'I’ve had setbacks in my life': Ali Abbas tries to find relaxation in football

Ali Abbas was 17 when he told Saddam Hussein’s men to go home. Warned them, rather, that US troops had taken Baghdad. The Abbas family was driving back to the capital they called home, having fled to the neighbouring Diyala province once the bombs started falling in early 2003, and on the way encountered the inevitable roadside congregation of uniformed figures.

The future A-League star and Iraq international’s initial instinct was to disclose what they knew, that Hussein’s shackled statue was toppling and the symbolism was about to get very real for the overthrown dictator’s allies.

Related: Interview: Sydney FC's Ali Abbas

The problem was their intelligence, while accurate, wasn’t legal. Abbas’s older brother Ayad, also a footballer, had bought a satellite dish on the black market in Erbil, where he’d travelled for a match. And so, from the safety of a farmhouse, they’d watched the invasion play out in real time on TV.

“No one knew about it, because if the government finds out you have a secret satellite you get jailed and punished,” Abbas told Guardian Australia.

“As we’re driving back through this area still under Saddam’s regime, my brother said ‘don’t say anything because no one knows about the satellite’. Then he started getting upset, saying ‘we don’t want them to come and get killed by American soldiers, so we should tell them’.

“We started talking to them, saying ‘look, man, Baghdad is gone, you should leave’. They just said, ‘are you sure?’. We watched as they changed their clothes and started going home. When we got to Baghdad we saw the American soldiers pointing guns and everything. It was a very scary moment for me and my family.”

Iraq has been no less unnerving since that day. In 2004, Abbas’s father was killed by one of the countless car bombs detonated during the conflict. A few years ago, his 21-year-old cousin was shot in the head by Islamic State.

“I used to have that fear when I was in Iraq,” he said. “You wake up, you leave the house, you don’t know if you’re going to come back or not. It’s just something I lived with since I was young. I came to Australia to find a little relaxation, but still I can’t.”

Stability hasn’t been an entirely foreign abstraction since Abbas ran away from a Gosford hotel and sought political asylum in 2007. Many a Sydney FC fan – and probably even former teammate and friend Alessandro Del Piero – recognise that. But, right now, his family are almost 12,000km away, and at the epicentre of more chaos.

With designs on a late-career comeback, the 33-year-old had been due to return this month and sign with an Iraqi Premier League club. When he read about Iran’s missile attack, he pulled out. Not that they’re playing anyway, with all league fixtures postponed indefinitely.

Since October, at the dawn of mass political protests, hundreds have been killed. Now Iraq is caught in the middle of exploding US-Iran tensions. So Abbas has stayed put in Sydney: training, eating, calling home.

In his adopted country, Abbas is an A-League cult hero and 2007 Asian Cup winner, one still stopped in the street by fans requesting a selfie with the fiery Sydney derby protagonist who somehow returned from the awful knee injury that was meant to end his career.

A left-footer like Ayad, Abbas left school at 14 in pursuit of the beautiful game. Nothing appears lost on that front, and most of his English was picked up from Australian teammates, first at Marconi Stallions and then Newcastle Jets.

By the time he joined Sydney FC in 2012, he had the banter down pat. Del Piero will attest to that, too, given the pair once almost came to blows in the dressing room with only 202cm of pure Zeljko Kalac between them.

The Sky Blues supplied some of the best and worst moments.

Related: Ali Abbas to launch official complaint over alleged vilification in Sydney derby

The latter is that infamous Sydney derby tackle that ruptured the utility’s ACL and MCL. The former is the moment, 405 days later, he returned and scored against the Jets. Cruel social media taunts from Wanderers fans spiked the intervening 13 months, which he pinned to his locker as rehab inspiration.

“If you don’t know somebody it’s very hateful to say, ‘I wish you snapped both your legs’,” Abbas says. “Do we really have this kind of human being in this world?”

The worst of humanity became apparent to Abbas when a suicide bomber took his father. It was still the worst day of his life, and he keeps the memory stowed safely out of reach. “I try to not think about the bad things,” he said. “The good things stick in my head.”

Ayad, a decade Abbas’s senior, is an Iraqi Premier League winner. He’s also the “mental hero” whose street-smart diplomacy helped mould a sibling who saw a lot of things kids shouldn’t and “always worried you might end up punished”.

Thankfully, by the time the then 20-year-old was plucked from an Under-23 camp in Jordan and deposited into the senior squad, the days of Uday Hussein’s ritual imprisonment and torture of national-team players were over.

And so, when Abbas and Iraq won the 2007 Asian Cup, they were not motivated by half-time phone calls from Saddam’s oldest son threatening to cut off their legs, but by the prospect of unifying a violently fractured nation that had grown too used to suffering.

The team, made up of Kurds, Sunnis, Shias and Turkmen, overcame daily kidnapping threats and the murder of loved ones to orchestrate one of football’s more remarkable stories.

“Back home it was a very bad situation, al-Qaeda was in Iraq,” Abbas said. “Every day 30, 40, 50, 200 people were dying. We thought by playing we could make everyone forget about suffering. So we beat Saudi and it was the highest highlight of my life. If you can put it in a movie I will watch it more than 100 times.”

Iraq’s final triumph over regional heavyweights Saudi Arabia is well documented. What isn’t, is the insidious post-tournament threat that prompted Abbas to flee Iraq.

In the same way that the brother of star Iraq midfielder Nashat Akram was kidnapped for ransom in 2009, Abbas returned home with prize money and a price on his head.

“This is actually the first time I’m going to say it,” he said, before launching into a story about a suspicious figure who approached him near his family home and used one of his friends as bait.

“He starts saying, ‘you have to help him and his family, he’s your friend’ … then he actually said the amount of money he wants and started getting angry at me.

“When I went to camp in Syria I got a call from my brother with a message that if I don’t pay they’re going to burn the new car I bought my family, and do this and that. My dad had just passed away with a car bomb and I just thought, ‘do I really want to stay there and make my mum suffer again what she went through with my dad?’.”

When he got to Australia for the Olympic qualifier against the Olyroos, he told his mother he wasn’t coming back. Not only that, he was giving up football to earn a living. After initial resistance, Ayad talked her around. “I just wanted to quit football and have a nice life,” he said.

So he and two teammates, Ali Mansour and Ali Khadher, snuck into the kitman’s room, took their passports, and left their hotel.

At the time – and much to his later amusement – Abbas didn’t know who Graham Arnold was, even though his future Sydney FC coach had overseen that Olyroos game and Iraq’s Asian Cup upset of the Socceroos.

But his contact with Arnold would continue long after he left Sydney for Pohang Steelers in 2016. Two years later, unbeknownst to most awaiting his impending Socceroos appointment, Iraq attempted to recruit Arnold - via his former player.

“Two days before Arnie took over Socceroos, I had a call from a general in Iraq who’s connected to the Iraqi Federation,” Abbas said.

“They were asking me if he’s interested to take the Iraq national-team job. I said, ‘let me ask him and see’. Arnie said, ‘yes, I would love to, but they need to act quick because I’m in talks with the Socceroos’. I was talking to them and everything, and then the next day I heard he signed for the Socceroos. It would’ve been good for Iraq and especially Arnie.”

Abbas has been without a club since 2018 when he left Wellington Phoenix. But he believes he has another three years in his legs, if an A-League team will have him.

“I’ve had setbacks in my life,” he says. “Then all of a sudden I find the love of football again.”