TRANSCRIPT:
BEN ABRAMS: 18-year-old Azatullah Haidari, who goes by Azat, is a lot like any other dedicated young soccer player.
AZATULLAH HAIDARI: When I’m on the field I forget everything, just focusing on the game, you know?
BA: Azat was born in Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan.
AH: So sorry about my—some English, like… I have some, like, problems with English because it’s my fourth language, so that’s why sometimes get I in trouble with, uh, grammar.
BA: Azat says he started playing soccer from a young age… with one particular ambition on his mind.
AH: I remember that I was young, like, before even, like, starting school, I used to play soccer. Trying a lot to get into the national team, that was one of my dreams.
BA: Luckily, that dream came true. Azat began playing as a goalie for the Afghan youth national team when he was 16-years-old. But quickly after that, things started to fall apart. Azat and his family were in particular danger from the Taliban. His father worked with the U.S. military. Soon they fled to Kabul International Airport to try and catch a flight to the United States.
AH: And the most, like, scary thing is that there is no police, there is no army, there is no one to protect you and there’s no safety. You don’t know what’s gonna happen next.
BA: His family waited for three days to get out. Leaving the country wasn’t a guarantee for everyone, as Azat and his teammates learned.
AH: One of our national soccer team players fall down from a U.S. aircraft and—yeah—he died. He was my teammate. He was my friend.
BA: That teammate was 17-year-old Zaki Anwari, who clung to a U.S. military aircraft even after it took off, falling to his death. It was gruesome and only one part of a chaotic series of last days in Afghanistan.
AH: You see, like, kids are getting injured and everybody is losing their friends, families, and everybody’s screaming, crying, shooting—and [the] Taliban from [the] other side trying to, like, hurt people. You know, that was, kind of… really terrible.
BA: After all the family experienced, they had to start a new life somewhere. That somewhere was Tulsa.
AH: I never heard the name of Tulsa, Oklahoma before. I just knew, like, New York City, California, something like that, yeah.
BA: Azat and his family were some of the 1800 Afghan refugees who were resettled in Oklahoma following their escape. Oklahoma took on one of the largest groups of Afghan refugees of any state.
AH: I will never, like, forget their helps, their kindness. People that are waiting for us and waving to us and that makes us really, really happy. Yeah. To see, like, how the people in Tulsa are really kind and really friendly.
BA: Azat benefitted from that Tulsa warmth after returning to the sport he loves. He began playing with FC Tulsa’s Elite youth camp and the Blitz Academy soccer program, but his family didn’t own a car, so Tulsans stepped up to give him lifts to practice. He says his family has always been supportive of his sports career and wanted him to continue after arriving in the U.S.
AH: Especially my dad, yeah, he always supported me. He told me that he believes [in] me all the time and that’s why he’s supported me a lot to get back in shape and play soccer in the U.S.
BA: At the time of this recorded interview, Azat says he had just come back from a tournament in New York.
