weekend eye
When Syria’s under-17 squad arrived for their first practice sessions in Puerto Montt, Chile, where the football world cup for their age-group is being staged, their local hosts observed that something was amiss. Hearing aircraft seemed to spread alarm among the players.
When this happened more than once, the office of the local mayor looked for an alternative site for the young men to train, a little farther from the flight path to and from Tepual airport. While they may get used to the sounds of engines – and even begin to hear them as unthreatening over the weeks they are in South America – it is evident the environment in which they spent their formative years has left its mark. Plane engines sound like harbingers for bombings. Even more than 15,000 kilometres from home, these teenagers exhibit symptoms of the trauma of war.
The young Syrians who qualified for the team are generating interest in Chile. Their journey to this tournament has been perilous and immensely brave. All of them have gone from childhood to their mid-teens entirely in the shadow of a brutal conflict, one notorious for the direct suffering inflicted on children and minors.
Exceptional talent at football has provided little shelter. Tarek Ghrair, a former teammate of the Syria’s under-17 team, died at the age of 15 during a mortar attack in Homs. As Mohammed Jaddou, one of the stars of the campaign that qualified the squad for the tournament, put it: “Our football field was bombarded a couple of times, so we were threatened even when we were playing.”
Jaddou is not playing in Chile. His family made the same choice that around four million Syrians have made since the civil war began in 2011 and left. In his family’s case, it was by the precarious sea route to Europe.
As he told The New York Times last month, the boat in which his parents made their passage from Turkey was overcrowded and unsafe. "We had to throw everything away – food, clothes and belongings – to keep the boat afloat," he said. "Not even for a second were we able to sleep. If we did, we would eventually drown.''
Jaddou’s journey eventually took him to Germany, where his dreams of becoming a professional footballer have been encouraged by youth coaches at Ravensburg, a lower-division club. His escape from Syria and his pending application for refugee status in Europe prevented him joining the squad in Chile.
One day Jaddou may represent his country again, but the prospect seems distant of him doing so in the national stadium in Damascus, in front of a patriotic and united crowd. The conflict means Syria’s junior and senior national teams are obliged to play all their matches outside the country. The under-17 side were mostly accommodated in Jordan as they progressed to their unlikely place alongside the likes of Brazil, Germany and Argentina in Chile. The senior men’s team have been playing their “home” matches in Oman.
Syria’s players live with the dangers not just of war but of political pressure. Some have withdrawn from the national team out of a principled reluctance to be viewed as representatives of a state whose rulers they reject.
In Turkey and Lebanon, squads have formed among the large refugee communities, including footballers who used to play for clubs in Syria. They are lobbying Fifa, the world governing body, to officially recognise them as legitimate representatives of a country with an ever-growing diaspora. Around 11 million have been displaced by the conflict.
The startling aspect of these schisms and daily setbacks is that the Syrian national teams, junior and senior, are achieving great milestones. The under-17s lost their opening fixture in Chile, 4-1 to Paraguay, drew 0-0 with New Zealand, but still rank among the top 24 teams in the world at their level.
Despite exile in Oman, the senior team has also played with improbable swagger, and to a higher standard than they set in peacetime. They have won four out of five of their matches in the second round of qualifying for the 2018 World Cup in Russia.
Sport sometimes thrives despite conflict. Look around the national football teams of many European countries, and you spot a disproportionate number of individuals with immigrant or refugee backgrounds, players whose parents or grandparents fled turmoil to seek a better life.
Take the example of Zlatan Ibrahimovic, captain of Sweden, icon of Paris Saint-Germain and the son of a Bosnian and a Croatian. He moved to Scandinavia at the start of the unrest in the Balkans in the 1990s. Desperation can breed the drive and determination that defines the successful athlete.
But in team sports, too, fractured countries have sometimes found inspiration in the sporting arena. The Arabic-speaking world has many examples.
In Algeria in the late 1950s, as the war for independence from France intensified, a group of professional footballers playing for clubs in the French league secretly met and planned to join the freedom fighters based in neighbouring Tunisia. They did not plan to take up arms directly but to form a team under the flag of an Algeria they hoped would soon become a sovereign state.
They risked their livelihoods to do so, and some were arrested and jailed, but the enterprise was an enormous success. The so-called FLN Team, named after the Front de Liberation Nationale, the main guerrilla army in the war for Algerian independence, toured widely across North Africa, the Middle East, the Far East and Eastern Europe.
They played dazzling, triumphant football to large crowds – to the annoyance of France.
“We were the true ambassadors of Algerian independence,” Mohammed Maouche, one of the ringleaders of the rebel group and an elegant striker, once told me. “We all had a sense we were carrying the flag for our country and our continent.”
In recent years, Iraqi football has provide a beacon of optimism in a troubled land. At the Athens Olympics of 2004, a year after the invasion by US-led forces and with the country beset by violence, the men’s team advanced through the competition as far as the semi-finals.
The atmosphere among the players was not only charged by the anxious awareness that any day could bring bad news about loved ones at home, but also by political events. Several players made known their distaste when they learnt that American broadcasters had pointed to the Iraqi team’s participation in the Olympics as a symbol of the benefits the invasion had brought.
The players answered back they were there on their sporting merits, not because of favours given by western governments that were largely unwelcome in their country.
That defiant spirit may have helped spur them on. The 2004 Olympic footballers from Iraq certainly seemed to inspire their compatriots and three years later, the senior Iraq team went on to win the prestigious Asian championship.
Six years later, at the under-20 world cup in Turkey, Iraq knocked out England in the first phase. Unlike the football superpowers of Spain and Portugal, they progressed to the semi-finals and lost to Uruguay only in a penalty shoot-out.
The Syrian teenagers in Chile will be aspiring to something similar in three years time.
Ian Hawkey contributes regularly to The National’s sports section
