Photo: PATRICIA DE MELO MOREIRA/AFP via Getty; Inset: Stefanie Keenan/Getty
Kim Kardashian West, together with her shapewear and loungewear companySKIMS, played a key role in helping a group of young Afghan refugees make their way out of the region this week.
The flight, carrying about 130 people, left Pakistan on Wednesday and landed in London on Thursday morning.
The source close to the situation tells PEOPLE that it was Popal who managed to secure visas to the U.K. for the development team “but she needed funding to get them out.”
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Popal had been working with the Tzedek Association, a prominent New York-based nonprofit working on criminal justice and humanitarian issues, and the group’s president, Rabbi Moshe Margaretten.
The source says that Popal reached out “a few weeks ago” to the nonprofit “about a serious crisis”: Members of the youth development team “were stuck in Pakistanfor many weeks after being rescued from Afghanistan.”
According to the source, the players “faced the terrible and dangerous risk of being sent back to Afghanistan if we [didn’t] get them out to another country soon.”
The AP reports that after the development team’s members made it to Pakistan, “they were left in limbo for weeks with no flight out of the country as the time limit on their Pakistani visas ticked down.”
The Tzedek Association then reached out to Kardashian West, 41, with whom they have worked on criminal justice, the source tells PEOPLE. “They asked Kim if she would be willing to help and within an hour she confirmed she would pay for the flight,” the source says.
Kim Kardashian West.Jared Siskin/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images
In a statement, Rabbi Margaretten said he was “so happy and excited” that the team members and their families “are finally now coming to a place of safety and security.”
“As the son and grandson of Holocaust survivors, a time when righteous non-Jewish people stepped up to the plate to help save so many Jewish people, I know in my heart that we must be there for others in their time of need at a time when their very lives are at risk. Thank youKim KardashianWest and SKIMS for your magnanimous assistance to fund this flight and make it a reality,” Margaretten said. “And thank you Khalida Popal for giving us the opportunity to partner in this life-and-death effort and for all that you are doing.”
The U.K. soccer team Leeds United also provided assistance, per the AP.
“This story truly shows that we are all God’s creations and should unify together to make this world a better place,” Margaretten said in his statement.
Since the Talibantook over much of Afghanistanthis summer, at the end of the U.S. war, tens of thousands of peoplehave fled the country.
Members of the Afghanistan national girls soccer team are seen on Sept. 21, in Lisbon, Portugal.AP
Female athletes have been seen as particularly vulnerable, given the Taliban’s history of repressing women and girls.
Members of the Afghan youth women’s national soccer teampreviously escaped for Portugaland the senior teamwent to Australia.
“I mean, you just can’t make this stuff up,” McKinley said, adding: “It was a lot of divine intervention and luck. But at the same time, luck is just when preparation meets opportunity. And we had done an incredible amount of preparation.”
source: people.com
