My Beautiful Sisters: A Memoir of Courage, Hope, and the Afghan Women's Soccer Team

A story of survival, sisterhood and the fight for feminism in the age of the Taliban.

In August 2021, Kabul fell under the control of the Taliban, a militant political and fundamentalist religious faction. For Khalida Popal, it signaled the beginning of the most important battle of an already extraordinary young life--to get female soccer players out of a city where they faced imminent threat of execution simply for playing sports.

Khalida first began playing soccer in a refugee camp in Pakistan after her parents fled Taliban rule. Returning to Afghanistan, she fell deeper in love with the freedom and comradeship soccer provides. As co-founder and first captain of the Afghan women's soccer team, Khalida began using sports to empower young women, and was subjected to intensifying death threats in return.

Hounded out of her own country, she continued to support the Afghan women's team, founding the organization Girl Power and exposing widespread sexual abuse of players. From her new home in Denmark, she watched Kabul fall and immediately knew the risk to the players still there. Assembling a small but mighty network of international allies, she began evacuating women whose lives were at risk simply for loving the sport she had done so much to promote. Her teammates. Her sisters.

My Beautiful Sisters is a gripping, important memoir, and a compulsively readable one--a harrowing yet ultimately heartening story of survival and sisterhood.