Female soccer players on the national team Popal helped create in 2007 were desperate to leave the country, fearing that the Taliban would kill them for playing the sport.
But in a show of her resilience in a life marked by trauma, she waved away the medical workers and returned to her desk to continue coordinating an evacuation of players and their families from Kabul, the Afghan capital.
More than 100 politicians, across four countries, endorsed a letter she wrote to FIFA with the British parliamentarian Julie Elliott and Malala Yousafzai, the Nobel Peace Prize winner who was shot in the head by the Taliban when she was 15.
Eventually, Popal helped more than 200 players and their family members make it safely out of Afghanistan, where girls and women have since lost the freedom to work, attend school and even to go outside without a man.
Popal helped evacuate those players from Kabul by choreographing a journey to Pakistan that included the girls huddling inside an abandoned house while Taliban fighters roamed outside.
Popal sought help from Rabbi Moshe Margaretten of the Tzedek Association, a Brooklyn-based social justice group she worked with during the initial evacuation of players.
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