In the vast indoor Olympic swimming pool in northern Baghdad, sectarian differences are submerged after a commute which is equally dangerous for all the swimmers.
Here, amid the overwhelming smell of chlorine, Hamza Hamid and his disabled swimming team colleagues are preparing for an upcoming competition.
The air-conditioning at the former Olympic compound never seems to work properly, and when summer temperatures soar into the high 40s, the hot humid air combined with the chlorine can even make the swimmers pass out.
Yet neither the conditions in the pool, nor the dangerous journey through some of Baghdad’s more unstable neighbourhoods, keep Hamid and his teammates from making their weekly pilgrimage for Sunday swimming practice.
”The pool has become the only place for us to gather, as each one of us became trapped in his neighbourhood because of the security situation,” Hamid says as he prepares to dive into the water.
The Iraqi national disabled swimming team brings together men from all over the city to compete in butterfly, backstroke, freestyle and other disciplines — competition that gives them purpose in their increasingly difficult lives.
”I never considered myself to be handicapped,” says Hamid (36), who lost his right leg 20 years ago to a mine in the Iran-Iraq war.
”I can compete with anyone.”
Hamid came fourth in the World Peace Championship in Brazil in 2005, and he has won medals in several international tournaments. Now his sights and those of the team are set on a tournament in Madrid at the end of the month.
The prime obstacles for the 13-person team, says Hamid, are not their missing limbs, but the dangerous commutes they endure to reach the Olympic complex in the capital’s al-Shaab neighbourhood.
”Today the Americans closed all the roads. I had to take some risks, take alternative routes through the fields to reach Baghdad from Yusifiyah,” Hamid says, referring to the town south of the capital that has been a focus of insurgent activity.
In the wake of a new security plan launched on Wednesday, with about 40 000 Iraqi and coalition troops descending on the capital to bring stability to the violence-plagued city, the team members will now have to negotiate even more checkpoints.
The team was formed during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war when otherwise healthy and fit soldiers began to return from the front lines with limbs blown off by exploding landmines and artillery shells.
The Ba’athist government set up sports teams specifically for disabled veterans of the Iran war.
As United States military doctors are discovering now, as American amputees return from the battlefields of Iraq, sports can help restore the soldiers’ self-esteem, keep them healthy and reintegrate them into the community.
With the fall of the Saddam Hussein regime, the teams were opened to those disabled by Iraq’s other wars and the numerous mines and ordnance left scattered across the country.
According to estimates by international aid agencies, many of which are now supporting these teams after the removal of government funding, about 80 000 people in Iraq are missing limbs.
The swimming team has had to overcome many obstacles in the past. Saddam’s son Uday, who headed the Iraqi Olympic Committee, used to rent the pool out to businessmen for parties, cutting into the team’s practice time.
When US-led coalition forces rumbled into Baghdad in April 2003, one of the first places they held and fortified was the Olympic complex, and for a while the pool was the sole province of American soldiers.
Eventually, however, they agreed to leave and the team’s practice sessions could resume.
Team coach Raed Abdel Karim sees this swimming pool and his team as an answer to the sectarian violence currently tearing the capital apart.
”The swimmers see this pool as a safe haven to escape the sectarian violence in their country for at least a few hours,” he says.
”This pool is big enough for Sunnis to swim next to Shi’ites, Christians and Kurds,” he adds, gesturing towards the 50m-long pool where his team members are swimming their warm-up lengths.
Abdel Karim, who is not himself disabled, is a former Iraqi national swimming champion.
He received a medal for bravery from the government in July 2005 after he dived into the muddy waters of the Tigris river to save scores of drowning Shi’ite pilgrims.
A mortar attack had turned a Shi’ite religious event into a deadly stampede across a narrow bridge. More than 1 000 people were killed, many after throwing themselves into the river to avoid being crushed.
Amid the daily chaos and uncertainty of life in Baghdad, Hamid and his teammates find both companionship and purpose in the chlorine confines of their swimming pool.
”These swimmers are challenging the war and the sectarian violence of their country,” says Abdel Karim proudly. — AFP
