5 min readJun 17, 2026 12:58 AM IST
First published on: Jun 16, 2026 at 03:41 PM IST
When Iraq’s plane landed at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport last week, US immigration officers pulled Aymen Hussein aside and held him for seven hours. His mobile phone was inspected before he was granted entry. The team’s photographer was waved through. The embers of what passed between both nations — the 2003 invasion, the years that followed — have not entirely cooled, whatever the diplomatic language now says. But Hussein, who will spearhead Iraq’s attack against Norway on Tuesday, joined his teammates at the hotel without strain. He has been used to worse.
He grew up in Al Safra, a rural village in the Hawija district of Kirkuk, waking to the sound of drones and bullets. His father, a soldier in the Iraqi Army, was shot dead by Al Qaeda militants when Hussein was twelve, killed while buying building materials for the house he was still building. Hussein told his mother and elder brother to flee. The brother refused. Shortly after, he was kidnapped, allegedly by ISIS. He never came back.
The house his father had started remained unfinished. “I loved football,” Hussein told FIFA, “but my old dream was to get enough money to complete the construction of the house my father had begun to construct.”
Eighteen years later, Hussein scored the goal that sent Iraq to their first World Cup in forty years.
The journey to reach Chicago had already tested the limits of what a football squad could absorb. Iraq played 21 qualifying matches across 28 months, in Basra and Muscat, Jakarta and Monterrey. They nearly missed the playoff final against Bolivia in northern Mexico because of the war with Iran. Commercial flights had stopped. A 25-hour road trip to Istanbul was considered and abandoned — the ministry judged the route too exposed to shelling. Instead they mapped a path through the desert to Jordan. Some players travelled 28 hours to reach Amman. There, missiles grounded them for 36 more. Eventually a flight to Lisbon, then Monterrey.
“We didn’t worry,” Hussein told Al Jazeera, “because we are used to bombings and bullets. We have learnt that no good things happen without waiting and being patient.”
They won in Monterrey. They are here.
Nearly half the squad — eleven of twenty-six — are immigrants, scattered across Malmö and Amsterdam, Liverpool and Warsaw. Their presence created a problem that coach Graham Arnold, an Australian, solved in a way no coaching manual would suggest. “About 80 per cent speak Arabic and that even affects on-field performance,” Arnold said. “When I started, I played the best players to their positions and strengths but then I realised some couldn’t speak the language so there was no communication.” His solution: English-speaking players on the left side of the field, Arabic speakers on the right, with a centre-back and central midfielder who speak both bridging the gap. The team is literally divided by language and held together by it.
Arnold spent eight months in Baghdad despite his family’s apprehensions, learning their culture and habits. He fined players for arriving late to training. When they turned up exhausted in Monterrey after the ordeal through Jordan and Lisbon, he told them: “You know what you have suffered, your families. Now, you do it for them and make them proud.” He understood what he was asking. “The players went through a hell of a lot of stress,” he said. “Forty-six million people on their shoulders. Every one of those games was heartbreak or survival.”
Ali Al-Hamadi, a forward whose goals will be central to Iraq’s chances alongside Hussein’s, was two years old when his family fled. His father, a lawyer previously jailed under Saddam Hussein, and his pregnant mother left Maysan in southeastern Iraq at the turn of the century. They settled in Toxteth, Liverpool, where Al-Hamadi grew up in a rough neighbourhood, racially abused, drawn at times toward the wrong crowd. “I have had periods where I was hanging around with the wrong group of kids, staying out late, causing trouble,” he told the BBC. “But I am quite proud to say that from within myself I realised that’s not what I wanted to do.”
Pitted against France, Norway and Senegal, Arnold has been measured about their chances of advancing. That is the sensible position. But the Lions of Mesopotamia did not travel this far — through deserts and missile attacks and seven hours at O’Hare — to be sensible. Hussein joined his teammates at the hotel without complaint. In Al Safra, the house his father never finished is still there. He has not forgotten it.
Iraq's Aymen Hussein celebrates scoring a goal. (Reuters) 
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