Syria win battle with Cambodia but their real goal is unity 

The team scored six goals, but every time the ball hit the back of the net, silence echoed around the stadium.
For Syria’s national football team, improbably trying to qualify for the 2018 World Cup, every match is an away match and goals must be set against the wider context of a broken nation.
“Of course, it’s a big disappointment,” Abdulrazak Al Husein, team captain, said after the match in Cambodia this week. “When you’re playing sport, all you want to do is play for your country, in your country, with your own fans.”
With even their home matches set to take place in Oman, there will be no stadiums of Syrian supporters to cheer the team to victory. Indeed, football stadiums have taken on a darker connotation in Syria after it was reported that some had been turned into military bases and detention centres.
The team, sitting at the top of the table for its group, is performing remarkably well despite formidable hurdles. The war has crippled football in Syria, scattering players across the world, and leaving them with barely a week to meet and train ahead of each match.
But Syrians everywhere are pouring out their support through social media, says Al Husein, and the crisis at home piles on the pressure to make them proud. He hopes that, by doing so, the team will pull the country’s fragmented identity closer together.
“At the end of the day we come from all aspects of Syria. Whether you’re a Christian or a Muslim or any sector of Islam, we’re all one family, we’re playing for one team, one country.”
While the team is not built along sectarian lines, neither is it immune to political tension.
Mosab Balhaust, the goalkeeper, was arrested in 2011 on charges of sheltering rebels, although he was later released and returned to the team. In 2012, its then striker Omar Al-Soba raised a revolutionary flag during the team’s winning game at the West Asian Championship in Kuwait, while star player Firas Al-Khatib refused to represent the national team altogether.
Other promising players have fled the country, joined opposition forces or been killed in terrorist attacks. Some have even defected to a rival team, the Free Syrian National Football Team, which trains in Lebanon.
Meanwhile, the official team is used as a political tool to legitimise the Assad regime, according to James Dorsey, author of The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer.
Its existence, he says, projects “a sense of normalcy amid the mayhem” and “lends the government a degree of prestige” – underpinned by reports that Assad gifted a flat, cash bonus and government position to each player to reward their success at the West Asia Games.
While Al Husein stresses that the team are focused on football, not factions, their manager and head coach Fajr Ibrahim is keen to highlight the political dimension to its struggle. “We want to fight all the world that is fighting us in Syria,” he says. “It’s our message to the world.”

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Cambodian fans wave the national flag during the match between Cambodia and Syria. Photograph: Tang Chhin Sothy/AFP/Getty

Just as Iraq strove to reassert a sense of national identity by storming to victory in the Asian Cup in 2007, Ibrahim believes that the turmoil in Syria will “motivate” the team to greater heights.
“We created civilisation,” he says, lamenting the destruction of ancient sites such as Palmyra by Islamic State insurgents. “We believe in our country and our flag – especially in this situation. All the team come only to play for one thing: they come to play for the Syrian people.”
While Ibrahim’s desire to see his team triumph internationally is fuelled by palpable anger with the country’s regional rivals – and the western allies he believes has helped them to dominate – for Al Husein, the game is simply about solidarity and looking forward. “Our main goal is to unite people. Whether we win or we lose, what we’re trying to do with the team is to set a good example,” he states, adding that right now the team is focused on preparing for its next, tougher, game against Japan, which will dictate whether the country qualifies for the World Cup for the first time in history.
“At the end of the day, we’re playing for the country, hoping it will get back to the way it was,” Al Husein says. “The best thing we can do is unite the people of Syria.”