They call them “The Rascals”.
A rambunctious group of boys, madly dashing around on a Saturday morning playing soccer — the game they love more than anything.
They play like their life depends on it: with passion, untold energy and joy.
In this sense, they’re no different to any other kids their own age.
And yet these boys couldn’t be any more different to the boys on the other side of the pitch.
Because the other young boys they’re playing aren’t refugees. Those other boys didn’t have to endure a terrifying escape from Afghanistan after the Taliban regained power. And they didn’t have to set up a new life in a new country all the while dealing with the trauma of losing one — or both — of their parents while fleeing their country and starting a new life in a strange and foreign land.
But The Rascals of the Melrose Park Football Club under-13s in north-west Sydney are lucky. Because in Australia they found a group of people who cared deeply about giving them the gift of playing soccer with each other.
And they’re lucky because they have a leader. He’s another young Afghan who had lost a parent and was himself little more than a boy when he fled his country.
His name is Zarar Mujahid, and he’s just 21.
When Zarar was three, his father – a soldier in the Afghan army — was killed when the convoy he was leading was blown up by a Taliban roadside bomb.
His death left behind a widowed mother with six young children.
Struggling to make ends meet as a single parent in Afghanistan’s capital, Kabul, Zarar’s mother moved the family back to their native Panjshir Valley.
But not before she made an incredibly difficult decision.
Zarar’s mother decided he would have a better quality of life if he lived in an orphanage rather than at home.
“I grew up in an orphanage for eight years, nine years,” Zarar says.
For Zarar, the orphanage offered a secure place to live, where he was well fed and clothed, cared for, and importantly, received an education.
And he says while he went home regularly to see his family, it was extremely hard to be apart from them.
“Because you have to choose — what do you want to do?” he says.
“Do you want, for example, to follow your dreams or do you want to work and make money and survive and bring food for your family?
“It was very hard, I was young, and I was missing my family – my mum, my brothers and my sisters.”
But he says he and the other children at the orphanage gave each other the courage and affirmation to carry on with their education.
“We were telling each other to support each other and give hope to each other who grew up in the orphanage — to continue to study because it was the best place to study,” Zarar says.
One Australian charity worker who met Zarar in Afghanistan when he was just a teenager, says he stood out from the beginning.
“He was the leader and obviously from the beginning a mentor to the younger boys,” the charity worker says.
“He was reading poetry, he was giving lectures.”
‘I lost my everything in Kandahar’: flight from the Taliban
But that all changed overnight when the Taliban regained power in Afghanistan in August 2021.
Suddenly the future for Zarar and all the other children in the orphanage – especially the girls — was uncertain amid the chaotic stampede to flee the country.
“When the Taliban came to Afghanistan, everyone, everybody, child, woman, old, young, was trying to get out of Afghanistan,” Zarar says.
“The Taliban situation was very hard to escape.”
Because of the bombing in the Panjshir Valley, the kids were moved to Kabul.
But when it became too dangerous for the older kids to live with girls under the Taliban regime, Zarar and others were moved again at the beginning of 2022, into a shared house with seven or eight children to a room.
By now, as one of the older children, Zarar became a de facto carer, a protector for the younger kids.
“My role was to look after the kids and make sure everyone was OK, make sure everyone feels alright,” he says.
“I was scared, everyone was scared, but we make sure to be strong to look after the kids.
“I was pretty young, too, and I was very scared because if the Taliban find out who you are, or who you are supporting, they might send you to jail.”
While this was happening, supporters in Australia were swinging into action.
The first mission was to get the kids out of Kabul and to Kandahar, close to the Pakistan border.
Zarar shepherded a group of 18 girls and boys on a terrifying bus trip, which was stopped by Taliban soldiers.
“When the Taliban came on to the bus, I opened the Quran because they wouldn’t ask any questions to anyone reading a Quran,” he says.
It was August 8, 2022.
