(ESPN)- ON A COOL February afternoon, one of Syria's greatest soccer players sits outside a mall on the Persian Gulf, paralyzed by a decision that he fears could kill him.
For five years, Firas al-Khatib has boycotted the Syrian national team to protest dictator Bashar al-Assad, who bombed and starved Khatib's hometown.
Now, suddenly, Khatib seems to be having a change of heart. He is thinking about rejoining Syria for its final push to qualify for next year's World Cup. His reasons are complicated, and he's reluctant to express them.
"I'm afraid, I'm afraid," he says in stilted English. "In Syria now, if you talk, somebody will kill you -- for what you talk, for what you think. Not for what you do. They will kill you for what you think."
Khatib is bearded and runty, with curly brown hair and kind eyes. He has earned millions playing professionally in Kuwait. The mall's posh setting offers a glimpse into his comfortable life here -- yachts bobbing on scalloped blue water, robed men and women drawing flavored tobacco from tableside water pipes. But Khatib seems nearly crushed by the weight of his dilemma, which he discusses over two days of interviews. "Every day before I sleep, maybe one hour, two hours, just thinking about this decision."
Khatib pulls out his phone to show his Facebook page, which receives a hundred messages a day. Even some of his closest friends are ready to turn on him. One player he grew up with, Nihad Saadeddine, says if Khatib returns to Syria he'll be relegated to "the garbage bin of history along with everyone who supports the criminal Bashar al-Assad." Saadeddine vows never to speak to Khatib again.
Sometime within the next 36 days, when Syria plays its next match, Khatib must choose between two great evils that plague the modern world.
If he rejoins Syria, he will be team captain and the most important player in his country's quest to make the World Cup for the first time. He will also represent a government that -- along with nerve gas, torture, rape, starvation and the bombing of civilians -- has used soccer as a weapon to promote its murderous rule.
If he continues his boycott, he'll be aligned with a complicated movement that began with peaceful demonstrations and has since splintered to include al-Qaida and ISIS. ISIS has used soccer as a backdrop for some of its most heinous crimes, including the 2015 bombings at the Stade de France and a 2016 bombing at a youth soccer match in Iraq that killed 29 children.
"Now, in Syria, many killers, not just one or two," Khatib says. "And I hate all of them."
He's at a loss.
"Whatever happen, 12 million Syrians will love me," he says. "Other 12 million will want to kill me."
EMBEDDED INSIDE SYRIA'S civil war is a civil war in miniature: a wrenching and sometimes bloody fight for the soul of the national sport.
Syria's improbable World Cup bid has pitted player against player, coach against coach -- divisions that mirror the conflict that is remaking much of the world. During six years of civil war, at least 470,000 Syrians have died, and life expectancy in the country has dropped from 70 years to 55. Representing a nation with more than 12 million displaced people -- roughly half the population -- the national soccer team is yet another battleground between the followers and opponents of Bashar al-Assad.
The Syrian government contends that soccer is the one place where Syrians of all sides can come together in peace. Soccer is "a dream that brings people together. It gives people a smile and helps them forget the smell of destruction and death," says Bashar Mohammad, the Syrian national team's spokesman.
In reality, the Assad regime -- backed by FIFA's tacit support -- has woven soccer into its grisly campaign of state-sponsored oppression, a seven-month investigation by Outside the Lines and ESPN The Magazine shows.
The Syrian government has shot, bombed or tortured to death at least 38 players from the top two divisions of the Syrian professional leagues and dozens more from lower divisions, according to information compiled by Anas Ammo, a former sports writer from Aleppo who tracks human rights abuses involving Syrian athletes. At least 13 players are missing. Although opposition forces have killed soccer players on a smaller scale -- Ammo attributes four such deaths to ISIS -- the Syrian Network for Human Rights concluded that the Assad government has "used athletes and sporting activities to support ... its brutal oppressive practices." Soccer stadiums have been used as military bases to launch attacks on civilians. From the beginning of the war, according to players, teams were essentially forced to march in support of Assad, sometimes carrying banners and wearing T-shirts with the president's image. "Assad was keen to show people that athletes and artists were strongly supporting him because those are the people with the most influence in the street," Ammo says. "The marches were obligatory."
