BAGHDAD — At the moment he jumped to head a ball during afternoon practice on the second-to-last day of March, Manar Mudhafar was one of the best soccer players on the best team in Baghdad, an easy-smiling 19-year-old with speed, skills and a toughness that made him a rising star.
By the time he hit the ground, he had a perplexed look on his face and a bullet in his throat. Mudhafar didn't say a word as he struggled to breathe and blood soaked his white jersey, staining its Canon logo and his number, 29.
He was dead in three minutes.
"He looked like he had been stung by an insect," recalled Haidar Mahmood, the captain of the Zawra team, who was standing beside his friend and teammate when he went down. "I got to him and I saw it was a bullet and I ran away, because I couldn't stand seeing my buddy dying on the ground."
It's hard to hide from the rain of bombs and bullets that brings danger to the streets, the homes and even the mosques of Baghdad. But the bullet that killed Mudhafar invaded one place in Iraq that had been seen as a sanctuary: a soccer field, where the troubles of this splintering society could be left behind for the simple pleasure of kicking a ball around.
Mudhafar's death, from what teammates accept was a stray bullet, possibly fired from a nearby police station, shattered that illusion of immunity, and brought a singular hurt to a city riddled with individual tragedies.
"Our club is like a family because we train together, travel together and play together," said Mahmood, a 32-year-old veteran of Iraqi football, who once captained the national team under the Saddam Hussein regime. "Sectarianism is affecting everything in Iraq. But in football, it's the opposite. There is no sectarianism. We are part of a team. Our soul is sport."
A look at player rosters from teams across Iraq suggests that his words are more than just another sports cliche.
Sunnis play for the club in Najaf, a Shiite holy city, and Kurds play for the team in Samarra, a town in the heart of the Sunni Triangle. Irbil and Dahuk, the top clubs in Iraq's heavily Kurdish north, have recruited Shiite players from the talent-rich neighborhood of Baghdad's Sadr City.
Even Salahuddin, the local team for Hussein's overwhelmingly Sunni hometown, Tikrit, has been signing Shiite players from the south.
