Sport as the enemy

The life of the manager of Iraq's national football team is in danger. He has had to leave Bagdad and go into hiding in Kurdistan. His crime? The success of the team and the possibility that it could help unite the country. The partisans of civil war are not keen on sport:

In recent months Iraqi sport has found itself unwittingly at the forefront of that struggle [for sectarian division].

Its success in recovering from the Saddam Hussein era - when there were torture chambers at the Olympic Committee building and football stars were chained to walls and given electric shocks if deemed to have played badly - has made it a target for those who dislike its universal popularity.

There has been a succession of attacks on sportsmen this year. Yesterday, 10 young footballers died when two bombs buried in a sports pitch exploded.

Earlier this year, 15 members of the Iraqi taekwondo team were kidnapped and the national coach murdered shortly after a former wrestling champion was shot in front of his family in Basra.

In May the national tennis coach and two of his players were killed.

The violence led to Jamal Abdul Karim, the head of the taekwondo association, warning sportsmen to be on their guard as its unifying nature meant that it was resented by Sunni and Shia extremists.

"They want youth to stop practising sport because terrorists know that sport is the one thing that has succeeded in Iraq," he said.

That was before he, too, fell victim to the men of violence last month.

Gunmen burst into a cultural centre and kidnapped the head of the Olympic Committee, Ahmed al-Hajiya, and 50 other officials, including Mr Karim.

The abductors' identities are unknown, though witnesses reported some of the gunmen wore police uniforms, possibly linking them to the Shia militias who have widely infiltrated the force.

Although a handful of officials were released, the fate of Mr Hajiya and Mr Karim is not known.

That says something both about the democratic values of sport and about the rather different values of those intent on civil war.