By Mark Baber
February 21 – Youssef Suleiman, a player from the Homs-based al-Wathbah club, was killed by a mortar attack on the Tishreen Sports Complex in Damascus on Wednesday.
The Sana news agency said mortars landed outside a hotel used by the Homs-based team and in the actual stadium where a game between al-Wathbah and Hama-based al-Mawaair had been due to kick off.
19 year old Suleiman, who had been a youth international and was the father of a six-month-old baby, was wounded inside the hotel as the players were preparing for training and died later in hospital.
Ali Ghosn one of Suleiman’s team-mates said, “We were collecting our things, about to head to the stadium, when we heard the first explosion and the windows were blown off. Youssef was hit in the neck. We ran out to the corridor when the second explosion struck and I saw Youssef fall down bleeding from his neck.”
Three other players were wounded, including one reported to be in critical condition.
“We are football players,” Ghosn said. “These people don’t want what is good for Syria. They are criminals.”
Despite widespread violence around the country, the nine-team Syrian league began last week with the matches scheduled to be played in the capital behind closed doors.
A similar mortar attack, the day before, targeted the Tishreen palace in the same suburb. A group calling itself the ‘Commando Battalion’ from Homs, a special operations arm of the Free Syrian Army, showed footage of that attack on their YouTube channel with masked men firing 120mm mortars and shouting “God is Great”.
Rebels appear to be trying to shatter the sense of normality the Assad regime has tried to portray in the capital. The head of the Syrian Sports Union, Major General Mowaffaq Jouma, offered his condolences to the player’s family, saying this was one of many attacks targeting sports cities and institutions.
According to the US State Department, many Syrian rebels have ideological and organisational links to al-Qaeda in Iraq.
Al Qaeda in Iraq and its allies have a long record of targeting football players and spectators, including the shooting of a football player and the wounding of two others this Sunday near Kirkuk, the killing of two footballers from the Bashir sports team and wounding of four others on January 11, the May 2010 suicide attack on a stadium in Tal Afar which killed 10 spectators and injured 120, the killing of Muhammad Hammed Nawaf and Muhammad Meshaan midway through a game and in front of spectators in Ramadi in and the targeted killing of nine football players near Hilla in June 2012.
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