Football unites Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds

They weren’t disappointed as Iraq won 2-0 to advance to the semi-finals for the first time since 1976, causing hundreds of people from across the sectarian divide to overcome fears of violence and take to the streets in spontaneous celebration.

Men of all ages waved Iraqi flags and did a jig in the streets, while others jumped on top of cars and rode around, horns honking. On a negative note, five people, including two children, were killed and 25 were wounded in celebratory gunfire, according to health officials in Baghdad, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of security concerns.

Iraqis said the jubilation over the victory showed they can come together despite the past years of spiralling violence between Sunnis and Shiites that has made Baghdad a maze of concrete barriers.

Many expressed regret that Iraqi political factions couldn’t emulate the soccer team, as the Shiite-dominated government’s failure to bring minority Sunnis into the mainstream has been blamed for fuelling insurgency and retaliatory violence.

“None of our politicians could bring us under this flag like our national soccer team did. I wish that politicians could take a lesson from our team, which is made up of Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds who worked together regardless of their backgrounds,” Abdul-Rahman Abdul-Hassan said.

Abdul-Hassan, a 40-year-old Shiite education ministry worker who lives in the northern Baghdad neighbourhood of Kazimiyah, joined three Sunni friends watching the game in a coffee shop. It was the first time he had seen his former soccer teammates in two years because they had fled the predominantly Shiite area due to sectarian tensions.

“Ahmed, Naji and Abdul-Karim were there with us,” the father of three said, giving only the first names of his friends. “We kissed and hugged each other and recalled our days when we were part of the local soccer team in Kazimiyah and how we were playing in an organised fashion regardless of our religious and ethnic affiliations.”

Marwan Ahmed, a 23-year-old Sunni tailor in the southern Iraqi city of Basra, called Saturday “the most beautiful day in Iraq over the past four years.” “All the people at the casino congratulated each other, even those who didn’t know each other. I felt like this team helped clean our hearts from hatred as all were thinking only of Iraq and nothing else.”

Iraqi officials agreed. “Political interests created this problem… the sport gives us a signal or rings the bell to say this is the real Iraq,” said government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh. But others warned it was not so easy. “The politicians should learn from and see the joy on the Iraqi streets when our soccer team won… and all of us realized the national unity of Iraqis,” said Salim Abdullah of the Sunni Iraqi Accordance Front. “But the difficult question is whether the Iraqi politicians can play as one team, regardless of results?”

Sinan Salaheddin and Saad Abdul-Kadir contributed to this report in Baghdad.