Female refugees learn to soar

Captain Niloofar Rahmani from Afghanistan and Maya Ghazal from Syria both know what it means to escape conflict. After becoming the first woman to pilot a fixed-wing jet in the Afghani Air Force, Rahmmani began receiving death threats and was forced to seek refuge in the United States, where she was granted asylum in 2018. As a result of the worsening situation in Syria, Ghazal fled her home in Damascus to join her father in the United Kingdom.

As part of its “Everyone Counts” campaign, the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) and British actor Douglas Booth, who recently played Nikki Sixx in Netflix’s The Dirt, accompanied Ghazal on a flight and watched her make her first solo journey. The video was posted on social media on Monday.

“Civil war in Syria started eight years ago. In the end, it [was] just not bearable anymore. Electricity, water and going to school were not safe anymore,” she told Booth.

After the interview, Ghazal flew Booth in a small plane and then landed to drop him off so that she could make her first solo flight, a major milestone on the path to becoming a pilot.

When talking about flying, Ghazal oozes with passion. “I fell in love with the adrenaline and how you feel up in the air; how you have control of your path, where you go and [that] you draw it,” she said in the UNHRC’s video. “You decide, and nothing is really limiting you.”

Ghazal’s message, however, was not just about following her dreams: It was about what education means to refugees like her.

“Maya showed me how investing in education is the most powerful way to help them create a better future for themselves – and for everyone else,” Booth wrote on his Instagram.

Rahmani first garnered public attention in 2013 when she became the first woman to pilot a fixed-wing jet in the Afghani Air Force. Photos of her in a khaki flight suit, a black head covering, and thick-rimmed glasses began circulating across the globe and her story went viral.

She wanted to be a pilot from a young age and when she was 10, in 2001, she became more and more familiar with seeing jets when the US invaded Afghanistan.

However, her time in the Afghani Air Force was not easy. After struggling through doctors who attempted to medically disqualify her, according to BuzzFeed News, Rahmani faced disparaging colleagues and threats on her and her family’s lives from the Taliban. At one point, the Taliban warned her in a letter to “learn from Malala Yousafzai,” a Nobel Prize laureate who was nearly killed for fighting for women’s rights in Pakistan, Fox News reported in 2018.

“[My colleagues] always told me I’d fail because I am a woman, and because I am weak I would crash the plane and kill myself,” she told BuzzFeed News.