Word: iraqi
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Iraqi sprinter Dana Hussein, 21, was already discouraged a month ago. "If you compare our situation with other countries, like the Asian countries, other athletes have already competed in 12 events. We're still in Baghdad," she told TIME, standing on the crushed 1980s asphalt where she trains. But having dodged bullets, curfews, and sectarian threats through five years of war, Hussein was not going to be stopped by training disadvantages and a lack of funding. She saw an overarching hope for helping to heal some of Iraq's bitter sectarian divides with this Olympics. "Sports can unify the Iraqi...
...Iraqi team might still have a shot. IOC spokesperson Giselle Davies told CNN the Iraqi government would have one last chance, but only for about a week. "If there can be some movement and if a resolution can be found, that's still an open door," she said. The spokesman for the Baghdad security plan, Tahsin al-Sheikhli, in the meantime, said Iraqi sports unions would be filing a formal complaint against the IOC for its decision. "This was the only time that Iraqis would get to gather and bring the name of Iraq to a real international competition," says...
...days after the fall of Saddam Hussein, I got a chilling insight into the brutality of his rule, in the most unexpected place - the compound of the Iraqi sports ministry. In one corner of a sprawling complex of offices and official residences, behind walls emblazoned with the universal symbol of the Olympic Games, was that most medieval of torture devices: an iron maiden...
...nearly eight feet tall and looked like a cast-iron coffin. At first, I thought it was somebody's grotesque idea of a joke - a gag gift, perhaps, for Uday Hussein, Saddam's psychopath son and head of Iraqi's sports administration. But when I opened it, I realized its purpose was deadly serious...
...iron maiden confirmed some of the ghastly stories I'd heard about Uday's treatment of Iraqi sportsmen, especially the national soccer team. When they lost a game, they routinely received beatings and an imaginative range of punishments - like being made to kick concrete balls, or forced to run shoeless over shards of glass. Later, I would meet a coach who had spent two terrifying hours in the iron maiden - his torso was riddled with scars from the spikes...