So far, 2023 has been good for football in Iraq. The under-20 national team reached the final of the Asian Championship in March to qualify for this summer’s World Cup in Argentina, where they are drawn with England, Uruguay and Tunisia. In January, the country hosted and won the Gulf Cup, an eight-nation regional tournament, lifting the trophy in front of 60,000 fans in Basra. If the year ends with the national team starting out on the road to the 2026 World Cup with qualifiers on home soil, then it really will be 12 months to remember.

The last time a World Cup qualifier was hosted in Baghdad was way back in 2001. The US-led invasion two years later and the ensuing instability and insecurity (not that things were much different in the previous decades, with the Iran-Iraq war and then the first Gulf war) has meant Fifa and the Asian Football Confederation (AFC) have usually told the federation to play home games in third countries such as Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

So there have been only two World Cup qualifiers in Iraq this century. In 2011, the Lions of Mesopotamia, who defied the odds four years earlier to win the Asian Cup, hosted Singapore in the northern city of Erbil, a game that was disrupted by a power cut. Eight years later, Hong Kong came to the southern port of Basra, and that has been it.

It was set to change. In March 2022, Baghdad was given the green light by Fifa to host a vital qualifier against the United Arab Emirates. Days beforehand, however, a missile attack on Erbil, which emanated from Iran, led the world governing body and the AFC to change their minds and the venue, citing security concerns. “Football is played all over the country with no issues whatsoever,” the veteran Iraq striker Ahmed Yasin posted on social media. “This ban makes no sense. How much longer do we have to wait?”

Maybe not too much longer. The Gulf Cup was presented as a chance to show that Iraq was ready. The prime minister, Mohammed al-Sudani, took personal interest in the tournament, both before and during, there was investment in facilities and thousands of visitors from the region poured into Basra and Fifa’s president, Gianni Infantino, was present.