Soccer title brings rare gift: Iraq unity

BAGHDAD — The players wore black armbands to remember the victims of a car bombing. The electricity went out, as usual, at the most exciting moments of the match. Baghdad was under a citywide curfew for fear of insurgent attacks on sports fans.

And all that was forgotten the instant the Iraqi national soccer team won its first Asian Cup championship Sunday in a fairytale 1-0 upset of heavily favored Saudi Arabia. As the Iraqi players wept and danced with joy on a soccer pitch in the Indonesian capital of Jakarta, their countrymen rejoiced at perhaps the rarest of Iraqi experiences: a happy ending.

"This is a gift to the united Iraqi people, to the different spectrums of the Iraqi people," said midfielder Nashaat Akram as he stood drenched in sweat on the field in Jakarta.

Back home, patriotic music filled the airwaves. Children with their faces painted red, black and green, the colors of the Iraqi flag, pelted their neighbors with candies. Families made plans to slaughter sheep or chickens for feasts. Vendors sold out of a T-shirt that emphasized unity over sectarianism with the slogan, "I am Iraqi."

At a time when sectarian tensions between Shiites and Sunnis have worsened in the Iraqi government and on the streets, the soccer team has been credited with helping unite Iraqis. Its leaders include Sunni and Shiite Muslims who work well together and often talk about overcoming sectarianism.

The victory by the team that fans call "The Lions of the Two Rivers," after the Tigris and Euphrates, reminded Shiite Muslim laborer Muhammed Hussein of Iraq's potential.

"These players helped us keep our faces up," the 43-year-old Baghdad resident said. "They showed us what the real Iraq is and how we can work hard to be something."

"Our gallant youths fulfilled their vows to their country and people," said Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki in a televised speech after the game. "They were able to portray Iraq beautifully, in all its shades, and bring a smile of hope to their people. They are a stark contrast to those who lurk in dark corners to plant death and sorrow among the innocent."

Even the country's politicians managed to set aside their squabbles as they crammed onto sofas to watch in the living room of Deputy Prime Minister Barham Saleh's elegant villa in the capital's Green Zone compound. There were enough Cabinet ministers to make a quorum, and a handful of senior American and British diplomats joined them in cheering on the home team.

Then, just a few minutes into the game, the power went off. The crowd, dapper in business suits and ties, groaned in the manner of less privileged Iraqis for whom such power cuts are an everyday occurrence.

"This is the government!" said Saleh, jokingly, as he waved his arms in mock exasperation.

"Tomorrow, we'll bring the minister of electricity to parliament and interrogate him!" cracked an Iraqi legislator.

In Sadr City, the Shiite enclave in Baghdad where some of the soccer team's players were raised, residents who were without power for three days coordinated generators to ensure they wouldn't miss a minute of the game.

In the northern Kurdish city of Irbil, where the game was broadcast at malls, soccer fans were waving the Iraqi flag, taboo in recent months, since it is viewed by Kurdish leaders as a leftover from the Saddam regime. Fans also danced the "debka," a traditional Kurdish dance, arm in arm in the middle of the street and atop moving cars.

In Kirkuk, a northern oil city known for its various ethnicities, Sirwan Rasheed, 55, a Kurd, said he erected flags in the team's honor with friends of various sects and ethnicities — Sunni and Shiite Arabs, Turkmen and Christians.

"This team has united the sons of Iraq from the south to the north," he said.

In marshy southern villages, northern mountain towns and the battle-scarred neighborhoods of the capital, elated Iraqis pumped bullets into the air in defiance of government and clerical bans on celebratory gunfire.

In Baghdad, a few daring celebrants broke the curfew and piled into beat-up cars to cruise until the police stopped them. Others skirted the 14-hour ban on vehicles by roaming the streets on bicycles and scooters festooned with huge banners.

Zuhair Muhammed Jabir, a policeman in the southern city of Hilla, said the last time he was so happy was the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime in 2003.

"Now we are facing all this terror and violence — Iraq is bleeding," he said. "The win is a bandage healing those wounds. It's a lesson to politicians that Iraqis can be one. We were all supporting our team; none of us was saying this player is a Sunni, a Shiite or Kurd."

Sporadic gunfire, much of it deemed to be celebratory, still could be heard hours after the game ended. At least two civilians were killed in clashes with Baghdad police and two more in gunfire after the game, police said.

Later in the evening, police shot a man attempting to drive a car bomb into a jubilant crowd in the south Baghdad neighborhood of Sadiya, killing him and causing the car to explode without injuring anyone else, police said.

Earlier in the day, Baghdad police said they stopped two Saudi-Arabian nationals trying to detonate cars packed with explosives in the eastern neighborhood of Zayuna.

After the Iraqi team's previous Asian Cup game against South Korea on July 25, at least 50 people were killed by two car-bomb explosions in the capital; another by celebratory gunfire. Three people were killed by gunfire in the capital after the quarter-final game against Vietnam on July 21.

Commanders in the Iraqi security forces had vowed early Sunday to better protect jubilant crowds against insurgents. They instructed police and soldiers not to join in celebrations, closed major roads and imposed curfews in several major cities, including Baghdad, Basra, Kirkuk, Najaf and Hilla.