Daily Times

Mohamed Fathi, coach of Mosul’s football club in northern Iraq, hardly recognises the ruined soccer stadium once used by Islamic State group fighters to fire rockets and lob mortars from.

Piles of rubble lie alongside a pitch of bumpy sand. The high concrete stadium tiers surrounding it — with all seats torn out — look dangerously close to collapse.

“After this was destroyed, there’s no other stadiums in the city to play football,” Fathi said, waving his hand at the crumbling building.

“The impact of the destruction is enough to tell you everything that happened here.”

Jihadi fighters from the Islamic State (IS) group seized Mosul in 2014, later expanding its so-called “caliphate” to over a third of Iraq and into neighbouring Syria.

In 2017, Iraqi and coalition forces forced the hardened insurgents out in a grinding urban battle that left ancient Mosul in ruins.

The bullet-riddled 20,000-seater stadium, home to Mosul Sports Cub, was not spared, caught up in the deadly battles for control.

Two other smaller stadiums in town were also damaged.

Football ‘brings life’

“Sadly the central government doesn’t realise that football is what brings life back to a town, its people and its youth,” Fathi said. “So things have stayed the same.”

Mosul Sports Club was once a solid performing club that produced some of the country’s best players.

They include Hawar Mulla Mohammed, who led Iraq to its historic 2007 Asian Cup championship, and who played professionally in Europe.

Decades earlier, Iraq’s national squad made its only World Cup appearance in Mexico in 1986.

Mosul’s own son, skilled midfielder Haris Mohammed, ably led his country to the rare international honour.

Founded in 1947, Mosul SC played 18 seasons in Iraq’s premier league, before its relegation to the first division a decade ago.

With thousands of roaring fans passionately backing their team, locals dubbed it the “stadium of horrors” for visiting teams.

But that ominous label would take on a more sinister meaning with the arrival of IS militants.

“I used to follow soccer matches here, and suddenly out of nowhere convoys of IS militants decked out with guns would show up,” recounted Omar al-Mosuli, a resident in his thirties.

“It was a frightening scene, and I used to walk away quietly.”