Dreams pack a punch

Young athletes in flowing headscarves bob and weave, jabbing the stale air of their darkened training room in Kabul's Ghazi National Olympic Stadium. A cracked mirror on the wall reflects the line of female figures in red Puma tracksuits, punching, sidestepping and hopping across the red and green mats at their coach's command.

"Change! Change! Change!" shouts Mohammad Sabir Sharifi.

Sharifi, 52, checks his watch: 3.15pm. His team of Olympic hopefuls has just started practice but in only an hour they must be escorted home for their own safety.

For four years, about 20 women and girls, 12 to 22, have been meeting like this, an hour at a time, three days a week, beneath the stadium where the Taliban once publicly executed women accused of adultery.

In 1996, the Taliban banned all women's sports as a violation of Islamic law, the same year it barred women from most jobs. Four years later, the Afghan Olympic team, which had competed at the Summer Games since 1936, was excluded from the Sydney Games because of the Taliban's prohibitions on sports and discrimination against women. Now Sharifi hopes his team will show the world the new face of Afghanistan at the 2012 London Olympics, the first to include women's boxing.

But that face is difficult to envision in a culture where girls are pressured to quit school and marry young. With the United States to begin withdrawing forces from the country in July, it is not clear how much support will remain for women undertaking non-traditional pursuits.

Fahima Rahimi, 20, braces a punching bag and instructs a teammate on the finer points of executing a left uppercut. On the walls around her, Afghan boxers beam in photographs, arms raised in Rocky-style triumph, all of them male.

Why does she box?

"I should be able to defend myself," she says. The boxing team, Fighting for Peace, was started by several male coaches and boxing stars with support from the Afghan non-profit Cooperation for Peace and Unity and the international non-profit Oxfam. In 2007, the coaches also founded the Afghan Amateur Women Boxing Association under the auspices of the Afghan Olympic Federation.

Sharifi, who started boxing in 1980 and fought on the national team for eight years, said he wanted to develop a women's team to counter the image of the submissive, burka-clad Afghan woman.

Rahimi and her two younger sisters box. They have always been both athletic and religious and never saw that as a contradiction. When their high school gym teacher told them about the new boxing programme, they begged their father, a taxi driver, for permission to join. Their parents were supportive, even though they worried that the girls could get hurt. They got over that pretty quickly, Rahimi said.

Then came the threats. Recently, a stranger called to deliver a warning.

"You're not supposed to let your daughters go to boxing," the man said.

Other female boxers had been threatened but never harmed. Still, their father was so frightened that he kept the girls home and did not allow them to return to practice until Sharifi called to reassure him.

Sharifi, too, has received threats. That is the old Afghanistan, he says. He has no time to worry. He has to get the Rahimi sisters, among the few female fighters with enough talent and training to make it to the next Olympics, ready for upcoming tournaments that could qualify them for London.

Sharifi summons Shabnam Rahimi, 18 and about 5 feet tall, to spar with him in front of the team. He considers her an exemplary fighter — disciplined and proud.

She does not flinch when she faces off against the coach. Instead, she keeps her large, brown eyes locked on him, gloves up, sweat rolling off her brow and into her curly black hair as she works her cross.

As Shabnam practises, one can't help noticing the shabby boxing bags, gloves and hand wraps. The women receive a weekly stipend but it is not enough to buy new punching bags or build a boxing ring. But the rundown facility is not a slight to the women: The country's three men's boxing teams train in the same place and with the same equipment.

Sharifi talks about moving his team to a new $200,000 (Dh734,000) training facility, complete with boxing ring, that the Afghanistan Boxing Federation is building nearby. But the ring might not open in time for the Rahimi sisters.

They are not Sharifi's first protégés. Shahla Sekandari, 20, won a lightweight bronze medal at the Asian indoor games in Vietnam in 2009 and was on track to qualify for the Olympics. Then, three months ago, she got married.

Fahima is not engaged yet. But she does not rule out getting married soon. And if she does, she too may quit boxing.

"It depends on my husband," she says shyly. "If he wants me to continue, I will."

Shabnam is more determined. She knows the sting of a connecting punch and the damage it can do. During practice, she has twice broken the middle finger on her left hand. But pain will not make her quit.

"Even if I lose my nose, I will keep coming to boxing," she says as girls behind her jump rope and yank off sweaty black gloves to rewrap their hands.

"Stop," says the coach.

It is past 4pm. Time is up.

One of the men's teams arrives and the women exit quickly. They speed down the long stone corridor to the locker room. Outside, a driver waits to take them home.

Shabnam emerges with a friend, both wearing backpacks. Arm in arm, the boxers make their way past the eerie calm of the stadium. At the stadium gates they pass a pair of Afghan soldiers in flak jackets keeping watch with a machinegun.

They will be back again on Monday.