Spirit of Soccer Child Safeguarding event held at Charlton Athletic FC training ground.

On 22-23 November, Spirit Of Soccer in association with the UEFA Children’s Foundation and Charlton Athletic FC held a 2-day training event “Safety on the Field: implementing the Principles of Risk Education through Football Development” for 25 grassroots football coaches.

The coaches, of whom many work in conflict zones, learned how to implement life safety training through football drills and to identify forms of abuse and how to discretely take action.

Everyone in football has the right to be safe from harassment, abuse and exploitation – be it physical, emotional, mental or sexual – neglect or bullying.

Berivan Jalal Rashid, a graduate in Physical Education from Halabja, Iraq, joined Spirit Of Soccer back in October 2020 with two goals in mind:

1. to support and develop football participation among Halabja girls;

2. to work as a session coordinator and football coach in Spirit of Soccer in order to improve skills and techniques, and to use this to raise awareness among her immediate community about the dangers of Explosive Remnants of Wars and Landmines.

These noble causes are all the more poignant in light of the city’s tragic history: During the Iran-Iraq war Halabja City, which lies in the North-East region of Kurdistan, was the scene of a genocide committed by Iraqi forces under Saddam Hussain. On the 16th March 1988, following 2 days of conventional blanket bombing, a chemical attack was launched causing 5,000 deaths in the immediate aftermath with a further 7,000 casualties afflicted with long-term illnesses. The atrocity effectively razed the city to the ground and left the landscape littered with Unexploded Ordnance (UXO) for years to come.

Back to the present day and Berivan’s goals… To help realize the first of these, SOS financed the set-up of Berivan’s very own football institute for young girls, the “Bryar Football Institute”, which now boasts 25 female players between the ages of 8 and 18. Understandably Berivan has become a heroine to these girls, focusing her time on spreading the love of football coupled with SOS’s specially designed programme with EORE messaging to them and their families.

With traditional religious values prevalent in the community her passionate message is not without challenge.

“I face many obstacle with my student’s parents to let their girls start and continue their football path. Many of them mention that they’ll withdraw their kids out when they grow up but my duty is to convince those parents and community members that football is also for girls and that this generation has greatest future ahead in sports…”

A talented footballer herself player, Berivan was one of nine Kurds selected for the Iraqi national squad who went on to beat Saudi Arabia 4-2 in the final of the West Asian Women’s Futsal Championship Final held in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia – A result she proudly broadcasts to validate her message: 

‘… this only can be proven with my success – to be an icon for my players and their families in football – so I can prove that yes a girl from Halabja can win the Asian Cup in football” she continues with a smile.

In working with Spirit Of Soccer Berivan also ensured the second of her goals. She obtained her Master’s degree in Sports Physiology back in 2021, obtained her (AFC) Asian Level ‘C’ and ‘B’ Football Coaching licenses soon after and has since coordinated numerous seminars and workshops on an international level.

“In encouraging her to take part in many face-to-face training sessions, hosting various online seminars and workshops, Berivan has become a devoted coach, sincere in her duty and an integral part of SoS – a role model for her football students and the wider community in developing football skills and delivering the humanitarian message of EORE. “Said Mohammaad Al-Naqib – the Country Director of Spirit of Soccer in Iraq. 

Following their victorious final, Bevain leaves us with a few more words of motivation:

“We were able to achieve this great success with one spirit – players hand-in-hand – with the skills of the coaches to guide us in serving our country… I offer this victory to all Iraqi women and tell them not to give up and to continue, and you too can introduce Iraq to the world under the name of football...”

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Spirit of Soccer promotes female inclusion and is a staunch advocate of womens football development and their involvement in communities in most need of assistance.
The main goals of the SOS programmes are to:
         –  Promote football among women and young girls in order to empower the role of female players and help them realize their full potential. 
         –  Provide the ball and arena for female players to pursue their goals by using football as a means of empowerment, working for health and welfare, women’s rights, and education.

We spoke to Scotty Lee, Founder of Spirit of Soccer, about the threat to football from the current conflict in Iraq, clearing landmines in conflict zones and being nicknamed the “Soccer Special Forces” by the military. Scotty started Spirit of Soccer in 1996 after witnessing a group of children in Bosnia set off a landmine while playing football – three of the children were killed, four were maimed. All were under ten years old.

How is the rise of Islamic State in Iraq affecting Spirit of Soccer?

There are certain areas we cannot operate in any longer. Three of our coaches have been made refugees in their own country, and we have one coach who is trapped in an Islamic State controlled village, and he cannot get out.

Is the tide turning? 

Daesh (Islamic State) is a very well organized, well-funded organization and are very sophisticated in the way that they distribute money. They produce and perform a lot of social services from garbage collection to law enforcement, albeit in a very brutal way. The tide will turn against such brutality but it will have to be led by the Islamic world.

