Fawzia Koofi, dubbed the “Afghan Hillary Clinton,” is making steps toward running for president, according to a report.
Koofi, a lawmaker, launched her new party, the Movement for Change in Afghanistan, on Thursday as hundreds of supporters gathered around.
“I don’t know who will be the next president, I don’t know, no one knows,” she said, according to NBC. “But we must come out of the days of darkness, and bring about change.”
She has a number of supporters across Afghanistan.
“She has support all around the country, and she will get votes from everyone,” Shugufa Wassiqzada, 20, was quoted as saying. “Not only women but people from all over will vote for her!”
But some have said that her venture into campaigning for the nation’s top office is premature.
“I’m sorry to say a woman cannot be president in Afghanistan, because of mentality, because of culture, because of tradition,” Wadeer Safi, a political scientist at Kabul University, told NBC. He said her campaign was a “good start for future generations,” however.
According to a CNN report in June, Koofi--the 19th child in her family--has a dangerous mission.
“Today I am going on political business to Faizabad and Darwaz. I hope I will come back soon and see you again, but I have to say that perhaps I will not,” she wrote to her two children on the campaign trail.
Koofi has said that hardline Islamist militants in the country, including the Taliban, want to see her dead or not campaigning anymore. “One day the Taliban will probably succeed in killing me,” she wrote in an editorial in the Daily Beast months ago.
In the article, she decried the situation of women in Afghanistan and the international community taking a blind eye.
She wrote: “I am resigned to this fate. But for as long as I am alive, I will not rest in my desire to lead my people out an abyss of corruption and poverty. For this reason, I am running for the Afghan presidency in 2014. I was born a girl who should have died. But if God wills it, I may die having become the first female president of a country I love and a country that will finally see all of its children—both boys and girls—born into peace and security, not violence and war.”
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