But they still had to get across the border, so Zarar and the children in his care managed to hire an Uber for the four-hour trip, which he said was “the scariest travel I ever did,” thinking at any moment they could be stopped.
“I left everything in Kandahar,” he says.
“I had three certificates from school, I had five gold medals from kickboxing, so I lost my everything in Kandahar.”
Meanwhile, supporters in Australia had managed to persuade the Australian government to secure an amnesty for the kids with the Pakistan government.
It meant they were able to travel without passports or a visa.
By now, Zarar had a group of seven children with him and a theoretical boarding pass for a flight to Australia.
They eventually made it across the border, but only after a seven-hour delay while Pakistan officials questioned one of the boys.
From there they travelled for two days to a safe house in Islamabad, where they spent a month, while Australian diplomatic staff did identity checks before they could finally board flights to Australia.
“It was a moment for me that was life-changing,” Zarar says.
“I feel like freedom, and I’m free in Australia.”
Soon after he arrived, Zarar had the good fortune to meet Julie Crane, the president of the Melrose Park Football Club.
Crane had grown up in Western Sydney and seen a lot of people miss out on the opportunities to play sport that so many Australians take for granted.
“[I saw] disadvantaged families watching from the sideline and not being able to participate because of how expensive it is,” she says.
And so, with a like-minded group of friends and more than a fair degree of determination, she decided to start her own football club.
With her husband, Chris, the couple ran several Street Football World Cups to support refugee kids from the Liberian diamond trade and then families from Syria who had fled ISIS.
By 2019, the club was fielding its first all-ages team in the North-West Sydney District competition.
“We want to provide a football club that can help new migrants and refugees adjust to Australian society and culture and we want to use the round ball for that,” she says.
“We are a social inclusion club, so our goal is to get as many people participating.
“Our ultimate goal is we want to produce sports professionals.”
The club doesn’t charge fees, instead they hold fundraisers and apply for grants to allow as many people as possible to play.
It invited Zarar and other young Afghan refugees who had arrived in Australia after the Taliban re-took control of the country to come to picnics on the weekends. It was a chance to be amongst other members of the community, to have a kick and be able to participate in the thing they loved best, playing football.
“When all the kids arrived — and there was around 70 — all at the same time, they all came to the park with us, and he (Zarar) was one of those players,” Crane says.
“And we just threw the football out there, and we put some goals up, and for about six months we just let them come and play football at their own pace, have some lunch, settle.”
She says Zarar soon established himself as a leader in the same way that the aid worker had witnessed in Afghanistan years before.
“He was supporting all the other players, making sure everyone was OK. That was exciting for us – seeing a future leader in him,” she says.
“He wanted to embrace English.
“He tried his hardest to break through the barriers that he had as a non-English speaking refugee, who was young and unaccompanied.”
Zarar says the weekend events helped make him feel safe.
“After three weeks of being in Australia I came to Meadowbank Park (the club’s home ground) and I met Julie Crane,” he says.
“For me, when I saw everyone happy, I felt really good, and I said to myself we are around a good place, the Taliban, everything was gone.”
But he had bigger plans.
“I was sitting at home one day having a cup of tea and I was thinking, ‘I love soccer a lot.’ I said to myself: ‘We have enough players to play,'” he says.
“I pick up my phone and I call Neilab (Osman – the team’s manager) and I said, why not start doing soccer a bit more serious?”
Birth of The Rascals
The Rascals were born. Osman, a refugee worker for the Australian Human Rights Commission, said the birth of the team had its ups and downs.
“I knew some of these kids from working in schools and they were like, ‘I really want to play soccer when I grow up, I want to be a football player,'” she says.
“They’re not all under 13, some of them are younger if anything. One of them is a 10-year-old, and he’s an amazing 10-year-old.
“They started out playing inside – like futsal — and they were losing like 16-0.
“The first game was a tragedy almost for them because they walked up, and they were all excited in their gear, and they got thrashed.
