After 20 years of war, Iraqi amputee football players heal their wounds on the pitch

Every Friday, the players gather at a side stadium in Al-Zawraa Park in central Baghdad. As daylight fades and despite the still stifling July heat, they warm up, stretch, and train in a strange ballet of crutches.

On the field, all the athletes bear the scars of twenty years of war and jihadist violence. Some were injured in the American bombings of Baghdad in 2003, which marked the beginning of the war against Saddam Hussein. Others lost a limb in suicide bombings by Al-Qaeda, whose attacks were almost daily in the 2000s. Still others were crippled fighting the Islamic State, which, from 2014 to 2017, imposed its terror on Iraq, controlling up to 40% of Iraqi territory.

The team was born in 2021, when Mohammed Al-Najjar returned from the United Kingdom, where he was working on his thesis. For three years, the young man had played in the Portsmouth amputee team. Upon his return to Iraq, he decided to repeat the adventure in Baghdad. “Iraq needs this team more than any other country, twenty years of war have left so many amputees!” A message posted and shared thousands of times on Facebook was enough to launch the project. “We started with seven. Today, we have four teams throughout the country, and another national one, recognized by the International Amputee Football Federation,” explains Mohammed Al-Najjar.