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

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.

Dressed in light blue jeans, a white T-shirt and a brown bomber jacket, Anita smiles as she retraces her journey into the brutal world of MMA fighting.

MMA is a full-contact combat sport that combines techniques from boxing, grappling, karate, Brazilian jiujitsu and kickboxing. A typical MMA bout leaves both fighters with a bloodied face, bruised body, swollen eyes and, occasionally, broken limbs.
Before Anita’s international debut in July 2018, no woman from Pakistan had ever competed in an international MMA fight.

Now, eight years later, Anita is preparing to step into the ring as a home favourite when Pakistan hosts its first-ever professional women’s MMA fight on Saturday. She will fight Parisa Shamsabadi of Iran for the female championship.‘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.”