"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."
"Papa was stronger, and he pulled me down, but I had better technique, so I went behind him and applied a rear-naked choke a martial arts chokehold and counted the seconds until he was out, she says. He regained consciousness quickly, she adds, but not before my mum had screamed at me for trying to kill my father. Her father, however, was impressed with her skills."
"It was Anita's first trip back to her family home in Karimabad, a historic town in northern Pakistan's mountainous Gilgit-Baltistan region 2,500 metres (8,200ft) above sea level and 700km (435 miles) from Islamabad, where she was living and training with her three older brothers. A few months earlier, she told her parents over a tense phone call that her heart was set on MMA and she was dropping out of university to become a fighter."
Anita Karim trained seriously in mixed martial arts, developing technique that allowed rapid success in sparring and surprised her family. She left university to focus on fighting and relocated to Islamabad to train with her three older brothers. Before her international debut in July 2018, no Pakistani woman had competed in international MMA. MMA combines boxing, grappling, karate, Brazilian jiujitsu and kickboxing, and often leaves fighters bloodied and bruised. Eight years after her debut, Anita prepared to fight at Pakistan's first-ever professional women's MMA event, scheduled as a home favourite.
Read at www.aljazeera.com
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