From swimming to soccer, running to horse riding, Afghanistan’s new sports chief said Tuesday that the Taliban will allow 400 sports — but declined to confirm if women can play a single one.
“Please don’t ask more questions about women,” Bashir Ahmad Rustamzai told AFP, from an armchair where Afghanistan’s Olympic Committee president had sat until he fled the country last month.
Rustamzai, a heavily-built former kung fu and wrestling champion with a bushy black and white beard, was appointed by the hardline Islamist group to be Afghanistan’s director general for sports and physical education.
Once the wrestling federation chief when the Taliban were last in power, Rustamzai then worked with the Western-backed government, before falling out with them because of “their widespread corruption,” he said.
Few days earlier, chairman of Afghanistan’s Cricket Board claimed to an Australian broadcaster in an apparent backflip on the Taliban’s hardline stance that Women could still be allowed to play cricket.
Azizullah Fazli said the governing body would outline how this would happen “very soon”, adding that all 25 of the women’s team remained in Afghanistan and had chosen not to leave on evacuation flights.
Those remarks saw Australia threaten to cancel a historic maiden men’s Test between the two countries, set to take place in Hobart in November.
Australian Test captain Tim Paine turned up the heat on Friday, saying he believed teams could pull out of next month’s Twenty20 World Cup in protest, or boycott playing Afghanistan.
In an overnight statement, the Afghanistan Cricket Board urged Australia not to punish its men’s team over the Taliban’s apparent ban, saying it was “powerless to change the culture and religious environment of Afghanistan”.
“Do not isolate us and avoid penalising us,” it added.
Cricket Australia said in brief comments Saturday that it remained in regular dialogue with the Afghanistan Cricket Board and that “we made our position very clear in the statement”.
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