Afridun Amu was the lone surfer carrying Afghanistan’s flag at last year’s Asian Surfing Championship in India, the event that secured the country’s spot at this year’s Asian Games – switching, heat to heat, between competing and commentating for the Asian Surfing Federation. Born in Kabul, Afghanistan, but grew up in Europe, Amu first discovered surfing at 19, on a high-school graduation trip to France’s southern Atlantic coast.
It’s a familiar pattern in countries with no surf culture of their own: the sport arrives secondhand, discovered abroad before anyone tries to bring it home. For someone from a landlocked country, it seems like there is almost no other way in. In 2018, Amu did exactly that – returned to Afghanistan with a trip planned specifically to explore what surfing there could look like. “When the ice melts, the mountain rivers create a great spot for static waves. The idea was for them to experience the movement of being on a board”, he explained.
That idea found its fullest form in Afghanistan’s Panjshir Valley. It started with Ehssanullah Akbar, president of the Peace and Sport Council of Afghanistan, who was introduced to Amu through a mutual friend, Oliver, the founder of Skateistan in Afghanistan at a gala dinner in Monaco hosted by Prince Albert II. “Around that dinner table, we began discussing an extraordinary idea,” Akbar recalls. “Could surfing become part of Afghanistan’s future?”
Research showed that snowmelt fed the Panjshir River with a strong enough current to create natural standing waves – river surf, not ocean surf, but surf all the same. It gave the team a starting point in a country that, on paper, shouldn’t have had one.
In 2018, a small international team surveyed the valley: Amu; Jacob Kelly, a surfer from Canada; Benjamin Di-Qual, a German surfer and engineer who specialized in artificial wave systems; and Nico Walz, a documentary filmmaker from Germany. They mapped water flow, scouted sites, and met with local authorities – laying groundwork for what Akbar hoped would eventually become a permanent facility, with artificial standing waves and a training ground for the next generation of Afghan surfers. What Akbar remembers most isn’t the technical survey but who showed up to watch it. “The greatest surprise came from the local people,” he says. “Village elders, children, students, families – everyone watched with curiosity and excitement.” The program itself was built with that breadth in mind – designed for children and adults, women and men, school students and entire local communities. After one of the last sessions, one of the visiting surfers gave a local boy the fin key off his board, as a keepsake of something the boy had just watched happen for the first time in his country.
The second phase of a similar program was scheduled for November 2021. It never happened with a vision to establish an artificial wave facility for continuing the growth of the sport. On August 15, 2021, the Afghan government collapsed and the Taliban took control of the country. “Our project stopped,” Akbar says. Whatever domestic surf community Afghanistan might have had was over before it had properly started, and it has not restarted since. Unlike countries where the sport struggles against underfunding or social stigma but still has a beach, a club, a next generation coming up through it, Afghanistan’s surfing now exists almost entirely outside Afghanistan – no federation on the ground, no facility or no path for the kids.
“If you’re asking me how many competitive Afghan surfers are out there, it’ll probably be less than ten,” Amu says. He estimates the number scattered across the diaspora – Afghans who left during decades of war and happened to land somewhere with a coastline – at a thousand or more. It’s a guess, he admits, not a count. But it captures something true about Afghan surfing: it doesn’t live in Afghanistan. It lives wherever Afghans ended up.
Akbar, for his part, isn’t ready to call any of it finished. “We succeeded in planting something even more important – a dream,” he says of the Panjshir project. He still believes Afghanistan’s current situation won’t last forever and that when it changes, the artificial wave facility will get built, with the same long-term vision that started it: a country producing surfers good enough to compete at the Olympics.
