She was set to make Afghan history at the Paralympics—until Taliban took over

But between her arrival in Kabul and the time she was set to depart for Tokyo, the Taliban had taken over Afghanistan’s capital. Now she’s pleading for help in a last-minute bid to somehow compete in the Paralympics, while still stuck in a city where she’s afraid to even go outside.

“I request from you all…on behalf of all Afghan women to help me,” she said in a video taken in Kabul and reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. “My intention is to participate in the Tokyo 2020 Paralympic Games, please hold my hand and help me.”

Khudadadi was one of two Afghan Paralympians, along with track and field athlete Hossain Rasouli. due in Tokyo. While the athletes hold out hope of competing, they do not have any way of getting out of Afghanistan, according to Arian Sadiqi, the London-based Chef de Mission for the Afghan Paralympic Committee.

Sadiqi, who shared the video of Khudadadi and translated it from Dari Persian, had planned to travel to Japan to meet them when they were scheduled to arrive on Aug. 17, but their inability to fly out of the country has potentially forced Afghanistan out of the Games, which kick off on Aug. 24th.

“It’s very devastating,” said Sadiqi.

The broader future of sports under Taliban rule is also in jeopardy. Though a few sports, such as cricket, managed to grow their presence before the regime was first toppled in 2001, most athletes in this country of more than 30 million were left terribly stunted in their development.

Afghanistan’s delegation to the Tokyo Olympics, held shortly before the U.S. military withdrawal that preceded the Taliban takeover, comprised just five athletes. The men’s national soccer team, for instance, didn’t even enter World Cup qualifying until 2006 despite joining FIFA some 58 years earlier.

Even officials at the world governing body for chess feared for their game’s future in Afghanistan. After reaching out to players in Kabul, the organization says it was alarmed to learn that the Taliban considered chess to be a form of gambling and a distraction from holy life.

But no one faces a grimmer outlook than female athletes.

“Please, I request you all—especially all the women from around the globe and the female institutions and the United Nations to not let the rights of a female citizen of Afghanistan in the Paralympic movement to be taken away so easily,” Khudadadi says in the video, where she is wearing a black sweater and white head covering.

Khudadadi arrived in Kabul intending to make the 3,900-mile journey to Tokyo. But by the time she reached the Afghan capital late last week, as Taliban forces advanced through the country, prices on the rapidly changing flight schedules had skyrocketed, Sadiqi said. Soon, tickets were simply nonexistent. Commercial flights were canceled.

Khudadadi’s family remains in Herat, where she lives full time. For now, she is staying put in Kabul with extended family in precarious conditions. Though she says they do not have enough food to feed their own children, Khudadadi is too frightened to leave. She describes feeling “imprisoned” inside the house.

The same airport that Khudadadi and Rasouli were set to fly from has been the site of dramatic and devastating scenes in the wake of the U.S. military withdrawal from the country and subsequent Taliban takeover. At least eight people were killed at Kabul Airport on Monday as Afghans crowded the tarmac and even clung to planes in desperate bids to escape.

Had Khudadadi made it to Japan, her participation in the Games would have been a marker of social progress for a country that had never medaled at the Paralympics. The country’s only two Olympic medals came in taekwondo, from 2008 and 2012 bronze medalist Rohullah Nikpai. It was Nikpai’s success that motivated Khudadadi to take up the sport. Her goal was to tear down the stigmas against Paralympic athletes, particularly women, that she had grown up with.

Khudadadi persevered for years, training at home and in her backyard. Local clubs have been off-limits to her, because of a heavy Taliban presence in her home province. She won the 2016 African International Parataekwondo Championship in Egypt. Five years later, she was invited to the Paralympics in Tokyo with almost no notice. This spring, Khudadadi realized that she would have barely any time to get ready without the proper infrastructure.

“I was thrilled after I received the news that I have got a wild card to compete at the Games,” Khudadadi said in an article dated Aug. 10 on paralympics.org. “I was surprised but worried as well as I had just two months to prepare for the Games with almost no facilities.”

But simply by making the Paralympics, whether or not she earned a medal, Khudadadi knew she was playing for different stakes. She hoped to become a national symbol of women’s empowerment inside a country where women have historically faced harsh and often brutal restrictions.

“This,” Sadiqi said, “was the main thing for her.”