‘I didn’t set out to break records’: Pakistan’s first female MMA fighter

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Islamabad, Pakistan – Six months into her training as a mixed martial arts (MMA) fighter, Anita Karim grappled with her father on their living room floor, knocking him unconscious in six seconds.

Sitting in a busy coffee shop in Pakistan’s capital on a balmy day in October, Anita laughs as she recalls that summer afternoon in 2017.

‘A missing piece’

MMA did not emerge on the sporting landscape in Pakistan until the early 2010s, and it was not officially recognised as a sport in the country until 2020.

But Anita threw caution to the wind and swapped a spot at a renowned national university for a profession that no Pakistani woman had ventured into before. There were no guarantees of a steady income or acceptance in the male-dominated sport.

Still, her father, Nisar, and her mother, Nelofar, reluctantly allowed their daughter to proceed but not without apprehensions and a warning: There would be no giving up when the going got tough.

“I didn’t mind when my parents told me I couldn’t turn back from the road I had taken to become an MMA fighter. Martial arts was something I grew up with, so I was determined to carve out a career in the sport,” she says matter-of-factly.

Nisar, who worked as a security guard, had long been interested in combat sports, and his three sons – Uloomi Karim, Ali Sultan and Ehtisham Karim – had all tried their hands at MMA long before their sister became an international athlete.

After sitting at the cafe for more than 10 minutes, Anita does not seem interested in buying a coffee or even a bottle of water. She’s eager to carry on with her story, which turns towards her brothers and how their Islamabad gym, Fight Fortress, became her gateway into the sport.

“My brothers began training other athletes from a small patch of grass in a park, and now their gym is amongst the most sought-after places for MMA training,” Anita says, her face beaming with pride.

Initially, she tagged along to the gym just to hang out with her brothers. Gradually, Anita started dabbling in light training to stay fit and resume her earlier martial arts training.

Watching her brothers train got Anita thinking. She would picture herself with a strong body, a skill set of the best MMA moves and her arms raised in victory.

“I felt that in MMA, I had found a missing piece in life.”

MMA fighter Anita Karim trains at a gym in Islamabad, Pakistan

A form of self-defence

It is a couple of hours after Friday’s midday prayers, and the cafe is now bustling with a late afternoon surge of customers – students settling in with a cup of coffee and books, delivery drivers picking up orders, and groups of young men and women taking selfies and chatting over coffee.

Anita, however, seems oblivious to her surroundings and the increasing noise levels as she travels back in time to her childhood.

Born on October 2, 1996, into a family of the Burusho people, an ethnolinguistic group, Anita says she was raised in a “simple middle-class lifestyle” in the mountains.

The people of Karimabad number about 15,000 and mostly follow Ismailism, a sect of Shia Islam, and rely on agriculture as a source of income.

Anita’s hometown is the capital of Hunza District and sits in a valley known as the crown jewel of Pakistan’s breathtaking northern landscape of icy blue rivers, snow-capped mountains, lush green terraces of fruit orchards, centuries-old forts and glaciers.

The family’s terraced house was built into the rugged Karakoram mountains.

“Like most other houses in the town, ours was also high up above the river and offered spectacular views of the valley,” she says.

Anita would wake up to see the sun rise from behind the snow-capped Rakaposhi (the Shining Wall), the 27th highest mountain in the world, and reluctantly leave the warmth of her bed on bitterly cold mornings to start her school day.

The Hunza river flows through the Hunza valley, alongside the Karkoram mountain range in Pakistan's Gilgit-Baltistan region [Hafsa Adil/Al Jazeera]

She and her brothers, like most local children, walked to school on the narrow, unevenly sloped streets that run through Karimabad. Given the short distances and mostly unpaved roads, walking is how most locals have got around for decades.

After school, Anita would make her way to the taekwondo lessons that her father enrolled her in.

“In a way, my father sparked an interest in combat sports by pushing me towards taekwondo when I was seven,” she says.

