“It’s really impossible to control your tears,” said Nilofar Bayat, captain of the women’s wheelchair basketball team in Afghanistan, narrating her journey escaping the capital Kabul.
When the Taliban fiercely captured Afghanistan reaching the heart of Kabul, women’s rights activist and captain of Afghanistan’s wheelchair basketball team Nilofar Bayat and her husband Ramish bet on their lives to flee the country.
To get away from the shootings and attacks of Taliban, Bayat and her husband remained for 2 days in the airport of Kabul eagerly waiting for an evacuation flight.
“The Taliban were shooting around; they were beating us. They were beating Ramesh and me,” she said speaking to reporters in the northern city of Bilbao, days after arriving on a Spanish military plane. “I was scared a lot,” she added.
During her interview, the 28-year-old athlete spoke with a scrambling tone emphasizing how the Taliban were able to quickly sweep over the country as the US military left.
Having complete control over the city, the Taliban did not only pack Afghans with terror but also shot and beat people to stop them from reaching the airport.
In the late 1990s, activist Bayat and her family happened to be victims of the Taliban. When she was two years old, a rocket hit her family home causing the death of her brother and an injury in her spinal cord.
Now in 2021, scenes are recreating themselves but with Bayat’s victory. “In all this time the bad memories I have are about Taliban because they came, they changed my life,” Bayat said. “They came and put a non-stoppable pin in our life, a permanent disability that we will have our whole life.”
To Bayat, women are put on mute in Afghanistan. Recounting her victorious journey as one of the luckiest Afghans who could escape the terror happening in the country, she talked on the behalf of women stating: “Being a woman in Taliban regime means nothing. You are not part of the society. You can just stay at home and do nothing.”
Her loved ones, family and the people who could not scamper the attacked Afghan territory constitute as well a part of Bayat’s worries. When speaking to the Spanish media in Bilbao, the captain expressed her sincere wishes for the UN and all countries to help Afghanistan.
“The Taliban are the same as they were 20 years ago,” said Nilofar Bayat in the same interview.
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