The tide will turn, but not just with bombs and guns. A lot of these lads, they are religious people, they have seen the West take liberties and they are angry. When you are an angry young man – you can go round streets in Tottenham or Hackney in London and find the same sort of people – you just want to belong to and feel part of something. If we can use sport as a force of good and work with Muslim scholars to create a curriculum where the pillars of Islam are relevant to the pillars of sport – fair play, respect, charity and helping each other – we can create an opposite force to this evil.

How big a danger are land mines in Kurdistan and Iraq?

Our job is to keep children alive until all these weapons are pulled out of the ground. It might take another thousand years, it may never happen. There are mines on the Iraqi-Iranian border, up in the mountains. They will stay there. They will kill two or three shepherds a year. They know they are there. If they are going to take the risk, fine. But in Basra the biggest problem we have is that there has not been any regular garbage collection service since the invasion in 2003. So the locals burn the garbage. It is usually the job of the young boys to burn the garbage. Where they burn it there are often huge artillery shells from the British or the Americas or from the Iraqis, Al-Qaida, Daesh, it doesn’t really matter which group they belonged to. Then bang…

How does the Spirit of Soccer programme work?

For a Spirit of Soccer training session we set up a series of skill stations. The skill stations could be themed around communication, teamwork or recognition. They are soccer drills, but subliminally they are related to the Mine Risk Education messages that we promote. We might talk about recognition – recognising a moment in a football game. But then we will talk about recognising what weapons look like, or what a mine site looks like, both conventional and unconventional. At the end of the training session we do a 10-minute summary of how do you survive these weapons. The session is 90 minutes in total, because you do not want the children getting bored.

When we first came up with the philosophy of Spirit of Soccer 20 years ago, my heroes were Kevin Keegan, Pele, George Best, Glen Hoddle, but also my local PE teacher, who was a good footballer and the captain of the local football team. So we aim to create local role models within the community, who can then go out and engage kids with good quality coaching. We make sure they get proper qualifications. We often work with the national football federations, so our coaches walk away with a national or internationally recognised coaching qualification, which helps them with employment later on.

Spirit of Soccer also runs festivals for larger amounts of people and coaching workshops, teaching these skills to people who work for other NGOs, who can then go and implement this training in their community. In Laos we recently did this for 37 women, who all work for NGOs in their community. So there is the ongoing Spirit of Soccer patented curriculum and then there are other festivals and coaching workshops.

Why is Spirit of Soccer so important and effective?

If you can show a kid how to drop a shoulder or do a Ronaldo turn, hopefully he will trust you enough to say “ok, this person has told me how to play football and improve my skills, maybe I should listen to him when he starts talking about these weapons”. There is a very leading question of “Who wants to be the next Ronaldo, the next Beckham, the next Messi, the next Rooney?” Well you can’t do that if you have only got one leg, no eyes, or no face. If you want to be a professional footballer you need to be fit and healthy, you need to take care of yourself; you need to take care of each other.

We keep our education session to 10 minutes for the children because anything longer than that, their minds are going to wander. It’s mainly question and answer, because we really need to know what they know about these weapons. From that local intelligence, occasionally we will discover locations of minefields that no one knows about. In Cambodia recently we were talking to the kids, who told us there had been an explosion and a cow was killed. We spoke to a teacher and he remembered fragmentation mines being laid there 25 years ago. Spirit of Soccer has the power and authority to call an emergency team and they cleared 16 fragmentation mines that were just 5 metres from the classroom. The mines had been in the bushes for 25 years and no one knew anything about them. So we make a difference in getting information to have weapons cleared, especially when they are near schools and homes.

We are specialists in what we do with weapons. But we do so much more, especially with the amount of education we supply and the gender equality we create with our women coaches. There is an incredible amount of women playing football in Cambodia because of Spirit of Soccer. We started women’s football in Cambodia, Laos and a lot of these countries.

How do you decide where to hold a Spirit of Soccer training camp?

Spirit of Soccer works especially in Cambodia and Iraq by getting reports of mine injuries. At the end of every month we can find out where these injuries occurred, how many people were killed or maimed, the type of weapon that caused these injuries and what was the activity. We can then target those areas through the Ministry of Education. For instance we might go to Hanakin due to a spike in child casualties there, and we receive a list of all the schools and clubs reporting to the National Government. They give us permission to set up a schedule with the coaches, and we go out and start working in those schools and clubs. We are quite fast in reacting to where the problems have arisen and the injuries that are occurring. There is no point doing work where no one is being killed. We are where the problems are.

How important is it to identify and work closely with existing local organisations? 

Lots of the children we coach already play for teams or clubs. In Cambodia and Laos, we work with the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sport. In Lebanon we work with the Islamic Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts. We might work with a club, a village, or any local organisation. Most of my coaches are PE teachers in the community. Generally our three natural implementing partners are the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sport, the national football federation and the National Mine Action Centre.

