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Syria hosts the first international basketball tournament in years

 


DAMASCUS, Syria (AP) Syria hosted the first international basketball tournament on its soil in at least two decades on Monday, bringing a World Cup qualifier to the Asian region at a packed stadium in the capital Damascus.

The game against Kazakhstan, which Syria lost 81-71, saw the national team play at home in front of fans for the first time since the civil war disrupted security and changed the regular life in the country.

The head of the Syrian basketball federation, Tarif Qutrash, said that the preparations for organizing this part of the tournament took place over six months. Federation officials met several times with members of the Asian Basketball Federation to calm concerns about conditions in the country, he said.

We said with certainty that we are capable, Qutrash told the Associated Press. This is the first such tournament not in 11 years (since the beginning of the war), but in 20 years that has World Cup qualifiers for basketball in Syria.

Syria did not have the infrastructure to host such an international tournament. But the already modernized sports city of Al-Fayhaa features a basketball court and a gym that can accommodate up to 8,000 people, according to the Syrian basketball federation’s Facebook page.

A photograph of President Bashar Assad and his father, Hafez Assad, who preceded them, hangs over the bleachers.

The anti-government protests in 2011 were met with repression and the violence quickly turned into a civil war that claimed the lives of over 350,000 people and displaced half the population of the pre-war country of 23 million.

Fighting has calmed down and Assad’s forces have regained control of much of the country. But a peace deal remains elusive and parts of Syria remain in the hands of foreign-backed armed groups.

In the 2019 World Cup qualifiers, Syria played its home matches in neighboring Lebanon due to the security situation.

Syria is changing. It won at the sports level when the Asian Federation and the International Basketball Federation (FIBA) said Syria is the right place to host the tournament and host it, Qutrash said.

The Syrian national team lost to Kazakhstan in the first qualifying match on Saturday, 84-74, in a match organized in Nur-Sultan, the capital of Kazakhstan. Syria and Kazakhstan play in the same group as Iran and Bahrain.

The Asian region qualifiers will last until February 2023, where each national team plays games at home and abroad. The next World Cup to be hosted by the Philippines, Japan and Indonesia takes place from August 25 to September 10, 2023.

In a disaster in Nur-Sultan, the Iranian national anthem was played at the beginning of the first match to welcome the Syrian team, instead of the Syrian anthem. The Syrian Sports Federation complained to FIBA.

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