The Battered Champions of Aleppo

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, Personal Journals

4.3 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 31 December 2015

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

A fuzzy team photo from the 1980s sends Tim Whewell on a journey to track down football players from a small town in northern Syria who were once the champions of Aleppo province. In the last four years of war their hometown, Mare'a, has become a war zone – bombed by the Assad regime, besieged by Islamic State, subject even to a mustard gas attack. And the civil war has torn through what was once a band of friends – some now pro-rebel, some pro-regime. They’re scattered across Syria and beyond, some fighting near Mare'a, some in refugee camps abroad. What have they gone through since they won that cup? And do they think they can ever be reunited? Shabnam Grewal producing.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is a BBC Podcast.
0:02.3	You can get all our podcasts and our terms of use
0:04.9	at BBCWorldService.com slash podcasts.
0:10.9	When I first saw the picture, I was immediately fascinated.
0:14.9	There wasn't anything unusual about it in itself.
0:18.0	I'm sure you've seen many photos like it.
0:20.8	The reason I was so intrigued was because of the really weird
0:24.5	circumstances I was in at the time.
0:26.5	And because I had to know what happened afterwards
0:29.5	to the young men in it.
0:31.5	It's painful to look at that picture.
0:34.2	It's really painful because...
0:37.0	Because through all this years, what happened?
0:39.6	It's very emotional, conflicting feelings, okay?
0:45.0	Where were we? What we did?
0:47.2	And what happened to us?
0:52.4	That's Yasar Al-Haji, talking to me, Tim Hewool,
0:55.5	about the picture.
0:56.8	It's what inspired this week's assignment
0:58.8	here on the BBC World Service, a photo of a football team,
1:02.6	Yasar's old team. They're not famous.
1:05.6	They're just a group of ads who grew up together
	...

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