lots of warn her to “by no means communicate once more”. “However I’m used to those d*** pics ever since I began speaking about liberating Afghan ladies from the Taliban’s clutches. I obtain them ceaselessly, however the tipping level was greater than a thousand risk calls from unknown numbers after the interview ,” she says.
“I couldn’t contact or use my telephone. I disconnected a name after which one other got here and one other, all telling me how dare I say something about Rashid Khan and the Taliban,” she says.
At 22, Hamidi describes herself because the Taliban’s nightmare personified; a assured and impartial girl, donning vibrant garments, leaving her hair uncovered and – most significantly – making her voice heard.
She began the hashtag #LetUsExist in solidarity together with her mates and sisters again residence final week after the Taliban issued its decree banning ladies’s voices from being heard outdoors their houses, the most recent in a protracted sequence of dystopian guidelines.
She estimates that when she wakened on Sunday, there have been shut to three,000 calls and messages from unknown numbers on her telephone. Hamidi says she went to the police and handed over the machine, and an investigation was launched on Tuesday over any dying threats obtained from cricket followers in France, in addition to the leaking of her personal telephone quantity.
“I needed to get a brand new quantity and the police have given me a bodyguard now, in case of any bodily assault on me in France,” she says, including that her household have been bodily focused in Germany. An unknown man stopped Hamidi’s father this week and requested her why he had allowed his daughter to “put on such garments” and “discuss Afghanistan”. Her mom and sister made rushed calls and requested her if she needed to “proceed doing this”.
“This [suits] the terrorists in Afghanistan, the Taliban. They wish to see me silenced and useless. I’ll by no means cease speaking about how they’ve written off ladies from Afghanistan, declared them lacking and unvoiced,” Hamidi says. “They’re no person to inform me the way to costume and the way to discuss.”
