Soccer victory unites divided nation

It was a day Iraqis will remember for years to come.

Millions watched Sunday evening as the underdog Iraqi national soccer team won their first Asian Cup, beating three-time champions Saudi Arabia 1-0.

Fans took to the streets to celebrate across Iraq -- in Kurdish areas in the north, Shiite holy cities to the south and several neighborhoods in the capital.

Revelers painted their faces with the colors of the Iraqi flag and threw candy, lighted fireworks and ululated in triumph. Iraqi soldiers waved from passing Humvees. Honking cars clogged the main route into Baghdad’s fortified Green Zone, home to the Iraqi government, U.S. Embassy and U.S. military posts.

Sporadic gunfire, much of it deemed to be celebratory, could still be heard hours after the game ended. At least two civilians were killed in clashes with Baghdad police and two more in gunfire after the game, police said.

Khadim Lafta Alwan, a government worker, was among those shooting in the southern city of Basra.

“It’s a triumph and unity for Iraqis, a glorious day. Why not celebrate?” Alwan, 37, said.

Leaders from various sects, including Prime Minister Nouri Maliki, a Shiite Muslim, President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd, and members of the main Sunni Arab bloc congratulated the team on its win, as did Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. military commander in Iraq.

“This is a gift to the united Iraqi people, to the different spectrums of the Iraqi people,” midfielder Nashat Akram said as he stood on the field in Jakarta, Indonesia, drenched in sweat.

Back in Baghdad, fans lionized their team, known as the Lions of the Two Rivers after the Tigris and Euphrates. Shiite Muslim Mohammed Hussein, a laborer, said the victory offered a glimpse of Iraq’s potential.

“These players helped us keep our faces up,” Hussein, 43, said. “They showed us what the real Iraq is and how we can work hard to be something.”

Across town, Shakir Hamza, a retired Shiite teacher, prayed for the team as he watched the match with his wife and four daughters.

“Many nations win championships of Asia or the world, but no one has the circumstances of the [Iraqi] players and the people,” Hamza, 60, said. “Despite the tragedy that their families are living, they proved that the Iraqis cannot be beaten.”

Although parliament remained in session Sunday, it was eclipsed by the game. Political blocs put their squabbles on hold, with the largest Sunni party postponing a major statement in light of the event.

Tennis coach Mustafa Faraj, 53, observed, “It seems that sports have become more important than politics.”

At a time when sectarian tensions have worsened between Shiites and Sunnis in the Iraqi government and on the streets, the soccer team is being credited with helping unite the nation. Its players include Sunni and Shiite Arabs and ethnic Kurds, who work well together and often talk about overcoming sectarianism.

Zuhair Mohammed Jabir, a policeman in the southern city of Hillah, said the last time he was so happy was in 2003 when Saddam Hussein’s regime was ousted.

“Now we are facing all this terrorism and violence -- Iraq is bleeding,” he said. “The win is a bandage healing those wounds. It’s a lesson to politicians that Iraqis can be one. We were all supporting our team -- none of us was saying this player is a Sunni, a Shiite or Kurd.”

About 200 men paid $2.50 each to watch the game on banks of big-screen televisions at the Babylon Hotel in central Baghdad. They shouted advice and cheered, “One, one, one! Iraq is one!” and finally, “Bring us the cup!” as the final seconds ticked down.

Many listened with apprehension as a chorus of automatic gunfire erupted across the capital and in several other cities, despite warnings issued earlier in the day by Iraqi security forces. The country’s leading Shiite cleric, Ayatollah Ali Sistani, also had issued a fatwa, or opinion, forbidding the gunfire.

In the northern Kurdish city of Irbil, where the game was broadcast at malls, fans also waved the Iraqi flag, taboo in recent months, because Kurdish leaders saw it as a leftover from Hussein’s regime.

Fans danced the debka, a traditional folk dance, arm in arm in the middle of the street and atop moving cars.

In Kirkuk, a northern oil city with a mixed population, Sirwan Rasheed, 55, a Kurd, said he had erected flags in the team’s honor with friends of various sects and ethnicities -- Sunni and Shiite Arabs, Turkmen and Christians.