“He wanted me to learn martial arts so I could be strong like my brothers and as a form of self-defence. He felt that physical strength could instil a sense of independence in me from an early age.”

The 29-year-old remembers trying to sneak away after school to play with her friends in the neighbourhood, only for her dad to catch her and pull her back to her lessons. “He would never worry about my grades, but I dared not miss those after-school martial arts classes,” she recalls.

Anita explains that it was important to Nisar that she could defend herself.

Leaning forward after a few seconds of silence, she recalls an incident when a man chased her while she was out working in the fields.

“I wasn’t too far from my house, so I hurried back home and told my father, who came out and furiously beat the man. I added a few kicks as well,” she remembers with a bitter laugh.

It brings back more early memories of fighting. They involved putting some of her skills to use in neighbourhood scuffles between children.

“I would be pushed forward in all neighbourhood fights, especially if they involved boys. Yeah, I got into quite a few of them and beat up many boys.”

Childhood in the mountains

After having three sons, Anita’s father doted on her and she mostly got her way with him – from getting away with the occasional poor grades at school to later winning his approval on her choice of career. But she couldn’t do the same with her “military chief” mother, who taught her household chores.

Nelofar, a housewife who later worked as a tea lady at a local college, would get her 10-year-old daughter to help with cooking, cleaning and laundry.

Anita would also put in strenuous shifts in the fields.

The “early years of physical training”, as she calls them with a sarcastic laugh, involved climbing back home into the mountains from the low-lying terraced fields in the valley with a heavy load on her back.

“We would carry sacks full of apricots from the family’s grove in spring and summer, the last remaining green leaves and grass for my family’s cattle in autumn and firewood in winter,” she says nonchalantly, indicating how it was embedded into mountain children’s everyday lives.

The arduous hikes home would sometimes take an hour or longer and would be followed by the task of washing and spreading out the deep-golden apricots to dry them in the sun.

And while Anita wasn’t fond of carrying out those laborious tasks as a schoolgirl, she looks back on those years with gratitude.

“It’s a link back to my roots, a part of my identity that I don’t want to leave behind – not like I have much choice as mum still keeps me on my toes whenever I return home,” she jokes, adding that she’s grateful for the opportunity it provides to disconnect from the grind of city life.

While having her day packed with chores and after-school lessons, which also included evening classes at the local religious centre, Anita was expected to do well in school and eventually go to university.

Hunza is renowned for its high literacy rate – 95 percent compared with the national average of 61 percent – and for providing equal educational and entrepreneurial opportunities for men and women. It is an anomaly, especially for a remote region in Pakistan, where many girls in similarly isolated villages and towns do not have access to primary education. Overall, one in five girls in the country is married before the age of 18.

Anita credits her community’s leaders, specifically the Aga Khan, the spiritual leader of the Ismaili Shia Muslim community internationally, for encouraging parents to educate their daughters.

“We follow our [Ismaili] imam’s guidance and instructions. It helps maintain a strong sense of bond within the community,” she says.

“While in other parts of Pakistan, different communities try to bring each other down, we build each other up in Hunza,” she adds proudly.

The conversation returns to her move in 2017 to Islamabad.

While there to study for a university degree, Anita, then 20, found herself reluctant to stick to the “mould”.

“In our [Pakistani] culture, as soon as a girl is born, it is presumed that after attaining a certain level of education – if she’s lucky – she will get married and have kids,” she says with a clear look of annoyance.

“That’s not what a woman’s life should be restricted to,” she adds, shaking her head.

“She should have the right to make her own choices. I was lucky to have supportive parents who backed me when I took that leap of faith.”

The sun sets behind the Karakoram mountain range, as seen from Karimabad in Hunza valley, Pakistan [Hafsa Adil/Al Jazeera]

‘The Arm Collector’

Once Anita’s parents were on board with her MMA career plan, her brothers took her under their wing for training.

That first year, she focused on building her physical strength, agility and stamina in addition to mastering the skills on her trainee fighter’s CV.

