Iraqi youths find focus in the ring

Dripping with sweat, Bakr Sallih lunges toward his opponent and delivers a cracking punch to the jaw.

“Easy,” chides his coach. “I want wisdom. I don’t want force.”

Less than a year ago, the lean 17-year-old was running the streets of Adhamiya with a Kalashnikov, defending the Sunni Arab enclave from attacks from the surrounding Shiite Muslim districts in east Baghdad.

But that was then, he says. Now, his fights are confined to the boxing ring at the Adhamiya Sports Club.

“I want to dedicate my power to work and sport,” Sallih said between bouts, sucking blood from a split lip.

His coach, Iraqi boxing legend Farouk Chanchoun, smiled approvingly.

Once a place where Olympic dreams were made, the club was nearly destroyed in the sectarian bloodshed that swept Baghdad two years ago. As the violence ebbs, Chanchoun and other neighborhood athletes hope one of the city’s oldest and most respected athletics institutions can help lure its sports-mad youth off the streets and provide a more constructive outlet for their energies.

“The first thing I want is reconciliation,” Chanchoun said. “I don’t want the law of the jungle to prevail.”

But the reality of lingering fear and corrupt bureaucracies has a habit of intruding on dreams. Few people from outside Adhamiya dare visit the club in what was an insurgent bastion. And the Sunni trainers complain they have been abandoned by the country’s Shiite-led government, which owns the club.

It is an often-heard frustration in Sunni parts of Baghdad, where residents who once fought U.S. and Iraqi forces are now cooperating with them against religious extremists. The U.S. military, which paid to refurbish the club, believes it is places like these that can help restore a sense of belonging among Sunnis -- and help determine whether the fragile truce holds.

The club is located on a main square in what was a well-to-do neighborhood of retired military officers, educators and other professionals. In its heyday, its athletes came from across Baghdad to compete in soccer, basketball, volleyball and swimming. But it is best known for producing champion boxers and wrestlers.

This is where Chanchoun, who made it to the light-welterweight quarterfinals at the 1980 Olympic Games in Moscow, learned to trade punches when he was 7. His biggest fan, he said, was his mother, a diminutive woman in enveloping black robes who never missed a fight.

“It used to be one of the best sports clubs in Iraq,” said bodybuilder Ahmed Rashid, an enormous man whose photographs adorn the mirrored weight room he runs at the club. “Many of our players used to bring back medals.”

Saddam Hussein promoted sport as a way to bring glory to Iraq. Failure was not an option. When Hussein’s son Uday took charge of the National Olympics Committee in 1984, he terrorized athletes who did not perform to expectation at international tournaments.

Mohammed Taya, a wrestler, said he was summoned to the Olympics headquarters after he placed second at a youth tournament in France in 1985. He still sports a long scar across his skull from the beating he received.

After that, he could never get sponsorship to train and compete. He now works as a guard at the club where he made his name, and lives in a house on the grounds.

When Rashid too was invited to account for an unsatisfactory performance, he went into hiding at the club for more than a year.

During the day, he locked himself into an unused room. At night, when he was alone, he pumped weights.

“I even slept at the club, just so nobody would take me to Uday,” he said.

It was only after Hussein issued a general amnesty in the last days of his rule that Rashid dared go home.

Rather than fight in Hussein’s wars, Chanchoun fulfilled his military service requirement by joining the police sports club, where he remained as a boxer and coach for 30 years. His career ended abruptly when U.S.-led forces toppled Hussein’s Sunni-dominated regime in 2003, ushering in a government led by Shiites and Kurds, who had been repressed under the dictator.

Forced to retire, Chanchoun returned to Adhamiya, where he reunited with Rashid, Taya and other neighborhood athletes.

For a while, they managed to keep the club going. But as the capital was engulfed in violence, a detachment of Iraqi soldiers moved into the complex. The mostly Shiite soldiers turned the boxing hall into a barracks and used the ring for firewood.

Neighborhood militants frequently attacked the club, and most residents stopped coming. Those who didn’t were repeatedly caught in the crossfire. Chanchoun’s brother was shot in the face as he left the complex one day; he survived.

Early this year, the Iraqi soldiers returned the club to the neighborhood in a deal negotiated by the U.S. military. The military hired local crews to repair the worst of the damage, and youngsters started to turn up again to train.

The place still looks like a construction site. But on a recent afternoon, six boys under the age of 12 practiced on a new set of punching bags as two pairs of teenagers wearing red gloves pounded each other in the ring.

“I love boxing,” said Mohammed Said, a pudgy 10-year-old in red shorts and T-shirt. “It gives me courage and strength and confidence.”

The coaches involve themselves in every detail of their young charges’ lives, from what they eat to how they are doing at school.

“I don’t only train their bodies; I also like to think that I train their minds,” said Rashid, the bodybuilder.

When they couldn’t practice at the boxing ring, Chanchoun continued to work with a few of his best students at home in his yard.

Sallih visited him as much as he could, but often the fighting got in the way. Two of the teen’s cousins were killed in a bombing. His parents fled the sectarian death squads, leaving him temporarily in the care of an uncle.

Each time word went out over the mosque loudspeakers that the neighborhood was under attack by Shiite militiamen, Sallih was in the streets with his peers.

“But I never killed anyone,” he said solemnly. “If I had killed someone, I could never forgive myself.”

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alexandra.zavis@latimes.com