IT MAY be easy to miss on the eve of another round of international fixtures, but take note tomorrow of Iraq versus Singapore. Take note, first, because this is a home game for Iraq being played abroad (no explanation required) in the United Arab Emirates, and secondly, because of what an Iraqi footballer has to go through to get there.
A month ago, gunmen dressed in military uniform pulled up near the Baghdad residence of Ghanim Ghudayer, a member of Iraq’s Olympic football team, grabbed him and disappeared. He, like them, has not been seen since.
Two months before the kidnapping, Akram Ahmed Salman, the national coach, and his assistant resigned citing death threats. Salman was the third coach to leave in three years, all for the same reason.
The month that Salman resigned, the coach of Iraq’s national wrestling team, Mohammed Karim Abid Sahib, was murdered. That same week, an armed gang walked into a meeting of the Iraq Olympic Committee, blindfolded and handcuffed 30 people and drove off with them at gunpoint. One of these was Jamal Abdul Karim, the president of the Iraqi taekwondo federation, who had lost 15 members of the national team when they were kidnapped three months earlier.
Of the 30 kidnapped in July, two were bodyguards whose bodies were found dumped on a street. Others were released, although still missing is Ahmed al-Hijiya, the chairman of the Olympic committee, who had spent many years as a political refugee in London and had gone back to Baghdad to reorganise sport in his homeland.
The International Olympic Committee, which has worked hard to revamp sport in Iraq, has attempted to monitor the situation but has found information impossible to ascertain. An IOC official explained yesterday that it knows neither the kidnappers nor their ransom demands, nor even how many of the group of 30 were ever released. “There has been no contact, either with us or with the national Olympic committee in Baghdad,” he said.
The IOC, meanwhile, continues to fund a number of potential Olympic athletes to train abroad. This is the kind of measure that might have made easy PR, but an indication of the security crisis is that it will not release the names. It is simply too dangerous.
BERND STANGE, one former Iraq national football coach, discovered this to his own misfortune. Stange is a German who coached Iraq before and after the recent war and succeeded in getting a team to qualify for the 2004 Olympics.
Before the Games, he wrote to Tony Blair asking for help for his team, and was invited with his team to train at Bisham Abbey. In England, the Iraq team were also invited to Westminster, where they were photographed with Jack Straw, “and that,” Stange said, “was where I went wrong.
“This picture was on the front page of many Iraqi newspapers. And after that, I got death threats. Maybe the connection (with London) makes people angry, maybe people thought I had money. But after that, my bodyguard said that he was not able to protect my life any more. I had already been advised by the German Government to leave, so that for me was enough.”
It is enough for any Iraqi athletes who can get out, too. The Iraqi Olympic Committee still has an office in Baghdad, although it is run from Jordan, as well. The Olympic football team of 2004 has dispersed around the Middle East to anywhere they might find a job because the professional game at home no longer exists.
Stange coaches Apollon Limassol in Cyprus, where he has five Iraqis under contract and an Iraqi goalkeeping coach and has hosted the national team for a training camp. He also receives regular phone calls from desperate players asking for help in finding work abroad.
“The situation is far worse than when I left,” he said. “There is no reason to stay in Iraq. There has been no national championship since the war; and football used to be so important there. There was no culture under Saddam Hussein, no cinema, music or theatre, but football was part of life. It was one thing they had.”
But why target footballers and athletes? As Stange said, no player in Baghdad had money. “It was the Americans who brought their fantastic gymnasiums to the Green Zone; all we had was our hearts and commitment and a goat field to train in,” he said.
One answer came from Abdul Karim, the taekwondo president, in an interview he gave four months before being abducted. “They want youths to stop practising sport because terrorists know that sport is the one thing that has succeeded in Iraq,” he said.
To generalise here, though, is impossible. Those reaping anarchy have a wide target and anyone seen to be connected to sport, and especially the West, is perceived to be connected to money and Western sympathies. So when Fifa, football’s world governing body, for instance, funds the Iraqi federation with $250,000 a year (about £135,000), or stumps up more than $1 million for a new technical centre, you wonder if the largesse is being misplaced. And when an Iraqi footballer goes to Jordan to play an international for his country, you wonder how much he risks advertising himself.
The irony, for those who remember the Iraq football team at the Athens Olympics, is acute. Playing in the United States at the time was a George Bush re-election TV campaign in which the flags of Afghanistan and Iraq fluttered in the breeze to a voiceover claiming: “Freedom is spreading through the world like a sunrise. At this Olympics, there will be two more free nations and two less terrorist regimes.”
Then, after Iraq had beaten Portugal 4-2, Bush addressed a crowd in Oregon praising the Iraq team and adding: “It wouldn’t have been free if the United States hadn’t acted.”
None of this went down well with the Iraq team in Athens, who hated the idea of becoming an American’s advertising campaign. Two years on, the idea simply does not work.
