Nassir Ali Hatem – killed for wearing shorts
This national Iraqi tennis player wanted to help restore a sense a pride to his country by being a top sportsman. But tragically, he paid with his life – for wearing shorts.
Nassir Ali Hatem was with his coach Hussein Ahmed Rashid and fellow player Wissam Adel Auda when the gunmen struck.
Witnesses said that a Sunni militant group issued a warning a few days before the attack, forbidding the wearing of shorts.
The three had driven to a laundrette to drop off some washing when they were seized by the gunmen and cold bloodedly executed.
One cannot begin to imagine the agonising heartbreak and anguish the whole country must be feeling at this senseless slaying, the desperation of their fellow sportsmen whose futures are now undecided, their hopes of winning medals now dashed.
This picture of Nassir Ali Hatem was taken only a month ago. He was mentioned in a report about the struggles facing national sportsmen. It said:
“Over at the Iraq Hunting Club, on the western edge of the capital, Nassir Ali Hatam slashes across a dusty clay court and swats tennis balls over a tattered net.
“Defying the chronic bloodshed near them and the meager financial support from their erratic government, Iraq’s elite athletes are still trying to train for competitions at home and abroad.
” ‘I hope people around the world know that even though we’re in a bad situation here, we’re struggling for the progress of sports in Iraq,’ said Faleh Francis Yousif, a national Olympic Committee vice president.”
Their present life seems no better than the barbaric days when Uday Hussein took charge of the Olympic Committee and regularly tortured his football players for playing badly.
Though Wikipedia reports soccer successes following Hussein’s death, any future chances of success now look slim. Does the ban on shorts include football players? One assumes it does. Can they/will they play matches in joggers? Why was the ban imposed? Why weren’t sportsmen exempt?
This is not the first time that sportsmen have been targeted in Iraq.
On May 17 a group of 15 members of the Iraq tae kwon do team were taken hostage between Fallujah and Ramadi to the west of Baghdad as they returned Amman in Jordan. The kidnappers demanded a ransom of $US100,000 ($131,690) for their release.
And on February 25, former national boxing champion Jasseb Rahma was shot dead in front of his family in the town of Bassorah.
I came across this tragic story, and many others, on Today in Iraq, which gives an awesome insight into the true scale of the daily butchery and horrors experienced in this savaged country.
This is the saddest blog I have ever written, when talented lives with so much to look forward to are wiped out in such a barbaric way. I have two sports loving sons who live in their shorts, it’s hard to imagine that it could be them if fate had decided that Iraq have been their country of birth.
If only we could turn the clock back….
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