Nadia Nadim: 'I'm actually the picture of everything the Taliban don't want their women to be'

CNN

By Becky Anderson, Zeena Saifi, Sana Noor Haq and Jack Bantock
via CNN

Nadia Nadim remembers the moment she fell in love with football.

She was in Denmark when she saw some girls kicking a ball around on a field, uninhibited.

"That's the first time I got to see that girls actually did play football at the schools. And right away, I fell in love with the game," the 33-year-old soccer star tells CNN's Becky Anderson.

When she was 11, her father was murdered by the Taliban, and so she was forced to evacuate her birth country of Afghanistan alongside her mother and four sisters.

They fled to Pakistan, before settling in a refugee camp in Denmark.

"My mom sold everything she had. We had found a human smuggler, brought us out to Pakistan. And from Pakistan, with fake passports, we were transported to first, Italy, and then kind of trucked to Denmark," Nadim says.

Publish : 2021-09-11 16:48:00

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