Zahra considers August 15, the day the Taliban took control of Kabul, to be the hardest day of her life. Five days earlier, she had left Afghanistan’s capital city to study at Southern New Hampshire University after receiving a Fulbright Scholarship. Now living 6,600 miles away from home, Zahra has to read news reports about her country’s demise under Taliban rule.
“The sense of losing your country, losing your national pride that you had, and thinking about all the misfortunes that will come with the Taliban, all of those feelings stay in my heart,” Zahra, who requested that her last name not be used to preserve her identity, told Runner’s World.
That day, while continuing to follow coverage of the Taliban takeover, Zahra felt helpless and couldn’t find the motivation to do anything. Then, she remembered her goals for the Download Training Plans.
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“The reason I am running is because of all of the women who are in danger in Afghanistan right now,” she said. So, she went for a run.
New York City Marathon Free to Run, an organization that works to make sure women and girls living in conflict areas have the opportunity to run and do other physical activities. She finished in 4:59:41.
“When I crossed the finish line, I was exhausted but I had the beautiful feeling that I had completed this marathon only for the brave Afghan women and my mother, who is the bravest woman I know,” Zahra said. “For the entire 26.2 miles I was thinking about them.”
Two weeks before the U.S. was set to complete its troop withdrawal this summer after a 20-year war, the How to Help Women Runners in Afghanistan. The group, which had ruled the country in the late 1990s before being ousted by the U.S. in 2001, regained control of all the major cities in a matter of days.
The Taliban has already taken steps to restrict the rights of women and girls, including announcing that certain subjects in school may be off limits and female students will be barred from studying with male students. After the Taliban named an all-male Cabinet, it prohibited women from returning to work, citing security concerns that temporarily prevented it, according to ABC News.
“The Taliban has demolished [women’s ability] to go to work and get an education,” Zahra said. “That’s giving me so much stress. I really hope for my country’s women to have those opportunities, but now they don’t have them.”
Zahra joined Free to Run in 2018 after a friend introduced her to the program in Kabul. “When I started running, especially running with girls and women, it was really enjoyable because in Afghanistan, especially in Kabul, we have some parts that are safe but in other provinces, there is no safe place for women and girls to run,” she said.
In a few years, the program grew to the point where Zahra was running with 20 to 30 people at a time, something that provided a bright spot in her days working as a finance specialist.
“Running together is a very amazing experience because you are chatting with other girls, we’flit sharing our problems, and we can solve it. It was a really amazing journey the way I stuck with running through Free to Run,” she said.
Life Under Taliban Rule
Under Taliban rule from 1996 until 2001, women and girls had no conformity; they were banned from getting an education, working, participating in politics, and leaving the house without a male escort, among other restrictions. They were also barred from playing sports.
In a blog written for Free to Run, Zahra shared that when she was three years old, Zahra witnessed her father being arrested by Taliban authorities. “I was a child watching from a distance, but I understood they were the most dangerous thing I had ever encountered,” she wrote.
She recalled the Taliban wanted money for her father’s release, so her family sold everything they had to get him out of prison. “He was not, however, the same man he had been before the arrest,” she wrote. “There were scars all over his body, and he lost both of his legs as a result of the beatings.”
The Role of Free to Run
After the fall of the Taliban in 2001, women and girls won major freedoms: 3.5 million girls were enrolled in school and around a third of students at public and private universities were women. Women have also been holding political office and more than 1,000 Afghan women started their own businesses by 2019, according to the BBC.
As outlined in this Runner’s World story from 2018, Free to Run played a significant role in offering support and empowerment to women and girls who want to be active despite the resistance many still felt surrounding physical activity for women.
Health & Injuries Dubai last year. She also co-founded 7iStans, an organization dedicated to connecting the rest of the world with Afghanistan and other Asian countries through running.
Best Running Shoes get staffers and Afghan runners to safety. Now almost two months later, the program in Afghanistan, which operates in five different provinces throughout the country, is on pause while Free to Run organizers continue to navigate the shifting political landscape, executive director Taylor Smith said. While they don’t have plans for a start date yet, Smith said discussions are ongoing to determine how the organization can continue to serve women and girls in the conflict zone.
“When we do [have a start date], we’ve got a roadmap and a really strong network still in Afghanistan to figure out what is the best way in which we can support our women and girls in the region and also stay true to our mission,” Smith told Runner’s World.
Being a Voice
Zahra said she keeps in contact with friends and family members who are still living in Kabul, many of whom are now jobless and trying to find a way out of the country.
On her toughest days, running has become a source of therapy for Zahra and helps her cope with the stress she feels for her country. She loves being able to run at any time of day in the United States for however long she wants to go, which wasn’t the case when she lived in Kabul. In those quiet moments on the trail, Zahra also focuses on ways she can help those in need.
“Some days it really breaks my heart and I cannot find the motivation to do all the things I'm doing,” she said. “Sometimes I think that I cannot do anything, but there's things that I can do. Running the Download Training Plans and being focused on my studies is the least that I can do. And to also be a voice for all the women who are [in Afghanistan].”
Taylor Dutch is a writer and editor living in Austin, Texas, and a former NCAA track athlete who specializes in fitness, wellness, and endurance sports coverage. Her work has appeared in Runner’s World, SELF, Bicycling, Outside, and Podium Runner.
