Looking for revenge against the home of terror

Independent:

The assistant coach fled Baghdad after receiving threats that his son would be kidnapped, the goalkeeper lost his brother-in-law in the sectarian violence and even fans have been targeted by suicide bombers.

So the fact that Iraq's national football team has made it to tomorrow's Asian Cup final is nothing short of a fairy tale.

The rainbow team is not only giving a country riven by conflict something to celebrate with its remarkable run, but with Sunnis and Shia, Arabs and Kurds in the line-up, it is also a reminder that unity is not an antiquated relic of the past.

Iraq have never made it to the final before, and three-times champions Saudi Arabia are the only thing standing between them and the trophy. The political ramifications of playing Osama bin Laden's homeland are not lost on some fans. "Everybody will be hoping that the team can take revenge on the country that produced terrorism," said Bashar Ali, who runs a take-away in Baghdad's Karrada district.

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Iraqi football has had a chequered history in recent years, particularly under Saddan Hussein's son, Uday. As head of the Iraqi Football Association, he sadistically used the sport and its stars as playthings.

Uday forced the country's best players to play where he chose; training sessions were called on a whim in the middle of the night and on at least one occasion he made a side play with a concrete football.

When players had a bad game, they would be locked up. The sentence depended on the crime, from two days for a defensive error to three weeks for a missed penalty.

Former Iraqi footballers such as Sharar Haydar, who defected in 1998, described being whisked away by the secret police, to a cell where he was beaten on the soles of his feet up to 20 times a day.

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Yet in spite of the chaos, they made it to the quarter-finals. Two hours before that match against Vietnam, midfielder Hawar Mulla Mohammed received a phone call from the Iraqi Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, telling him his step-mother had been killed in the violence at home. He played on, and the team won 2-0.

But on reaching Kuala Lumpur for the semi-final with South Korea, the Iraqi team arrived to find only seven rooms available for the 30-strong squad. To make matters worse, the rooms they were waiting for were being occupied by players from Iran.

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What? You mean things were worse under Saddam? They weren't flying kites in celebration? How did this information slip into a story from the Independent? This is a paper that supported the status quo in Iraq where soccer players were tortured and forced to play with concrete balls. Defeating a team from the country that is supplying most of the human ordinance in Iraq would be special.