Word: uday
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...sixth year of living with war, Iraqis may be justified in claiming their team should be granted special understanding due to difficult circumstances. But particularly infuriating is the timing of the ban; many argue that under Saddam Hussein, the sports atmosphere was no less corrupt, with Hussein's son Uday exercising an abusive grip on state sports. "Why didn't the International Olympic Committee intervene under the previous regime when Uday used to imprison and torture some of the players?" says Mithal al-Alloussi, a secular MP from the Umma party...
...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...
Needless to say, torture didn't make the Iraqi soccer team play better. But once freed from Uday's depravity, the team flourished. At the Athens Olympics in 2004, they went all the way to the semi-finals, losing the bronze medal game by a single goal to the mighty Italians. They had been the Cinderella team of the Games, and like their proud countrymen, I celebrated the team's success. Three years later, as their country was being torn apart by a bloody sectarian war between Shi'ites and Sunnis, the team (comprising of players from both sects...
...embassy attack was not simply a strike at an Indian installation, but also an attempt - by the Taliban, the ISI or anyone else - to undermine President Karzai and anyone who supports him. "[The perpetrators] want to disrupt the current Karzai effort that's being supported by the West," says Uday Bhaskar, deputy director of the Institute for Defense Studies and Analysis. "India is now part of that...