Abbas Atwi (right) of Lebanon’s Al-Ahed soccer team, which has the backing of Hizbullah.
In early June, several heavily armed Islamists, part of a group that admires Osama bin Laden and wants to bring his ideals to Somalia, surprised a group of soccer fans gathered in Mogadishu to watch a World Cup match. They killed two of the fans, and told the rest to go home, saying the sport was ungodly.
But if the Al Qaeda leader heard about the attack from his hiding place in Pakistan, he most certainly disapproved. Bin Laden—whose strict Islamist worldview proscribes music, women’s education, gambling, drinking, homosexuality, and the shaving of beards—is a fan of the game, and his preferred position is center forward. He is one of the many jihadists who worship the world’s most popular sport. “It’s on the whole their favorite thing after jihad,” says Scott Atran, an American and French anthropologist who has studied the interplay between terror groups and soccer..more..
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