Football more important than politics

2.00am - by PATRICK COCKBURN

ARBIL, northern Iraq - On the eve of war in Iraq players from the Iraqi football team Naft saw no problem in travelling to the heart of Kurdistan even though the Kurdish government supports a US-led invasion.

The Iraqi players were keen that nobody should be in doubt about where their loyalties lay.

Outside their dressing room in the new stadium in Arbil they did a little jig, chanting: "We offer our soul and our blood to you Saddam."

Udai Abdul Ridah, a mid-field player, confided: "All our players are ready to fight."

For an hour before the game Kurdish supporters of the Arbil club (known as Hawler in Kurdish) lined up to buy tickets for five dinars (about $3) while stall holders beside the gates sold them bags of sun-flower seeds, pistachio nuts, baclava and fried rice balls.

"We play in a friendly way, but we don't cheer for Saddam," said Abdul Khalid Massud, the stadium manager.

Indeed the main chant from the 10,000-strong Kurdish crowd, when not cheering on their own side, was: "F*** the Turks." For the last week Kurds have talked of little else but the Turkish threat to advance on a 350km front into Kurdistan.

Neither Naft nor Arbil is at the top of the Iraqi league, but the game underlined that there is not much animosity at a popular level between Arabs and Kurds in Iraq.

The Arbil star striker, Mohammed Nasser, is an Arab from Baghdad and the club's most popular player.

"There is no difference between the Kurdish and Arab nation," he said.

"We are against war and there will be no war." The Naft goal keeper Sair Aldin Zamman added: "We go back and forth. Sport is different from politics."

Later he remarked, perhaps with that sense of self-preservation bred in Iraqis over the decades, "we love Saddam Hussein and we will stay with him to the end."

The game, played under a clear blue sky after two weeks of constant rain, was not particularly aggressive. Occasionally the crowd grew impatient as isolated Naft players spontaneously collapsed on the ground claiming they had been savagely kicked or punched.

Overall Arbil had the better of the play and won by a single goal.

There may have been a measure of official orchestration in all this.

The official cheer leader, named Adid Gharib, a Kurd who had fought in the Iran-Iraq war and held prisoner for 12 years, was leading the chants against Turkey.

"I like the Arab team," he said. "Turkey wants to occupy our oilfields and take what we have achieved."

Arabs from the rest of Iraq often play for Kurdish teams because they get better paid, a fact that irritates some Kurdish football officials who think the money could be better spent.

The Iraqi population is divided into three communities – Shia Arabs, Sunni Arabs and Kurds -- but they have never regarded each other with the same sectarian hatred as Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland or different sects in Lebanon.

Violence against each community has normally come from the government in Baghdad.


- INDEPENDENT