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War by other means
28.6.2008
By Ian Klaus
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June
28, 2008
A few years ago I spent a semester teaching American
history and English in Erbil, the capital of the
Kurdistan region of Iraq.
The campus of the university where I taught has both
a basketball court and a soccer field. The court was
always empty, but the dirt field, with lines barely
visible and netless goals, was frequently filled
with players in mismatched jerseys and winter
jackets who lacked for nothing in confidence or joy.
Soccer is a sport I've enjoyed all my life, and the
many invitations I received to play on that field
made me feel welcome, not only at the university but
in that part of the world. So last summer, when I
returned to the region, I suspected it wouldn't be
long before the games began again.
I was visiting with Kurdish friends, and the family
with whom I was staying took me along on a trip to
Tawela, a small village on the Iranian border. A
local who fought against Saddam Hussein in the 1970s
and 1980s was organizing a reunion for fellow
veterans, my host among them.
Before the celebratory dinner, some of us took a
walk. As the sun set behind us, we approached a
heated soccer game in progress. Teams from Tawela
and Biara, two small villages tucked away in the
mountainous crevices of this, the Hawraman region,
were at play.
Members of the Tawelan home team wore blue-striped
Inter Milan jerseys. Local fans in baggy traditional
Kurdish pants and knockoff jerseys lined one side of
the field. A stone wall on the other side of the
pitch served as both the international boundary
between Iraq and Iran and as a grandstand for
spectators. Linesmen in black trousers and white
button-down dress shirts waved red handkerchiefs for
offside.
Familiar as the players were with one another, the
game had a formal intensity about it. Each team was
playing for village pride. At the game's conclusion,
the Tawelan team crammed in the back of a truck and
drove away, dust covering their jerseys.
Then a pickup game started, and I joined in. I could
feel the onlookers wondering what soccer skills an
American might possess. Within minutes,www.ekurd.net
I shanked a ball, and it
landed in Iran. Sailing above the goalie in his
Arsenal jersey, over the rusted crossbar, and
clearing the collapsing stone wall delineating the
international boundary, the ball settled near the
feet of a meandering donkey. A young boy quickly
hopped over the stones and brought it back.
As the play continued, I crossed balls to little
children who headed them past an aggressive
goalkeeper. Young boys in plastic sandals passed to
older men in the worn cloth clogs famous to this
region. I put one ball into the goal, and another
back into Iran.
Here we were - in a village where the dead
insurgency leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was said to
have slept, in a country ravaged by wars of identity
- playing the world's game, reckless amateurs
representing only our teammates and ourselves.
When the game was over, I decided to walk up to the
official border crossing in the region, about three
miles away. Barbed wire lined two imposing walls
that met at a gate painted red, white and green,
maybe twice the height of a goal. There were no
Iraqi guards at the crossing. Two Iranian flags
waved from the gate.
When I acknowledged the Iranian soldiers, they waved
back. But when I took out my camera, they hollered,
training their weapons on me. On the white exterior
of a bunker, in lively colors, someone had painted
in Persian: "Death to America."
The next morning we headed to Sulaimaniyah, a center
of intellectual life in Iraqi Kurdistan, as well as
a city with economic and cultural ties to Iran.
Those residents who weren't stuck in gas lines were
already heading toward the mountains for Friday
picnic, a day with family.
For me, it appeared, another night of soccer lay
ahead. At 9 o'clock, the temperature having dropped
to the low 90s, I ended up in a game of five on
five. We played on dusty Astroturf under floodlights
until, one by one, the heat ran us all into the
ground.
After the game, we sat talking in the corner of the
field, enjoying cigarettes and cans of fruit juice.
"Did you hear?" one of my opponents asked at a
certain point. "America has suffered a great defeat.
You have gone down." He wore a slight grin and
seemed, for a second, to appreciate my alarm.
In this, a country at war, I didn't ask after the
ambiguous statement. I felt that nostalgic, guttural
ache that is the longing for home. His grin grew
bigger and his eyes softened - the United States, he
informed me, had lost to Argentina, 4 to 1.
Ian Klaus is the author of "Elvis Is Titanic:
Classroom Tales From the Other Iraq."
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