After Fall of Hussein and Sons, Joy Returns to the Soccer Field
The big sun sinks in the desert haze and military helicopters skitter across the skyline as Nawar Jawad, who earns $1 a day in a sewing factory, breaks free on the dusty field and punches home a goal.
Sweaty boys cheer and little girls dance. Jawad throws up his arms. His teammates rush toward him. And for a few seconds, the world beyond this soccer field, with all its violence and uncertainty, has been stilled as a young man from a poor neighborhood has done the perfect thing with a scuffed-up ball and a ripped pair of shoes.
“I have scored,” he says.
Across this nation, down alleys, along highways and behind mosques, soccer fields come alive in the late summer dusk.
Most of the goals have no nets. Most of the teams have no uniforms. Some people play in sandals. Some play barefoot. The games are fast and rough. There is blood and laughter in the dirt, and when it’s over, the tired young men and boys drift through the darkness toward their homes and another night of gunshots and worry.
This is Iraq. Fear and joy laced, struggling with one another. Soccer is one of the few signs across this landscape that Iraqis are desperate for a more normal life. Every day the players from Jawad’s neighborhood, ranging in age from 11 to 23, come with their one, Chinese-made ball, kicking it amid the garbage, past the goats and beneath date palms and eucalyptus.
“Since Baghdad collapsed,” said Jawad’s coach, Ibrahim Khalil, “you see so many young men out playing soccer. When Saddam Hussein was in power, the young men were forced into the army or into other state things. He imposed himself on even the tiniest things in our lives. He’s gone and we have more space in our lives, and the boys find freedom to play what they love.”
Khalil’s team is Youth of Independence. Jawad, 19, is one of the stars. So is Tahsin Sady, an artist who works with Jawad in the sewing factory. Ahmed Tariq, a deserter from the Iraqi army, plays defense. Mohammed Haider is good by all accounts, but he is too young and must watch from the sidelines. So does Amjad Yasin, who, when the game is slow, shoots sparrows with a slingshot. And there’s Ahmed Sadi, 11. He has a broken tooth and a lisp and is made fun of often, but that does little to stop him from yapping.
“I am good,” he said. “My father taught me.”
The other boys laugh.
“It is a beautiful game,” Issam Ali said.
It was not always so. Hussein’s son Uday, killed along with his brother Qusai by U.S. forces in July, long had a sadistic hold on the country’s sports leagues. He was alleged to have tortured members of Iraq’s Olympic soccer team and was accused of preventing some of the nation’s finest athletes from competing because they lacked political connections.
With Uday gone, the promise of soccer has returned. Organized -- and not so organized -- leagues are in action and bet on from the mountains of the north to the sandy outposts in the south. Most fields have no grass. Some are stained with oil seeping from underground tanks. Others -- that housed artillery, missiles and tanks Hussein’s army scattered throughout neighborhoods before the U.S.-led invasion -- remain scarred by bombs.
Youth of Independence couldn’t care less about such things these days.
The boys stretch, gulp water and get ready to play.
The visiting team -- Abas Union -- is from the same neighborhood, known as Alif Dar, or the place of 1,000 houses. Built for Baghdad police officers by President Abdul Karim Kassem after the revolution in 1958, the neighborhood is a smudge of mud bricks along the highway. Most of the police officers are dead, and their sons and grandsons work in the marketplace or in small factories and shops.
The soccer game begins only after shovel boys do their work. They scrape away garbage and blowing plastic bags and papers. They clear some of the rocks and the sheep droppings, hauling it all away in a wheelbarrow. The field, say the players, has gotten worse in recent weeks as municipal truckers have dumped garbage across the dirt.
“We need to take care of it,” said one boy. “They neglect us.”
The game begins. Puffs of dirt rise with each footfall. The ball scrapes. Tariq catches an elbow to the head. He goes down and bleeds from the ear. He says he’ll be fine.
A little girl is chased from the field and just beyond, down an alley, there is a flash of color and the sounds of a horn and drum -- a wedding party. Cars and U.S. Army Humvees race past on the highway. The call to prayer echoes from a minaret; the game does not stop.
“It’s all changed since the war,” said Haider, a slight boy with bushy hair. “We play with full freedom now.”
“And we get satellite TV,” Sadiq Ali said. “I watch soccer from around the world. We get movies, too. I saw ‘Terminator’ yesterday.”
Jawad scores his first goal. Mohammed Abdul Amir comes off the field, graceful through the dust.
“I tried to play soccer under Saddam’s regime,” he said. “But if you didn’t have the right relatives or friends you were kicked out of the soccer clubs. That’s how it worked. Things are getting a little better now, but we need more security and stability. We have to capture the criminals of the old regime. We need the tip of the spear: Saddam Hussein. Only when he’s dead or captured will we be safe.”
Abas Union is moving toward a score.
“Defense, defense!” shouts coach Khalil.
The shot goes wide.
The boys who play here know the news beyond their field. Bombs rip through the nation, bodies float in the Tigris, U.S. soldiers move through on patrols. Tensions are rising between Shiite and Sunni Muslims. There are kidnappings, rapes, poverty, thieves and what Iraqis view as the unfulfilled promises of the coalition forces. Many call the U.S. military an occupier and want it out.
But the soccer boys don’t mind if the American troops stay a bit longer.
“For security and peace, I want the coalition army to stay,” said Sady, who studies drawing at a college of fine arts. “There will be even more chaos if they leave.”
The sun is gone. The soccer ball is a dim blur. The grunts are louder; sweat speckles the dust. The wind kicks up and the faint chalk lines whirl away like ghosts. A shout rings out and under a half-moon, Jawad takes a pass, zig-zags and shoots. The ball stays low and threads the goal.
The final whistle blows and Youth of Independence wins.