An MMA fighter must not only be strong to last in the ring – usually for three rounds of five minutes each – but also must quickly bounce back from an onslaught of kicks, punches, knee and elbow strikes, body slams, joint locks and chokeholds.

Anita’s brothers knew what she would face. Ehtisham and Ali had been training MMA fighters since 2008, and Uloomi made his own MMA debut in 2014. So they put her through months of rigorous training.

Her broad smile and light-hearted tone return when she talks about her siblings.

“My brothers are my best friends, my role models, my mentors and my toughest trainers,” she says.

Uloomi, who was then one of the best MMA fighters in Pakistan, would show no restraint when training with his sister, delivering body slams, knee kicks and a flurry of punches to her face.

As the only girl at the gym and the first female Pakistani MMA fighter, Anita’s sparring partners and practice fight opponents were all men, which helped her build up her strength for her first fight.

Most international fighters sign with global promotions, private companies that contract fighters and organise competitions, on the back of amateur fights. Because women’s MMA fights were not introduced in Pakistan until after 2020, Anita could not follow that path.

Instead, she participated in local martial arts competitions, won most of them and picked up her fighter’s nickname “The Arm Collector”.

Anita shrugs nonchalantly as she recalls the painful incident from a Brazilian jiujitsu match when she dislocated her opponent’s elbow. She laughs with a competitive spirit when she tells the story of how she earned the nickname.

“I had a girl down on the mat in an Americana lock, a shoulder-lock move, but she wasn’t willing to tap out [of the fight], so I looked quizzically at my brother Uloomi, who was watching from my ringside corner. He told me to apply more pressure. I yanked harder and felt her arm go limp,” she recounts.

“The girl’s teammate came onto the mat to face me next and vowed revenge. I pulled the same move on her, and the result was the same. That’s how I got the nickname.”

Breaking limbs is not common in martial arts fights, but some chokehold positions can result in snapped or dislocated arms if the fighter, especially an amateur, does not tap out swiftly enough.

With no prospects of an MMA tournament at home due to a lack of competitions and female fighters, Anita made the leap to professional MMA fighting in July 2018.

Her baptism by fire came in Singapore against Nyrene Crowley, an experienced fighter from New Zealand seven years her senior. Crowley forced Anita into submission two minutes into the second round. It was a reality check for the novice and one that sent her back to the drawing board.

Back at the gym in Islamabad, the training sessions got more gruelling and the practice fights more intense. Seven months later, Anita returned to the same ring as a smarter and stronger fighter.

Lighter on her feet, more patient with her moves and visibly more muscular, she faced Indonesia’s Gita Suharsono for her second fight.

The 152cm-tall (5ft-tall) Anita used her shorter height to get under Gita’s 5cm (6-inch) taller frame to land hooks and jabs that left the Indonesian frustrated. After three rounds and a unanimous decision by the judges, Anita secured her first international MMA win.

Anita Karim Pakistani MMA fighter [Courtesy of Anita Karim]

Hero’s welcome

As the first Pakistani woman to win an international fight, Anita expected the result to make waves back home, but she wasn’t prepared for the scenes that unfolded upon her return a few days later.

It was one of the most remarkable moments in her life, and Anita holds on to the memories dearly, recalling them with tears in her eyes.

“I was stunned to see hundreds of supporters chanting my name and jostling to get a closer glimpse of me at Islamabad airport,” she says, her voice raised with excitement.

After squeezing past the crowd under a shower of petals with garlands around her neck and bouquets in hand, Anita stopped in her tracks. A group of men had encircled her in an impromptu dance set to traditional Hunzai music.

Such grand gestures are usually reserved for Pakistan’s male cricketers. Olympic gold-medal javelin thrower Arshad Nadeem was a rare exception in 2024.

“I had never seen such a big crowd at the airport. It was incredibly heartwarming, and then things got really crazy when I went to Hunza.

“On the ride home, I was soaking in the views and enjoying the tranquillity I feel whenever I’m in Hunza, but as soon as we approached Hassanabad Bridge, the scene changed dramatically.”