“But from then on it was a process of Zarar and myself (and other volunteers), being patient with them and kind of supporting them and being optimistic and focusing on the goals that did go in as opposed to the goals that didn’t go in.”
Osman says the turn-around since has been exceptional, with the team now playing eleven-a-side football in a third-grade competition and remaining undefeated this season.
“They’re in a winter competition … and they’re coming first at the moment on 22 points,” she says.
“They won their first game 10-0 and a scout approached me and gave me invites for the entire team to join the Spirit FC Football Academy.
“In a year and a half, it kind of shows if you have faith and hope in people, especially kids, it’s limitless, they can do anything.”
A new sporting start for ‘Lionel’ and ‘Cristiano’
ABC Sport cannot name the boys for legal reasons, and instead we’re asked to use aliases – ones they’ve chosen after their favourite players — Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo.
“I like to play soccer because it’s good to play and I like most of them, my friends and my team,” says Lionel, who’s 12 and in year 6.
“We are winning all matches.”
Cristiano who’s 13 says: “I like to play soccer. I want to be a good soccer player in the future.”
On the field, they’re terriers, playing with passion and flair.
Crane’s husband, Chris Bullock, says one of the challenges they initially faced was teaching kids who were brought up playing scratch matches on makeshift stony pitches, to learn to play as a team rather than as a collection of individuals.
But that education has been instrumental in helping these kids connect with their new country.
Osman says football has given the boys structure and helped them to trust again.
“Football I think for them gives them a sense of community,” she says.
“Obviously they’ve had really traumatic lives when they were younger with their parents and each kid comes with a different struggle.”
She says the football club has helped the kids to begin a healing process.
“Because they come to soccer and they learn teamwork, they learn how to negotiate, they learn how to play under pressure, they learn how to have fun as well, they get active,” she says.
“They had a really intense evacuation process. The evacuation was difficult. The Taliban is brutal.
“And even upon arriving, it’s difficult navigating your way in Australia, you come to a new country, a new language, a new culture, a new way of being.
“Trauma is also the way they relate to people, whether or not they’ll build trust with someone.
“It’s the fact that they think twice or three times before doing anything or saying anything. It’s the over-alertness that they have towards things because they’ve been failed in life so many times.
“Trauma does impact them every day, but I think these kids have managed to channel it or regulate themselves or manage it on an everyday basis.
“I think for these kids especially, they’ve done a remarkable job at triumphing over it, and I think they’ll continue to do so.
“The very fact that we show up every week for their training and their games – it heals their perception of relationships.”
As for Zarar, Osman says “he’s a remarkable coach”.
“[The kids] love him; anything he says they will do,” she says.
Including copying his haircut.
“There was a week where I noticed they all had the same haircut because they really look up to him,” she says.
Crane says the coaching has benefited Zarar, as well as his charges.
“It’s given him a sense of purpose and giving back,” she says.
“That’s what I’ve seen him doing with the kids. Really leading them, being a role model for them and seeing that they can rise for sure.”
Crane and Osman aren’t the only ones who’ve seen what Zarar has achieved.
He was recently given a New South Wales Human Rights Award for Sport by the Governor of NSW, Margaret Beazley, at Government House in Sydney.
“I’m actually very proud of myself and very proud of these kids and I’m extremely happy,” Zarar says.
It’s been an extraordinary journey for a refugee who’s yet to turn 22, who left his family and all his belongings behind and who has been in Australia for less than two years.
And it’s only just beginning.
Zarar is planning to study IT, but for now is working as an intern in a biomedical engineering company and sending money back to his family in Afghanistan.
“I really love to bring my family to Australia. My mum is a bit sick, and I really want that she could come to Australia,” he says.
“I don’t know if it’s going to happen one day, but I’m going to try to put in an application for them and bring them here.
“I swear to myself, and I swear to God, whatever I want to do in Australia, whatever is my dream, I’m going to do it.”
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