LONDON: Afghanistan’s junior female football team and their immediate families are set to relocate to Britain from Pakistan after recently escaping their homeland, the UK government has said.
“We are working to finalize visas to the Afghanistan women’s football team and look forward to welcoming them to the UK shortly,” a government spokesperson said.
The team of around 35 young footballers, mostly teenagers, and their families — totalling around 130 people — just missed the hurried British airlift from Kabul in August, according to a UK-based charity helping them.
The squad were able to flee in small groups to Pakistan “with the assistance of some very brave people on the ground in Afghanistan,” said Jonathan Kendrick, chairman of the ROKiT conglomerate, whose foundation is providing assistance.
“From a humanitarian perspective, there was simply no option,” he said in a statement, noting they were “in a hugely dangerous, life-threatening, position should they not find a way to leave Afghanistan.”
Pakistan granted the players temporary 30-day visas and they were transported to Lahore, the capital of Punjab province, from where they applied to relocate to Britain.
“These young players, with whom we are in regular contact via video calls, are absolutely thrilled and relieved to have been given the opportunities that will come available to them in their new lives in the UK,” said Siu-Anne Marie Gill of the ROKiT Foundation.
She added it will “continue to support them as they settle into their new home in the coming weeks, to include helping to arrange further education, where possible.”
Gill said she hoped many of the players would undergo trials with several professional women’s football teams in Britain that “have already expressed great interest in meeting them.”
Britain has airlifted more than 15,000 people — both UK nationals and Afghan allies — from the war-torn country since the Taliban recaptured it in August.
London has also committed to welcome up to 20,000 people over the coming years, including around 5,000 in the first year, as part of its Afghan citizens’ resettlement scheme (ACRS).
“The government is committed to doing all it can to support those most in need, including vulnerable women and girls, and those at risk who have had to flee Afghanistan,” the government spokesperson added.
The interior ministry declined to detail the type of visas the female players would be getting and whether it was part of ACRS.
Afghan junior female football team to relocate to UK from Pakistan
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Afghan junior female football team to relocate to UK from Pakistan
- Squad were able to flee in small groups to Pakistan which granted the players temporary 30-day visas
- They were transported to Lahore from where they applied to relocate to Britain
Nigeria signals more strikes likely in ‘joint’ US operations
- Nigeria on Friday signalled more strikes against jihadist groups were expected after a Christmas Day bombardment by US forces against militants in the north of the country
LAGOS: Nigeria on Friday signalled more strikes against jihadist groups were expected after a Christmas Day bombardment by US forces against militants in the north of the country.
The west African country faces multiple interlinked security crises in its north, where jihadists have been waging an insurgency in the northeast since 2009 and armed “bandit” gangs raid villages and stage kidnappings in the northwest.
The US strikes come after Abuja and Washington were locked in a diplomatic dispute over what Trump characterised as the mass killing of Christians amid Nigeria’s myriad armed conflicts.
Washington’s framing of the violence as amounting to Christian “persecution” is rejected by the Nigerian government and independent analysts, but has nonetheless resulted in increased security coordination.
“It’s Nigeria that provided the intelligence,” the country’s foreign minister, Yusuf Tuggar, told broadcaster Channels TV, saying he was on the phone with US State Secretary Marco Rubio ahead of the bombardment.
Asked if there would be more strikes, Tuggar said: “It is an ongoing thing, and we are working with the US. We are working with other countries as well.”
Targets unclear
The Department of Defense’s US Africa Command, using an acronym for the Daesh group, said “multiple Daesh terrorists” were killed in an attack in the northwestern state of Sokoto.
US defense officials later posted video of what appeared to be the nighttime launch of a missile from the deck of a battleship flying the US flag.
Which of Nigeria’s myriad armed groups were targeted remains unclear.
Nigeria’s jihadist groups are mostly concentrated in the northeast of the country, but have made inroads into the northwest.
Researchers have recently linked some members from an armed group known as Lakurawa — the main jihadist group located in Sokoto State — to Islamic State Sahel Province (ISSP), which is mostly active in neighboring Niger and Mali.
Other analysts have disputed those links, though research on Lakurawa is complicated as the term has been used to describe various armed fighters in the northwest.
Those described as Lakurawa also reportedly have links to Al-Qaeda affiliated group for the Support of Islam and Muslims (JNIM), a rival group to ISSP.
While Abuja has welcomed the strikes, “I think Trump would not have accepted a ‘No’ from Nigeria,” said Malik Samuel, an Abuja-based researcher for Good Governance Africa, an NGO.
Amid the diplomatic pressure, Nigerian authorities are keen to be seen as cooperating with the US, Samuel told AFP, even though “both the perpetrators and the victims in the northwest are overwhelmingly Muslim.”
Tuggar said that Nigerian President Bola Tinubu “gave the go-ahead” for the strikes.
The foreign minister added: “It must be made clear that it is a joint operation, and it is not targeting any religion nor simply in the name of one religion or the other.”
