Niloofar Rahmani

Niloofar Rahmani

Niloofar Rahmani (* approx. 1992 ) is an Afghan fighter pilot . She is the first Afghan woman to be trained as a pilot since the end of Taliban rule . Through numerous media reports about her, she also temporarily became a symbol for a modern image of women in Afghanistan.

Rahmani belongs to a Persian- speaking ethnic group in Afghanistan. Her family fled the Taliban from Kabul to Pakistan in the late 1990s . After the fall of the Taliban in 2001, the family returned to Afghanistan. Rahmani wanted to be a pilot as a child and when the Afghan armed forces decided to allow women to pilot training, she successfully applied. From 2010 to 2012 she completed the pilot training program of the Afghan Air Force in the United States and received the rank of Second Lieutenant , later completed further training to fly the Cessna 208 transport aircraft and was promoted to captain . The army then used it primarily for transport flights, including for the transport of high-ranking military personnel and politicians, who initially often had objections to a female pilot.

After she received increased media coverage, she received death threats from both the Taliban and her own extended family, in which relatives disapproved of her career choices and demeanor. Her family had to move several times for security reasons. In 2015 she went back to the USA for a 15-month training course to fly the Lockheed C-130 Hercules . There she received the International Women of Courage Award from Michelle Obama in the same year . At the end of 2016, after completing her education, she did not return to Afghanistan, but applied for asylum in the United States because she saw herself and her family as too endangered. The asylum application met with severe criticism from the Afghan government and the Afghan military and was accused of having invented the death threats and of evading her (military) duties.

swell

• Danielle Moylan: Meet Afghanistan's first female fixed-wing pilot . Al Jazeera English, November 9, 2015
• Mirwais Harooni, James Mackenzie: Anger in Afghanistan at female pilot's US asylum bid . Reuters, December 25, 2016
• Mohammad Jawad (dpa), Christine-Felice Röhrs (dpa): Afghanistan's first female air force pilot gives up . Spiegel Online, December 26, 2016
• Jawad: Sukhanyar: Afghan Response to Female Pilot's US Asylum Case: 'I Am Sure She Lied' . New York Times, December 25, 2016

Web links

Commons : Niloofar Rahmani  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• Rahmani's official Facebook page
• "We were wrong ... and now we're proud of you" . The Conversation, BBC, July 17, 2015 (audio, 2 min.)
• Death threats force Afghanistan's first female Air Force pilot to quit . As It Happens, CBC radio, August 7, 2015 (audio, 6:47 min.)
• Biographies of 2015 Award Winners - Website of the US Department of State with the biographies of the winners of the 2015 International Women of Courage Awards