Hassanabad is the last town along the Karakoram Highway before it crosses over the Hunza River towards Karimabad. The bridge, which crumbled due to the bursting of a glacial lake in 2022 flooding, served as an entryway into Karimabad and its surrounding areas.

Anita gets animated – sitting up straighter and smiling wider – at the mention of her hometown and raises her voice to speak over the chatter from nearby tables and the sound of Billie Eilish songs playing inside the coffee shop.

“Traffic on the narrow, single-carriage highway was suddenly diverted to a one-way route all the way up to Karimabad. Hundreds of men, women and children had lined up on either side of the road to welcome me,” she recalls.

She explains how she stopped at every town and neighbourhood along the way to greet her fans, turning the normally 45-minute journey into a five-hour trip.

Her voice goes quieter, and she pauses to take a deep breath.

“It was worth every second, though, when I saw my parents waiting for me at the doorstep,” she says.

“When I began training in 2017, I didn’t set out to break any records or lap up adulation. I just wanted to be my best at something I loved and make my parents proud. But when I saw the outpouring of love, it felt like a transformative moment. Perhaps I had changed the country’s perspective on women in MMA.”

As the local hero happily spent the following month hosting guests and visiting local schools and colleges to meet eager new fans, one moment stood out for her.

“I was invited to a celebratory event at the college where my mum worked as a tea lady, and when we were asked to step on the stage together, I couldn’t fight my tears,” she says with a quivering voice.

“It was my proudest moment – my mother was honoured because of me and sat alongside me.”

Training in Thailand

Inside the cafe, Anita draws a few lingering looks from the nearby tables, but people are otherwise absorbed in their own conversations. With a deep breath, she takes a deep dive into the most crucial and testing period of her career.

Once the dust had settled on her trailblazing win, Anita’s coaching team felt the need to crank up the intensity of her training and practice sessions before bigger fights.

A few months later, she signed with Fairtex, a well-known Muay Thai gym in Pattaya, Thailand, that has trained famous MMA fighters, including Alex Gong, Stamp Fairtex and Gilbert Melendez.

Thus began the most gruelling and lonely years of Anita’s life.

She was plucked out of the bubble of a family-run gym in her home country and thrown into the mix with hundreds of fighters from around the world in a land with a centuries-old history of martial arts.

Fairtex founder and owner Philip Wong was a notoriously hard taskmaster and pushed his fighters to their limits.

Amid the grind of 14-hour training days, missing home and the months spent without friends, self-doubt often crept into Anita’s mind.

She continues to smile but looks down at her hands while fidgeting nervously with her fingers. She dives back into her thoughts, sharing some of the darkest moments from those early years in Thailand.

“It wasn’t easy. I struggled mentally and physically,” she says, her voice strained with emotion.

“I had to sort it all out by myself, from chopping off my long hair to celebrating Eid and other occasions on my own and coping with a battered body. There were moments when I wondered if it was all really worth it.”

When asked to explain what those moments entailed, she nods slowly before recalling a few instances when she had to dig deep to persevere.

“Once, I felt my knee give way, but I literally taped it back in to prepare for a fight. I learned how to cook better because I couldn’t live on Thai food. My skin broke out. I lost sleep. I feared losing because it would bring the wrath of the boss [Philip]. I would sit under a cold shower to drown out the thoughts of giving up.

“I would think back to the moment I decided to drop a university degree and pick up the gloves and tell myself: ‘I’ve made it this far. There’s no turning back.’”

She slowly learned to cope with doubts and injuries and made friends.

“I addressed my problems and fears by treating them like puzzles,” she says, shrugging.

Anita moves her hands on the table as if to rearrange the pieces of an imaginary jigsaw puzzle to explain how she would break down and rearrange pieces of the problem.

“I kept trying to come up with different solutions until one clicked.”

After battling her way through the early struggles, Anita thrived in Thailand. She trained with some of the world’s best fighters, including Muay Thai and MMA champion Stamp Fairtex, and rose through the ranks to represent the gym at combat sports events.