The ESPN investigation drew upon interviews with current and former players, current and former Syrian soccer officials, and friends and relatives of victims, as well as reviews of case studies and publicly available videos confirmed by human rights monitors. The interviews took place between September 2016 and March 2017 in Malaysia, Germany, Turkey, Sweden, Kuwait and South Korea.
Allegations that Syria is in violation of FIFA's rules prohibiting political interference in matters related to soccer were delivered to FIFA's doorstep in 2015. FIFA has cited those rules 20 times over the past decade to suspend countries from international play. But in the case of the Syria allegations, which were contained in a 20-page document titled "War Crimes against Syrian Football Players," FIFA responded that the "tragic circumstances ... go far beyond the domain of sporting matters" and concluded that the issue was beyond its control. FIFA officials declined to be interviewed by ESPN but issued a statement saying the organization is limited in its jurisdiction and its "capacity to verify any allegations in such a complex setting."
"There is a contradiction between FIFA's decisions and its rules," says Ayman Kasheet, a former Syrian player who hand-delivered the allegations to FIFA's headquarters in Zurich. "They issue a directive to freeze a federation because of political interference, while at the same time there is all-out war occurring in a country where stadiums are being used to store military equipment, where children and soccer players under 18 years of age are dying, where soccer players are being thrown in prison. All this is taking place and there is abundant proof, but where is the decision? This is hypocrisy."
Mark Afeeva, a London attorney who specializes in sports law and has studied FIFA's independence statutes, agrees that Syria represents "a clear case of systemic state interference in domestic and international football, and yet FIFA has chosen not to act. Simply put, it doesn't have the balls to get involved in what is clearly a very nefarious affair."
Fadi Dabbas, the vice president of the Syrian Football Association and the head of delegation for the national team, dismisses the accounts as "not true at all" and says they were made up by exiled players who oppose Assad. "The regime protects the Syrian people, and their problem is they are outside of Syria and represent only themselves," Dabbas says.
Syria's presence on the World Cup scene has created a moral conflict not only for FIFA but also for players and fans. Hundreds of Syrian players have fled to neighboring countries and Europe. They include players who, like Firas al-Khatib, have refused to represent the regime. One, defender Firas al-Ali, made a dramatic predawn escape from the national team during training camp and fled the country, shortly after learning that his 13-year-old cousin had been killed in a government attack.
Ali now lives in a tent with his wife and three children at the Karkamis Refugee Camp in southern Turkey. In an interview with ESPN, he called playing for the national team "a dishonor. It was something I just could not do. I felt like I was betraying all the sons of our nation who had been killed by the tyranny and oppression. Those players, they are carrying the flag of death."
ON A STEAMY September afternoon, with rain threatening, the players from Syria's national team, clad in white jerseys, are sprawled in the lobby of the Royale Bintang Resort & Spa, waiting for the bus to take them to practice. This is their home for Round 3 of World Cup qualifying, which began in September 2016 and runs through this September.
Team Syria is like an abandoned child, bouncing from one foster home to another. Syria normally plays its home games in Damascus and Aleppo, but FIFA won't allow it because it cannot guarantee the safety of players and fans. After spending Round 2 of the Asian qualifiers in Oman, Syria was unable to find a Round 3 host in the entire Middle East. Days before the first match, Macau offered to host, then backed out. On the verge of forfeiting, the team settled for Seremban, an industrial city separated from Syria by 4,700 miles and the Indian Ocean.
Malaysia's Independence Day has just passed, and the lobby is covered with patriotic slogans and dozens of red, white and blue flags, which hover ironically over the Syrians. I AM A CHILD OF MALAYSIA, one slogan reads. The players are exhausted, bewildered over how they ended up here. The qualifying round started three days earlier in Uzbekistan with a 1-0 loss. After waiting to find out its new home, the team traveled 20 hours -- from Tashkent to Istanbul to Kuala Lumpur -- before busing 40 miles to Seremban. "We heard that our home was going to be Qatar, then Lebanon or Macau," says the team captain, Abdulrazak al-Hussein. "I don't know what happened exactly. There shouldn't be all these rejections and non-acceptances."
Syria is scheduled to play South Korea two nights later. A decade ago, a qualifier against the same team drew 35,000 people in Syria. As they wait, the players debate how many fans might show up this time: "Hopefully three!" one says, laughing.
