‘Lion of Mesopotamia’: How Aymen Hussein beat tragedy to reach World Cup
Iraq’s ‘most expensive footballer’, the striker who scored Iraq’s qualifying goal against Bolivia, retraces his journey about his difficult path to fame. It has been
Iraq’s ‘most expensive footballer’, the striker who scored Iraq’s qualifying goal against Bolivia, retraces his journey about his difficult path to fame. It has been a long, relentless journey to the World Cup for Iraq’s centre-forward Aymen Hussein, who propelled his country to the tournament for the first time in 40 years when he scored a winning goal against Bolivia in Mexico in the qualifiers. When he was just 12 and already playing football for a local team, his father was brutally murdered while buying materials to build the family home. A few years after that, his older brother was kidnapped, and he has not been heard from since. “I decided to quit playing football to take care of my family, but my mother refused,” Hussein said in an interview. “She asked me to continue playing.” His mother told him: “It is your dream. I know that. And you have to achieve it.” And he has hung on to that dream ever since. A violent legacy Born in 1996 in the village of al-Safra, in al-Hawija district in north-central Iraq, Hussein grew up in a family who made their living farming and raising sheep. Tragedy struck in 2008 when his father, a soldier in the Iraqi army, was killed by al-Qaeda, which controlled Kirkuk and the surrounding areas at the time. “He went to buy some materials for our new, under-construction house. A few hours later, we received a call saying Your father has been killed and his body is in the hospital’.” He had been fatally shot in the heart.
“We didn’t believe it at first. But then we went to the hospital to find my father’s dead body lying there. It was a disaster to all of us.” Hussein begged his family to move away from the village, but his older brother, who joined the Iraqi army after his father was murdered, refused. So, instead of fleeing, Hussein joined the Iraqi Youth football team. It was on his return from a training camp in Turkiye a few years later that he learned his brother had disappeared – kidnapped during a period in which ISIL (ISIS) had taken control of the area. “We have heard nothing about him since,” he says. ‘I was ready to play for free’ Amidst the tragedy, Hussein’s football career was taking off. In 2012, a turning point came when he was scouted for the Dohuk football club, one of the Iraq Stars League teams in Iraq’s Kurdistan region. Hussein signed a contract for 18 million Iraqi dinar ($14,000) and a monthly salary of 1.2 million Iraqi dinar ($920). “Honestly, I was ready to play for free,” he recalls. “You may not imagine what it meant to me to play with players from the Iraqi national team at that time. Playing with Dohuk was the dream of my life at that time.” Eighteen months later, he moved to Baghdad to play for Iraq Stars League teams including Al-Shorta, Al-Talaba and Al-Zawraa, becoming the league’s top scorer. Most recently, he was contracted at Qatar’s Al Khor club before moving back to Iraq to join Al Karma.
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