Read for 5 minutesUpdated: June 17, 2026 12:58 AM IST
When a plane from Iraq landed at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport last week, US immigration officials pulled Aymen Hussain aside and detained him for seven hours. His mobile phone was searched before he was admitted. The team photographers were waved off. The 2003 invasion, the years that followed – the embers of what happened in both countries – have not completely cooled, whatever the diplomatic parlance. But Hussain, who will lead Iraq attacks Norway On Tuesday, he joined his colleagues at the hotel without stress. He has a bad habit.
He grew up in the rural village of Al Safara in Kirkuk’s Hawija district, waking up to the sound of drones and gunfire. His father, a soldier in the Iraqi army, was shot dead by Al Qaeda militants when Hussein was twelve years old, killed while buying building materials for a house he was still building. Hussain told his mother and elder brother to run away. The brother refused. Shortly after, ISIS allegedly kidnapped him. He never came back.
The house started by the father remained unfinished. “I loved football, but my old dream was to earn enough money to finish the construction of the house my father started building,” Hussain told FIFA.
Eighteen years later, Hussein scored to win Iraq’s first World Cup in forty years.
The journey to reach Chicago had already tested the limits of what the football team could absorb. Iraq played 21 qualifiers in 28 months in Basra and Muscat, Jakarta and Monterrey. Due to the war with Iran, they were unable to play in the playoff final against Bolivia in northern Mexico. Commercial flights were suspended. A 25-hour road trip to Istanbul was considered and abandoned – the ministry also considered shelling along the route. Instead they mapped a route through the desert to the Jordan. Some players traveled 28 hours to reach Amman. There, the Missiles grounded them for 36 more. Eventually Lisbon, then a flight to Monterrey.
Hussain told Al Jazeera, “We should not worry, because we are used to bombings and shootings. We have learned that nothing good happens without waiting and patience.”
They won in Monterey. They are here.
About half the squad — eleven out of twenty-six — are immigrants, scattered between Malmö and Amsterdam, Liverpool and Warsaw. Their presence created a problem that coach Graham Arnold, the Australian, solved in a way that no coaching manual would suggest. “About 80 percent speak Arabic and that affects performance on the field as well,” Arnold said. “When I started, I played the best players according to their position and strength but then I realized that some could not 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, center backs and central midfielders who bridge the gap. The Sangha is literally divided by language and united by it.
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Arnold spent eight months in Baghdad with his family, learning their culture and habits. He fined the players for arriving late to training. When he appeared exhausted in Monterrey after the ordeal of Jordan and Lisbon, he told them: “You know what your families have endured. Now, you do it for them and make them proud.” He understood what he was asking. “The players went through a lot of stress,” he said. “Forty million people are 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, was two years old when his family fled. His father, a lawyer, had previously been imprisoned 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 neighborhood, racially abused, sometimes drawn to the wrong crowd. “I’ve had times where I’ve been hanging out with the wrong group of kids, staying out late, getting into trouble,” he told the BBC. “But I’m very proud to say that I knew deep down that this is not what I wanted to do.”
Against France, Norway and Senegal, Arnold has been tipped for their chances of progressing. It is a reasonable position. But the lions of Mesopotamia didn’t travel that far—through the desert and through missile attacks and seven hours at O’Hare—to be sensible. Hussain joined his colleagues at the hotel without complaint. In Al Safara, the house his father never finished still stands. He is not forgotten.