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With the Taliban closing in on Kabul, the national women’s football team had already fled Afghanistan, so Ugra implored Jones to touch base with cricketer Benafsha Hashimi to check on her wellbeing.
“You don’t know who I am,” Australian cricket great Jones messaged Hashimi.
“But do you, and any of the players, think that your lives are in threat, and would you like to look at potentially getting out?”
Hashimi replied immediately with a voice message: “Yes, we do.”
Over the following fortnight, Jones set up a “backyard immigration office” in her hotel room, liaising with the Australian Government to help organise humanitarian visas for Hashimi and her teammates. What started as a list of 19 contracted players quickly grew with the addition of coaches, administrators, members of the Afghanistan Cricket Board and relatives.
Soon, 135 names were seeking humanitarian visas, fearful for their lives and desperate to get out of Afghanistan.
“The list got very big, very quickly,” Jones explained.
“The Australian Government said there’s not a chance that this will fly. But in the end, we got 130-plus out.”
The plan was for the cricketers to cross the Pakistani border and travel to Islamabad, where they would undergo a mandatory two-week quarantine before flying to Australia.
However, first they needed to get out of Afghanistan.
“That was probably the most stressful part of it,” Jones said.
“The Taliban had taken over Kabul, but there were a lot of different militant groups that had power over sections all the way along the border as well. ISIS had a section.”
The players …
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