Cricket and the Pashtuns: from Peshawar's camps to the T20 semi-final

At a glance

• Afghan cricket was learned in the refugee camps and club grounds of Peshawar in the 1980s and 1990s. The Afghanistan Cricket Federation was founded in 1995 and the ICC took it in as an affiliate in 2001. [1, 3]

• The ICC made Afghanistan an associate member in 2013 and a full member, with Test status, on 22 June 2017. [1]

• Afghanistan beat Pakistan by eight wickets at the 2023 World Cup, and reached the semi-final of the 2024 T20 World Cup, where South Africa bowled them out for 56. [11, 13]

• Pashtuns dominate the men's team. A 2016 report puts this down to where the refugees went in the 1980s: Pashtuns to Pakistan, most non-Pashtuns to Iran and Central Asia. [8]

• Pakistan's Pashtun districts have supplied a growing share of its national team, and Peshawar Zalmi, whose name is the Pashto word for "youth", won the Pakistan Super League in 2017 and 2026. [2, 15, 17]

• Since 2021 the Taliban government has let men's cricket go on and has barred women from playing it. [19, 21]

Cricket in the camps of Peshawar

Cricket was not new to the Pashtun lands. In 2001 the writer Ramachandra Guha recalled an Afridi Pathan, Ahsan-ul-Haq, who went to Britain to study around 1900 and played for W. G. Grace's London County side. He also recalled Salim Durrani, born in Kabul, who played Test cricket for India in the 1960s and 1970s. Durrani's father, the wicketkeeper Abdul Aziz, had come down the Khyber to the Punjab to play. [7]

The game reached Afghanistan itself through the war. After the Soviet army came in 1979, millions of Afghans fled to Pakistan and Iran. Most refugees in Pakistan were Pashtuns and settled mainly in its Pashtun districts (the refugees and the war). The poor lived in camps, and the most famous was Kacha Garhi on the western edge of Peshawar, spelled Kachra Gari, Kacha Ghadi or Kacha Garhi in English. Boys played tape-ball cricket there, with a tennis ball wrapped in insulation tape. [3–6]

Taj Malik, later remembered as one of the founders of Afghan cricket, crossed into Pakistan on a donkey at the age of ten and grew up in Kacha Garhi with his mother and eleven brothers and sisters. His father was a mujahid who went in and out of Afghanistan. At twelve he was hooked by the 1987 World Cup, and he founded a camp team, ambitiously named the Afghan Cricket Club, whose players won prize money by challenging other Peshawar sides. [6] Allah Dad Noori, later called the father of Afghan cricket, said that "the war in Afghanistan also pushed my family to Pakistan in 1980." [4] Nawroz Mangal, who became the national captain, was about ten when he heard gunfire over the camp on 25 March 1992 and was told that Pakistan had won the World Cup. He took up tape-ball cricket from then on. [4]

Sidharth Monga, who wrote the fullest account of this world for The Cricket Monthly, says the Afghans "became part of the Peshawar club and academy scene, which would go on to become Pakistan's best." [3] The Pakistan Cricket Board helped the newcomers with grounds, coaches and matches. Khaliq Dad Noori said that it "invited us to Pakistan and organised matches and free stay for us in various cities." Dawn's account adds that it put the team in Grade-2 cricket, gave it the former Pakistan international Naeem Ahmed as coach for three seasons, and supplied references for its applications to the Asian Cricket Council and the ICC. [4] Taj Malik thanked Pakistan "who provided us grounds and other facilities". [5]

The Taliban years

The Afghanistan Cricket Federation was founded in 1995. [1, 4] The Taliban took Kabul in September 1996 (the Taliban emirate). Andrew Heger wrote in Foreign Policy that they banned many things, "but the fundamentalists never totally banned sports", and that cricket was allowed on conditions: play stopped for prayer and the crowd could cheer only with shouts of "Allahu akbar". [6] Noori remembered that "we had to fight very hard to convince" the Taliban and the authorities "that cricket can prosper in Afghanistan." [5] Khaliq Dad Noori said that during the Taliban years the team "straightaway started our activities" at the Wazir Akbar Khan ground in Kabul. [4]

A 2001 newspaper column gave a further story, which its writer had from a friend who had been to Afghanistan: that Mullah Omar had decreed that, unlike athletics, football or swimming, cricket did not require any part of the body to be uncovered in public. The column said the Afghans had applied to the ICC. [7]