During her five years in Thailand, she won four of her next five fights and built a reputation as one of the best up-and-coming MMA fighters in Asia.

Having completed strenuous training at Fairtex, Anita returned to Pakistan permanently in August 2024, and in September that year, she married her long-term fiance, Hassan Gul Basti, whom she met at her brothers’ gym.

After a simple Hunzai wedding, the couple moved back to Islamabad, where Hassan works as an MMA and boxing trainer.

Anita’s smile grows wider as she speaks of her husband and his family.

“They are amongst my biggest fans and supporters. All they want from me is to be the best MMA fighter. Unlike most in-laws in Pakistani culture, there is no pressure to spend more time with them and no rush to have kids.”

Anita Karim spent five years honing her MMA skills at the Fairtex Training Centre in Pattaya, Thailand [Courtesty of Anita Karim]

Hustle to stay afloat

A week after the conversation at the coffee shop, Anita offers a glimpse of her combat training routine at Fight Fortress, the gym run by her brothers, where a select group of athletes trains for 90 minutes under the watchful eye of head coach Sher Alam.

After a 45-minute, cardio-heavy warm-up, the group gears up for fight training with shin guards and boxing gloves. During MMA fights, they can wear only grappling gloves, but for training, the athletes add extra layers of protection to minimise injuries. Once they are divided into pairs, a Muay Thai-style kickboxing session begins.

Anita is the first one to throw punches. Her usual cheerful smile is replaced with a look of intense concentration.

With quick movements and light touches – the idea is to improve skills, not hurt partners during training – she spars for a few minutes before the roles are reversed. Next, she gets into a high guard, a boxing stance used for protecting the face, and moves with nimble footwork to stay out of her opponent’s range.

The thud of clashing gloves and the grunts of sparring fighters are occasionally interspersed with the coach’s instructions.

After a quick hydration break, the pairs grapple in short bursts of simulated drills, ranging from kicks to body-clinch moves and floor sprawls. Despite her small frame, Anita matches her taller opponent. In one swift move, she grabs his leg and keeps him hopping in a single-leg takedown until he drops on the mat.

Once the training wraps up, Anita winds down with the other fighters, forcing herself into their post-workout photos, sharing jokes and high fives. Soon, goodbyes are exchanged before the athletes pack up their equipment and head out.

Anita, though, stays a bit longer on the mat and asks Sher to help her brush up on some grappling techniques.

With the first of her day’s three training sessions done, Anita settles down on the mat to reveal the struggle of surviving as an MMA fighter in an otherwise cricket-mad country.

Seven years after her breakthrough, which made her the face of women’s MMA in Pakistan, Anita still does not earn enough from the sport to pay her bills and afford a fighter’s lifestyle.

To make ends meet, she uses her skills and experience to moonlight as a personal trainer for private clients. Like most Pakistani fighters, including her brothers and the athletes she trains with, this side gig is crucial to staying afloat.

“It is not cheap to sustain yourself as an MMA fighter. You need money for a regular intake of expensive nutritional supplements, a high-protein diet, and for rehab and recovery following major fights,” she explains as she wipes beads of sweat off her forehead.

Pakistan offers little in lucrative long-term endorsements for most athletes, except cricketers. This is especially true for MMA fighters, who receive no government stipends or financial support.

Finding sponsors, convincing them to commit to a sport that is not cricket and ensuring they don’t back out of a deal is all part of a fighter’s hustle.

Anita has not signed up for an international event since her last fight in January 2024, which she attributes to the difficulty of obtaining visas with a Pakistani passport and negotiating terms with global MMA promotions.

But she does not dwell on these troubles. Instead, she is looking forward to competing in Pakistan’s first women’s MMA title fight on Saturday.

Whether she’s preparing for a looming fight or simply training, Anita knows that maintaining her confidence and staying in touch with her roots are essential to her success.

“At the end of every training session, I post a selfie to feel good about myself and the work I put in, play some Burushaski music on my headphones, close my eyes and let it carry me back to Hunza.”

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