We’re not the only ones who love the World Cup. Osama Bin Laden and his fellow jihadists do, too.
Several prominent Islamist organizations have ties to soccer, according to Newsweek. And jihadists use the sport to bond with potential recruits.
“It’s on the whole their favorite thing after jihad,” Scott Atran, an American and French anthropologist who has studied the relationship between soccer and terror groups, told the magazine.
Hamas leader and Gaza Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh played on Gaza’s Al-Shate soccer team. And Abbas Atwi, who plays on Lebanon’s Al-Ahed soccer team, has been sponsored by militant group Hezbollah.
Even Bin Laden is a huge fan of the game, according to Nasser al-Bahri, one of the leader’s former bodyguards. In his memoir, he said Bin Laden’s favorite position is center forward.
Bin Laden, as a young boy, realized the value of camaraderie built around the sport. He used soccer as a strategy to bring together like-minded individuals and to spread his religious message.
“When he was a kid, he organized soccer games,” said Lawrence Wright, a writer for The New Yorker, who is writing a book on the origins of Al Qaeda. “He always had a social consciousness about it.”
Even in the 1980s, when the mujahedeen fought against the Russians in Afghanistan, Islamists formed teams to escape boredom and represent their countries in what Newsweek described as a “de facto mini-World Cup.”
Atran said soccer can actually lead to militancy.
“Our data show that a reliable predictor of whether or not someone joins the jihad is being a member of an action-oriented group of friends,” Newsweek reports Artan told the Senate Armed Services Committee earlier this year. “It’s surprising how many soccer buddies join together.”