Given the challenges, Syria's success thus far has been shocking. In addition to the logistics challenges and the defections of key players, the team is largely broke. FIFA was forced to freeze development money for Syria because of sanctions imposed on the country by the United States and the European Union. In Seremban, the team is practicing at a scruffy local pitch to avoid paying a $3,500 stadium fee, says Kouteiba al-Refai, the team's harried general secretary. Refai himself is unpaid.
Syria advanced out of Round 2 by finishing second behind Japan. It's the closest Syria has come to making the World Cup in 31 years. FIFA has celebrated the scrappy team as the ultimate overachiever, posting stories on FIFA.com about the team's heroic struggle to make the World Cup against all odds. "What Syria have achieved ... seems nothing short of a miracle," read one article last February.
The stories leave out one detail: Team Syria represents a government accused of committing war crimes against its own people.
FIFA HAS ESSENTIALLY adopted the position of the Assad regime, which maintains that Syria's national team is politically neutral. Dabbas, the Syrian businessman who serves as head of the delegation, says the team's primary goal, beyond qualifying for the World Cup, is "to bring all Syrians together" and "prove to the world that Syria is fine, that Syria has a pulse." The team represents "all of Syria."
But Dabbas makes it clear that Syria is playing for "our president" and is loyal to Assad. "Any Syrian inside Syria represents President Bashar Assad, and His Excellency President Dr. Bashar Assad represents us. We are proud of our president. We are proud of what he's achieved. And we want to send him our regards and thanks for what he has done for Syria, and we are behind him and under his leadership."
Assad, according to Dabbas, watches every game and is "following the most minute details of the team."
There are numerous signs, in fact, that the Syrian national team represents not a unified vision of Syria but the benign face of a ruthless dictatorship. In November 2015 in Singapore, the head coach, a player and the team spokesman showed up to a prematch news conference wearing T-shirts bearing Assad's photo. In comments widely circulated among Syrian refugees, the coach, Fajer Ebrahim, used the World Cup platform to proclaim Assad the "best man in the world."
Ebrahim, who is not coaching the team in the third round of World Cup qualifying, began an interview with ESPN in Kuala Lumpur by launching into an impromptu speech in praise of Assad. "We know our president is the right man, and a very, very great man," he said. "Without our president, Syria is destroyed."
Asked about the appropriateness of using World Cup competition to make political statements, Ebrahim replied: "Everything is linked now. Everything's related."
Given the pressures inside Syria, where thousands of people have been tortured and killed for opposing Assad, it's difficult to assess the candor of those affiliated with the team and what their allegiances are. Anas Ammo, the well-connected former sports writer who has documented human rights crimes against Syrian athletes, works as a sports agent in Mersin, Turkey. He says some players on the national team have family members who were detained or killed by the regime. "They are basically forced to play, otherwise they may kill their relatives," says Ammo, requesting that the players' names remain private to protect them and their families. Ammo says he knows of two national team members who play out of fear that the government, which controls their travel documents, will withhold their passports, making it impossible for them to play abroad. Other players, Ammo says, are loyal to Assad.
Ammo believes that if players were granted control over their passports, a large number would defect.
WEARY AND JET-LAGGED, the Syrians take the field at Seremban's Tuanku Abdul Rahman Stadium on a muggy September night. Admission is free, but there are fewer than 5,000 people in the 45,000-seat stadium. A hundred or so Syrians, mostly students down from Kuala Lumpur, cheer at midfield on the far sideline. South Korea, a perennial Asian power, threatens often but can't score, and soon Syria is battling to hang on for a scoreless tie that would give the team its first point. Every minute or so, a Syrian player flops to the grass, trying to run out the clock.
With time running down, the Syrian fans unfurl a huge banner. It's a picture of Assad, stretching 20 rows. The crowd jumps up and down, stomps its feet and chants: "Syria! Syria!" Within seconds, Malaysian security guards rush to the section and force the Syrians to put the banner away.
When the whistle blows on the 0-0 tie, a Syrian coach turns a cartwheel and the players storm the field.
"Today's result, it's not an achievement but rather a miracle," says team captain Hussein during the sweaty aftermath. "Today the Syrian team proved that it is a team of heroes, not just players."
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