From a federation to Test status

The Afghan Cricket Board's own history, which it publishes in Pashto and English, gives the steps. The federation became an ICC affiliate in 2001 and joined the Asian Cricket Council in 2003. In Pashto the board is Da Afghanistan Kraket Bord (د افغانستان کرکټ بورډ) and the game is kraket (کرکټ). [1] Heger noted that most of the players in a 2003 national tournament in Kabul were recent returnees from the camps around Peshawar. That tournament picked out the core of the later team: Mohammad Nabi, Asghar Stanikzai, Samiullah Shenwari, Shapoor Zadran and Hamid Hassan. [6]

The board says that a semi-final loss to Hong Kong at the 2006 ACC Trophy stirred the players and the fans, and that after the team shared the 2007 ACC T20 Trophy in Kuwait it returned home to a hero's welcome. A presidential decree of 2 June 2009 turned the federation into the Afghanistan Cricket Board. [1] The team won Division Five of the World Cricket League in 2008, and beat Namibia in 2009 to gain one-day status. [1, 6] The ICC made Afghanistan an associate member in 2013 and, on 22 June 2017, a full member. [1] The first Test was played on 14 June 2018. [1] Afghanistan beat Scotland for its first World Cup win in 2015 and the West Indies at the 2016 World T20. [1]

In 2023 the team beat England, Pakistan and Sri Lanka at the World Cup. [1] The win over Pakistan was by eight wickets, and in Kabul fireworks and celebratory gunfire filled the sky, with crowds in the streets despite what AFP called an effective Taliban ban on song and dance. A political deputy in the prime minister's office, Maulawi Abdul Kabir, congratulated the team and "all Afghans". [13]

At the 2024 T20 World Cup Afghanistan beat Uganda, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Australia and Bangladesh. [1] Against Bangladesh on 24 June, Rashid Khan took 4 for 23 and made an unbeaten 19 off ten balls, and the win put Afghanistan into its first World Cup semi-final. [10] The Taliban's acting foreign minister, Amir Khan Muttaqi, phoned Rashid to say, "Your victory has made everyone happy, you are a great inspiration for the youth." [12] In the semi-final at Tarouba on 26 June South Africa bowled Afghanistan out for 56 in 11.5 overs and reached 60 for one in 8.5 overs. Azmatullah Omarzai's 10 was the highest score. Rashid said it was "a tough night for us as a team, but that's how it goes in T20s." [11]

Why the team is largely Pashtun

An analysis published in 2016 found that Pashtuns dominated cricket, while the country's other groups tended to be more involved in football. Farid Mohammadi, a Pashtun cricket fan, explained it by where each group fled: refugees who fled to Pakistan in the 1980s "were predominantly Pashtuns", while most non-Pashtuns went to Iran and Central Asia, where football is the main sport. Hamid Elmi, an analyst, said football was "in much better shape than cricket" in its ethnic mix, and a Tajik member of parliament, Zahir Sadat, said cricket "is not made up of all the ethnic groups." [8] Monga, who calls Shahid Afridi "a Pathan like most cricketers from Afghanistan", puts the same history in the other order: Afghans learned the game from the Pashtun world of Peshawar. [3]

The three best-known players show how varied the paths were. Rashid Khan grew up in Bati Kot, a largely Pashto-speaking town in Nangarhar about 40 kilometres from the Pakistan border, one of eleven children of a tyre-selling family. Five of his older brothers and four sisters had gone to Peshawar as refugees, and he spent seven or eight years there himself. At the start of his career he was officially listed as Rashid Shinwarai, after his tribe, the Shinwari, and he said that once he named himself a Shinwari from Bati Kot, Afghans could trace his family. [3] AFP's account says his family lived in Peshawar as refugees, and that he studied computer science at Islamia College there after the college spotted his talent in cricket trials. [10] Monga says he learned to bowl wrist-spin on the concrete floor of his family's long house corridor, where the ball would not turn, so he flicked it from behind with his fingers. [3] Rashid has said that he wanted to be Shahid Afridi. [3]

Mohammad Nabi learned cricket in Peshawar and was in the 2003 group that formed the later team's core. [6, 9] He captained the Afghan Cheetahs, who played in Pakistan's domestic T20 Cup in 2011, and was the captain at the 2015 World Cup. [4, 6] Rahmanullah Gurbaz is from Khost, where his father was a school principal who wanted him to be a doctor. His childhood friend Hedayatullah Rohan says an older brother burned his bat when he found out he was playing, and that the coach Mohammad Khan Zadran asked him to join his academy after a half-century in a village match. [24]

Pashtuns in Pakistan's team

The Pakistani writer Ahsan Butt wrote in Dawn in 2022 that "the Pashtun population is where the game's expansion has really told in the last decade", and counted ten players from Pashtun cities and towns who had made their debuts in that time, most from outside Peshawar. Until the 1990s Pakistan had given Test caps to only four players born in what is now Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Butt credits television and "superstars with Pakhtun heritage, such as Imran Khan or Shahid Afridi", and the infrastructure built in the years of the NATO war, which gave young players physical space and equipment that cramped cities lack. Two of Pakistan's three most valuable players, he wrote, were Mohammad Rizwan of Peshawar and Shaheen of Landi Kotal. [2]

