It is ten years since Jabbar Mousa and Kahtan Chetheer were whipped for losing a World Cup qualifying match, but their backs still bear the scars. Back home in Baghdad, Chetheer’s mother has not recovered completely from the stroke she suffered when he was carted off to prison. That 3-1 defeat by Kazakhstan was costly.

Here in Dubai, the debate is twofold: we are discussing how to create space on the football field; we are also discussing Mousa and Chetheer’s homeland and the price of freedom - is a footballer’s lot better or worse since Saddam Hussein?

In fact, for them, Saddam was an irrelevance; Uday, his son, who was the head of the national football federation, was the dictator in their lives. Uday never travelled to away games, but he always had his advisers attend. After that Kazakhstan result, away, in Almaty, Uday was advised that three players were responsible. That Chetheer had been on the pitch for only five minutes did not matter.

This week, Chetheer, Mousa and 16 of their countrymen, most of them internationals from the Iraq team of the Nineties, are in Dubai for a coaching course run by two coaches from the FA. Soho Square is panned for many things, but its international programme is one of which it can be proud. No other nation has given Iraqi football such help; given what these men have been through in the name of sport, they deserve everything they can get.

The idea is that they will go home and spread the word of football in their country. The sport is on an upswing - Iraq won the Asian Cup in July, beating Australia along the way. However, the conditions for coaches are unlike anywhere else in the world. One of the men on the course, Ibrahim Saad, had been coaching in Oman, but a Saddam-free Iraq and the success of his national team persuaded him to go home, to embrace the new world. He returned by bus in May and was kidnapped en route.

He was held for only 24 hours, he explained, because he managed to lie so convincingly that his kidnappers were persuaded that he, like they, was a Sunni. “I really had death before me,” he said. That they merely robbed him was therefore a blessing.

The country they will take their skills home to is certainly too dangerous for the FA coaches. The FA considered staging the course in Kurdistan but the Foreign Office refused to sanction it.

In Iraq, though, football is still a peripheral business. It is incredibly hard to organise even a practice session in the capital. And it might be the case, as Abbas Obaid, another player, said, that “our politicians do not care about sport”, and that, in a nation split by religion and ethnicity, “no one sees that sport is good for bringing people together”. Yet, for most of these coaches – although opinion is divided – the status quo now is an improvement.

What they all agree on is that international football in their day terrified them. A standard Uday punishment was to humiliate a player who had underperformed by shaving his head. Chetheer remembers the aftermath of another game when, despite a winning scoreline, the entire squad were locked in the “red room” under the national stadium for 24 hours without food or access to a toilet.

“It is impossible to describe the pressure we were under to perform,” he said. “The insults and the demeaning affected me. I suffered mentally and my game suffered, too.”

For him and Mousa, though, the nadir was the Kazakhstan game. “If you lost, you knew you might go to prison,” Mousa said. “Two days after we got home, I received a phone call asking me to go to the Olympic Committee. When we were there, one of Uday’s security guards came saying, ‘Who is Jabbar?’ He was toying with a handgun, spinning it round in his hand. We were taken to prison.

“It was there the three of us had our heads shaven and we were whipped, seven times for each of us with an electric cable. We were released after two days, but it was months before I was able to sleep on my back.”

Three years later, at the Asian Cup in Lebanon, the scars on Mousa’s back were spotted when he took off his shirt at the end of a game and a report was filed to Fifa. “When Fifa then sent investigators to Baghdad,” Chetheer said, “they hid Jabbar and me, showed them some different players and said, ‘Look, they’re fine.’ ”

The question that then arises is: why turn out for the team? “You never said no to the national team,” Obaid said, “because you knew bad things would follow. They would punish your family, my brother, for instance.”

Even in South Korea, where Obaid played as a professional for six years, he dared not say no to the call-up. Uday would personally pocket a 40 per cent share of Obaid’s $120,000 (about £75,000 in 1996) wage, but that was not enough.

“One time, in 1996, I was called up for an international,” he said. “I had long hair at the time. I arrived two days late because I couldn’t find a flight from Korea. When I did arrive, I’d been travelling for 30 hours and so my first day I only did jogging; I didn’t do full training. When Uday saw me, there were people applauding me and he didn’t like that, so he had me taken away and had my hair cut off.”

Saad said: “What Uday did not like was when the players overshadowed him. He banned us from going out at night and that was not to make sure we remained fit and healthy. It was because he didn’t like people liking us.”

So this is how life has changed. Back then, players were banned from leaving their house at night because Uday decreed it; now they hardly dare go out because the streets are so dangerous. Back then, the fear was of performing badly for their country; this has now been replaced by a fear of the kidnapping gangs.

“If you are a professional footballer with a contract, criminal gangs assume you have money,” Najih Hmoud, the vice-president of the Iraq football federation, said. “And terrorists want exposure. By taking a national player, they get coverage. Footballers are the best-known targets.”

Almost every player knows another who has been kidnapped. “My friend Ghanim Ghudayer was taken,” Mousa said. “He was in his home and they came dressed in police uniform. He hasn’t been seen since – and that was 1½ years ago.”

This is why Chetheer is no advocate of the post-Saddam era. “Nowadays,” he said, “you don’t know who is following you or what could explode in front of you. You fear going to training, you fear moving about. It was much safer back then. Under a dictatorship, you had safety; that’s what a dictator does.” But Chetheer is on the minority side in this group. “Freedom comes at a price,” Saad said. “For me, just being able to have this conversation is a freedom.”

One hopes that their time with the FA this week will help their cause. “I believe that there are better times ahead.” Saad said. For this group of Iraqis, they are certainly overdue.

Three Iraq players secretly left their team hotel in Australia hours after playing an Olympic qualifying match on Saturday and plan to seek asylum. Ali Abbas, one of the heroes of Iraq’s Asian Cup triumph in July, was among the trio, according to Tariq Ahmed, the Iraqi FA assistant secretary. Sadi Toma, a coach, had also gone missing, Ahmed said.

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