“I am actually the picture of everything the Taliban don’t want their women to be” said Nadia in an interview after the Taliban forcefully took over Afghanistan and banned sports for women.

Nadia Nadim is an Afghan refugee who escaped the Taliban in the year 2000 after her father was executed by the Taliban. She along with her family managed to flee the country and settle in Denmark. After 20 years of struggling and hard work she is now an Afghan-Danish football player who plays as a striker for NWSL club Racing Louisville FC as well as for the Danish national team. Nadim is considered the most influential and greatest Afghan female football player of all time, particularly because she won the French league title in the 2020-21 seasons with Paris Saint-Germain.

She recalls her escape and said she was 11 when 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.

In another interview on world’s refugee days she said ‘I just feel that after 20 years you’re trying to get out of all that – that was happening and then we’re just back to where it all started. It is upsetting’.

The famous Anissa Bonnefont has recently completed “Nadia,” a timely documentary feature about Nadia Nadim, the Afghan-born Danish soccer star.

Nadia says "I always say it's probably a bit of fate because the refugee camp that I was staying in in Denmark was just beside these amazing football fields and a football club."

Read her full story and what she wants from the international community as an Afghan woman here: https://edition.cnn.com/2021/09/11/football/nadia-nadim-afghanistan-taliban-football-spt-intl/index.html