“This team has united the sons of Iraq from the south to the north,” he said.

Another Kirkuk resident, Ali Jabbar, 23, sacrificed a lamb for good luck before the game. The government employee said Iraq’s bickering politicians, “who were never able to put a smile on Iraqis’ faces,” should take a lesson from the soccer team.

Along with scenes of celebrations across Iraq, Arabic-language stations also broadcast video of Iraqis celebrating in California and Michigan.

In Sadr City, the Shiite enclave in Baghdad where some of the players were raised, residents have been without power for three days but coordinated generators to ensure they wouldn’t miss a minute of the game.

Shiite youths agonized over missed goals and penalty kicks until shortly after 6 p.m., when Iraqi captain and striker Younes Mahmoud, a Sunni Turkmen from Kirkuk, scored what turned out to be the winning goal.

Later in the evening, police shot and killed a man attempting to drive a car bomb into a jubilant crowd in the south Baghdad neighborhood of Sadiya. The car exploded without injuring anyone, police said. Earlier in the day, Baghdad police said they stopped two Saudi nationals attempting to detonate cars packed with explosives in the eastern neighborhood of Zayuna.

At least 50 revelers were killed in Baghdad by two car bombs Wednesday after the team’s semifinal victory over South Korea; one died in celebratory gunfire.

Three people were killed by gunfire in the capital after the quarter-final against Vietnam on July 21.

Commanders in the Iraqi security forces had vowed early Sunday to better protect against insurgents targeting jubilant crowds.

They instructed police and soldiers not to join in celebrations, closed major roads and imposed curfews in several major cities, including Baghdad, Basra, Kirkuk, Najaf and Hillah.

Hussein, the Shiite laborer, said Sunday’s gunfire frustrated him, particularly in light of how many people had been killed since the championship began.

“I do not know how it is linked to joy, but it is an outlet for us,” he said of the shooting.

He and other fans also expressed frustration with politicians’ inability to overcome sectarian differences to do the job they’re paid to do, as the soccer team had.

Hussein said lawmakers, set to leave for a monthlong recess this week without having passed legislation many Iraqis and Americans demanded, are being paid to “sit on their chairs and play with our lives.”

But Ridha Taqi, a member of the prime minister’s Shiite United Iraqi Alliance, said Iraq’s government, like its soccer team, has had to overcome many challenges to achieve its own victories, including the 2005 elections.

“This victory can consolidate the unity and brotherhood among all Iraqis,” he said of the Asian Cup.

Maliki had wanted to take a nonsectarian delegation of fans from across Iraq on a government plane to watch Sunday’s game, but visa problems and other red tape forced him to cancel, a spokesman said. After watching the match at his office in Baghdad, the prime minister announced the government would give each team member $10,000.

He issued a statement late Sunday noting the “wide difference between Iraq’s lions struggling to win happiness for their families’ home and those lurking in the dark corners to plant death and sorrow among the innocent.”

Talabani also gave each team member $10,000, with an extra $10,000 for Mahmoud, who was named best player of the championship. The president told Al Arabiya television that he intended to welcome the team home soon.

“We will receive them in Baghdad airport. If that’s not possible, Irbil or Sulaymaniya,” Talabani said. “They will be received as heroes coming back to their country.”

At least 13 people were killed Sunday in violence across Iraq, including several explosions in the capital.

A mortar round struck near the home of the French ambassador, injuring three of his guards, police said.

Also Sunday, Baghdad police recovered 17 bodies dumped in the streets.

The U.S. military reported the deaths of two American soldiers, one north of Baghdad and the other in an eastern section of the capital, bringing the number of U.S. troops killed since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq to 3,648, according to icasualties.org, a website that monitors U.S. military deaths in Iraq.

molly.hennessy-fiske@ latimes.com

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Times staff writers Saif Hameed, Zeena Kareem and Wail Alhafith and special correspondents in Baghdad and Hillah contributed to this report.