Shahid Afridi (see the Afridi tribe) is the figure the Afghan players follow. Monga says he "spoke Pashto" and "played to entertain and to be entertained". The Afghan Twenty20 league is called Shpageeza, which means "six", and Monga reads this as a tribute to Afridi. [3] Pakistan won the 2009 World Twenty20 under Younis Khan; Afridi was man of the match in the final, and the tournament's leading wicket-taker was Umar Gul, with 13 wickets, whose domestic sides included Peshawar. [14] Fakhar Zaman, the opener, comes from Enzergay village in Katlang tehsil of Mardan district (Mardan). [25] Khyber Pakhtunkhwa's side in Pakistan's 2021 National T20 Cup was captained by Rizwan and included Shaheen Shah Afridi. [26]

Peshawar Zalmi

In December 2015 the owner of the Peshawar team in the new Pakistan Super League, Javed Afridi, unveiled its name and logo at the Army Public School in Peshawar, where the Pakistani Taliban had killed students and teachers the year before. The name, Peshawar Zalmi, uses the Pashto word zalmi, "youth", and the logo is a turban of the kind Pashtuns wear on the frontier. Javed Afridi called the players ambassadors of the frontier region and said the first wins would be dedicated to the school. [15] He said Peshawar and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa "are close to my heart, and I want to develop the infrastructure around the game in my homeland." [16]

Peshawar Zalmi won its first title in 2017 against Quetta Gladiators, and its second on 3 May 2026 at the Gaddafi Stadium in Lahore, beating Hyderabad Kingsmen by five wickets with Babar Azam as captain. [17]

The men's game under the Taliban since 2021

In September 2021 Hamid Shinwari, the Afghanistan Cricket Board's chief executive, said that Anas Haqqani had come to the board and told him his job was over. Naseebullah Haqqani, also called Naseeb Khan, replaced him. [18] Ahmadullah Wasiq, a deputy head of the Taliban's cultural commission, told SBS that the Taliban would allow men's cricket to go on, and cleared the men's team to travel to Hobart for a Test. [19]

In a 2024 report, VOA wrote that the Taliban banned women's sports and restricted some men's sports, but not cricket, and gave two possible reasons: that officials enjoy the game, or that they fear public anger. [9]

Women's cricket

Wasiq told SBS in September 2021 that "I don't think women will be allowed to play cricket because it is not necessary that women should play cricket", and that the Taliban "will not cross Islamic values even if it carries opposite reactions." [19] On 5 November 2021 Cricket Australia postponed its first Test against Afghanistan, planned for Hobart later that month, "until a later time when the situation is clearer"; Mohammad Nabi said he was disappointed but glad it had been postponed, not cancelled. [20]

Of the 25 women the Afghan board had contracted in 2020, most have resettled in Australia on humanitarian visas. [22] In January 2025 an Afghanistan Women's XI played an exhibition match against a Cricket Without Borders XI at Junction Oval in Melbourne. It had no official status, and the captain, Nahida Sapan, said sport in Afghanistan "has been disbanded". [22] Afghanistan's men's team keeps ICC funding. The women's team has none, although ICC rules ask a full member to have a national women's team, and the players' 2024 letter asking the ICC to help set up a refugee team had no reply when Sky Sports wrote in November 2024. [21, 22]

Cricket and the Pakistan border

Monga writes that after the mid-2010s Afghanistan formed a strategic partnership with India, and its board ordered players with families and houses in Pakistan to return home with their families if they wanted to play for Afghanistan. Since Rashid wagged his finger at a dismissed Pakistan batsman in the 2018 Asia Cup, he says, stories have gone round of Rashid having a Pakistani identity card or a house in Pakistan, and a Google search for his name offers the prompt "Pakistani?" [3] Rashid has said, "Afghans look at me and feel proud that I am an Afghan." [3]

On 17 October 2025 the Afghanistan Cricket Board withdrew from a T20 series in Pakistan after three local cricketers, Kabeer, Sibghatullah and Haroon, from Urgun district in Paktika, died in a Pakistani airstrike, reportedly on their way home from a friendly match in Sharana. Pakistani security sources told Dawn that the strikes were aimed at militant hideouts. Rashid Khan called the board's decision "a principled stand". [23] The line between the two countries is described in the Durand Line, and recent events in Afghanistan and the Pashtun lands since 2021.