Our sessions become a bit of an ‘event’ for the local area. Particularly when we run tournaments, we get a lot of interest from the tribes. A lot of tribal elders come, you get a lot of political support, and the security forces turn up. They all like football. It is a good way of garnishing local support and local security for my teams, because they do not have bodyguards. Once they meet at a football tournament the security forces are more likely to look out for them when the football is not going on.

Where were these photos taken and are the children here mainly Kurdish or Arab?

Most of these photos were taken just outside Kirkuk in the Kurdish region of northern Iraq. The city of Kirkuk itself is split into two, the Kurdish region and the Arab region. On occasions villages are a mixture. But can you tell if these kids are Kurdish or Arab? I can’t tell…

Some of the photos were near Halabja, up on the border where Saddam gassed the Kurds. One coach is a PE teacher who has been working for Spirit of Soccer for about 6 years now and he just got married.

How much of your focus is on working with girls in Iraq?

About 25% of our target audience in Iraq is girls. In northern Iraq it is a lot easier. In central Iraq we work closely with local imams and have to be careful. In Hanakin we have two female coaches and they work just with the girls in very conservative areas. In Basra itself it is not too bad, but outside Basra by the Kuwaiti border we have to be careful how we approach and involve the girls. Everything is done on a cultural basis and a local basis with the local imams. A lot of women love to play football and getting them playing together at an early age is something quite profound. You get some powerful images when you have our female coaches in hijab training young men.

Who built these incredible football pitches?

The Kurdish government (KRG) and then the Iraqi government with a lot of Turkish money and Norwegian money started constructing these pitches. The Kurds originally got around $28m to build the plastic pitches. They are now found throughout northern Iraqand also now in central Iraq. The trouble is that they are locked up a lot of the time and it is hard to access them, with the keys belonging to a certain person. We have very close relationships with the authorities, the security services, with everybody. So we can use them whenever we like. They are used a lot, but to be honest these pitches should be open for the kids 24 hours a day.

How do the military view you?

Within the military Spirit of Soccer has been called “Soccer Special Forces”. We’ve been shelled with rockets while coaching. But the most important thing is to tell the story of these amazing children, their families and our coaches, who wake up every morning and go to work. They are doing it day in, day out. They are heroes.

ABA made a charitable contribution of $200,000 to the Samdech Techo Project for Mine Action.

The fund will be used to boost mine clearance work to achieve the country’s goal of becoming a mine-free nation by 2025.

The MoU signing ceremony took place at ABA Bank Headquarters and was presided over by H.E. Ly Thuch, Senior Minister of the Royal Government of Cambodia and First Vice-President of CMAA, and Askhat Azhikhanov, Chief Executive Officer of ABA Bank.

Commenting on the MoU, Azhikhanov said, “CMAA has saved many lives throughout the country from mines and explosive remnants of war.

“We at ABA are grateful for their hard work and fully supportive of the “Samdech Techo Project for Mine Action” initiative by the Prime Minister to achieve the goal of a mine-free Cambodia by 2025.

“We hope that our modest contribution will help this incredible work to provide safe access to land, infrastructure, irrigation, and clean water,” he added.

In addition to this donation, ABA will enable the opportunity for more than 2 million of ABA Mobile app users to donate to CMAA directly from the mobile app free of charge.

Thuch said: “On behalf of Prime Minister, I would like to thank ABA Bank for its charitable contribution of US$200,000 to the national movement for demining funds initiated under the “Samdech Techo Project for Mine Action. Providing Safe Ground, Creating Smiles”.

“This MoU will significantly contribute to the Cambodian people to live in a mine-free country. People can join hands to help get rid of remnants of war and clear unexploded ordnance by donating to the CMAA ABA account.”

In line with its corporate social responsibility values, ABA Bank regularly participates in charity programmes to benefit the people and communities.

The bank recently donated US$200,000 to the Cambodian Red Cross for its humanitarian activities.

It also supported the Samdech Techo Voluntary Youth Doctor Association (TYDA) in providing free healthcare to rural communities and the Association of Samdech Kittiprittbandit Scholarship Students (AMT) for supporting bright and gifted Cambodians via scholarships and educational programmes with US$100,000 to each Association.

In April 2021, the bank donated US$1,000,000 to support the government’s efforts to stop the spread of Covid.

About ABA Bank

ABA Bank is Cambodia’s largest commercial bank by total assets, customer deposits, gross loans and net profit. As of 30 June, the bank’s assets reached US$8.5 billion.

With 81 branches, 23 ABA 24/7 spots, more than 900 self-banking machines and advanced online and mobile banking platforms, ABA Bank reaches out to millions of customers with an array of modern financial services.