'I want to show the Taliban that refugees are not weak'

Forced to flee Kabul, taekwondo fighter Marzieh Hamidi talks about the challenges she faces in Paris as she prepares for the world championships in Azerbaijan.

- Arpan Rai

Her high front kick could easily take down an opponent and win her a medal in any championship. But in Afghanistan, taekwondo champion Marzieh Hamidi has been sex-shamed by the Taliban and driven out of her homeland.

“Many men in Taliban’s Afghanistan have been led to believe women cannot be champions. When I open my legs high up for training, they say ‘you lost your virginity, you’re bad’,” says Hamidi, who represented her country’s national team before the Taliban took over.

“This is violence for me. It doesn’t have to be a slap on my face. This is enough violence and destruction for my brain,” she tells The Independent.

The 21-year-old, who fled Afghanistan after the Taliban stormed to power, says anger has been brewing like a storm inside her chest since August 2021 and her kicks and punches are now fuelled by that aggression and rage.

Taliban fighters were in the streets outside her house in Kabul’s Karte Char, she says, as she watched them from her house window. Her father returned from an errand and told her, “they’ve arrived”, leaving her in complete disbelief.

To gauge what was happening to her neighbourhood, the then 19-year-old Hamidi wore a burqa three times her size and went to her favourite cafe, dragging a friend along.

“We only saw the Taliban’s armed fighters guarding every nook and corner, inside the restaurant and outside my house. The kind of men I had never seen before, in long beards and holding some sort of weapon. I did not see any woman out in public after that,” she says.