“When I was a baby, my family fled violence in Afghanistan. I learned judo for self-defence, and now I’m competing in the Olympics”

At six months old, I became a refugee. My family fled Afghanistan in 1993, after attacks by the mujahideen rebels. The violence happened so suddenly that there was no time to prepare. My mom left Kabul with me and my three siblings, and we waited outside the city for my father, who couldn’t leave safely for another day. Once we were all together, we travelled by car to the Pakistani border town of Torkham and walked through the mountains for two days and two nights; my mother carried me the whole way. When we eventually made it to Peshawar, we moved into a house with 15 other people. Most of them were our relatives who had also fled, and the others were the homeowners and their family.

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I was a happy kid, but I was often sick. I got fevers and rashes and had malaria, rheumatism and other illnesses I can’t even remember. Some days I couldn’t even walk. My hair was falling out and I was really skinny—at nine years old, I weighed 30 pounds. At the time, it was sweltering in Pakistan, and living in a house with 15 other people was making me sicker. I had to move into my aunt’s apartment because she had AC. My family didn’t have a lot of money, so we couldn’t afford to go to good hospitals and get medication, but a doctor told my mom to focus on my nutrition. She fed me five or six glasses of fresh juice every day; no one else in my family got any. I had never tasted anything like it before. I have no idea how my mother got the fruit, but she saved my life.

By the age of 11, I was healthier and able to get back to a more normal childhood. I loved class, but I would get harassed by men a lot on my way to the refugee schools I attended. One day, an older man assaulted me and my sister. He screamed at us and pushed me to the ground. I wanted to punch and beat him, but I didn’t know how. I came home and told my mom everything. She said that she wouldn’t be able to protect me all the time and that I needed to know how to physically defend myself.

Refugee schools in Pakistan were unpredictable. Sometimes they were open, sometimes they would close for no reason—and they never offered extracurriculars. My cousin, who went to a school for Pakistani citizens, told me they had a martial arts program. I desperately wanted to go. My parents tried to convince the coach to let me join, but he said I had to be enrolled at the school. Instead, he offered to train me privately. My aunt’s house was small, but it did have a small balcony with enough space for me, the coach and the few other refugee girls we invited. During our first class, I felt like I was finally learning to stand up for myself. Afterward, the coach noticed how passionate I was about martial arts.

He started training me in karate about twice a week for eight or nine months. I got my brown belt, joined Peshawar’s first all-girls under-18 team and won all my matches at my first competitive tournament. I knew I was talented, so when my coach told me to enroll in a nearby judo tournament, a sport I hadn’t yet tried, I jumped at the opportunity. I soon fell in love. I used to watch WWE with my dad and wrestle with my brother. Judo felt just like that. Unlike karate, where there is more distance between you and your opponent, judo is all close contact with a focus on power and speed. You can lose a match in less than 20 seconds—that excited me.

So I made the switch, joined a judo team, and got better and better. Eventually, I was representing my region and was even on Peshawar talk radio. Meanwhile, the harassment continued. On my way home from school, boys would stand in my way and ask, “Do you think you can beat us up?” I think the idea of a woman being a better fighter than them threatened their manhood.

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When I was sixteen, I told my parents I was done with studying. I was at the top of my class, but I wanted to focus on judo. Of course, they said no. Even my coach was against it, knowing that the opportunities for a female judoka in Pakistan were limited. So I stayed in school, and that decision eventually led me back home to Afghanistan.

I never felt like I was Pakistani. Although I was raised in Peshawar, I always felt entirely Afghani. In my refugee school, a lot of us were from Afghanistan, and we would all draw the flag and celebrate Afghan Independence Day. When my coach offered to help me get a Pakistani passport, I said no. I dreamed of one day being a citizen of Afghanistan. So in 2014, I went back to Kabul to attend the American University of Afghanistan and study political science and public administration. I was so excited.

In Afghanistan, many women can’t leave the house without a male guardian, let alone train with men in judo, a close-contact martial art. But, through connections to coaches who knew me, I was invited to train with the Afghani national team as the only woman. Thankfully—and surprisingly—the boys and coaches welcomed me. It was one of the best experiences I’d had as an athlete. I had been prepared for the worst, but inside the gym, we were a family, and they treated me like I was their sister. I felt supported, challenged and free from all my worries; it was the perfect environment for training.

Outside the gym was a different story. I was getting a lot of unwanted attention on social media. I was used to dealing with bullies in real life, but the sudden onslaught of online harassment was new and difficult to deal with. I was something of a celebrity in my community, and at 18, I was being stalked, threatened and trolled because I was training with men. It was horrible. I felt like everyone hated me. I was challenging their ideas of what a woman should be. But I persisted. When I left Kabul in 2018, after three years of competing, I was still the only woman on the national team.

My next destination was Russia, where I enrolled in my master’s in international trade and entrepreneurship. I was not welcomed there. I couldn’t find a training partner—no one wanted to fight with a refugee. So I trained alone, using exercise bands and bicycle tubes to mimic the resistance of a competitor. Those were the worst days of my career. But, in 2019, an International Judo Federation member saw me training alone at a judo camp in Yekaterinburg. She approached me, and when she learned I was a refugee, she invited me to try out for the Olympic refugee team in Germany. I hadn’t even known there was an Olympic refugee team. But I qualified, and by 2020 I was in Tokyo, walking with the refugee team’s flag. For most athletes, going to the Olympics is a dream come true. It was for me too, but the truth is that I had wanted to compete for Afghanistan. I wanted to walk under my nation’s flag and be Afghanistan’s first female Olympian to win a medal.

My first Olympic journey ended prematurely due to a shoulder injury I sustained during a match, but by the time the games wrapped, I’d come to understand the importance of the refugee team. I saw how much it meant to the hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers and displaced people all over the world. I am a proud Afghani, but I’m also a proud refugee. I knew that I needed to go back to the Olympics so I could share my story and hopefully inspire others.

I received much more attention after Tokyo, and it wasn’t positive. I didn’t compete with a headscarf during the games, which made headline news in Islamic Pakistan. So when I went back to Peshawar, for my safety, I didn’t tell anyone and stayed inside—only my parents and siblings knew I was in Pakistan. I healed, rehabilitated and trained with only what I could ask my family to bring inside the house.

A year later, with the help of the Olympic Refuge Foundation and the UN Refugee Agency, I was able to come to Toronto through the World University Service of Canada program. I enrolled in a postgraduate degree in international development at Centennial College. When I first arrived in Toronto, my priority was to find a dojo and a coach. I visited every martial arts gym in the city and eventually found Ipe Dojo in North York. Initially, I was living in Scarborough and commuting four hours a day to get to and from the dojo. Eventually, I moved to North York and continued to train three times a day, six days a week. When I qualified for the Paris Olympics, I was ecstatic.

Now that I’m here, I’m thrilled to represent my refugee team once again. After the Olympics, I look forward to coming back to North York and taking some time to rest and explore the city. I feel welcome in Toronto and plan to build a life here. I will continue to train at Ipe and hopefully find a career where I can use my experience as a refugee and an Olympian plus my background in politics and international development. I want to continue fighting for opportunities for people like me.