THE OTHER NATIONAL TEAM · IRAQ
During the men’s World Cup, FemGol will trace the history of some of the women’s national teams from the countries taking to the pitch. Because a country’s football doesn’t fit in a single team.
Iraq have returned to the men’s World Cup 39 years on. They had not managed it since Mexico 86, and qualification —sealed in the spring— was celebrated in the streets as a national event. The Lions of Mesopotamia share a group with France, Senegal and Norway, and for a few days football is once again, in Iraq, a collective celebration.
On the other side of that same shirt is another national team fighting for something far more basic. Not to win a World Cup, nor even to qualify for one: to have continuity, fixtures, a ranking and a structure from which to grow.
Their starting point was almost brutal. On 19 October 2010, at the Arab Women’s Cup in Bahrain, Iraq made their debut with a 20-0 defeat to Jordan. Two days later they lost 15-0 to Egypt and, in their third match, 12-0 to Lebanon. Those scorelines, recorded by the RSSSF, are the harshest —but most honest— way to measure where it all began.
For years, Iraq were a side more present in the records than on the calendar, with no major campaigns and no recognisable path towards Asia’s elite. The explanation lies largely off the pitch: various analyses of women’s sport in Iraq describe a difficult environment —shaped by decades of conflict and by conservative social and religious currents— in which wearing kit, appearing on camera or playing out of public view has often been the only safe option due to the taboos surrounding the sport.
Perhaps that is why their first joy came indoors. Futsal —less exposed and easier to organise away from the spotlight— served as the gateway for Iraqi women’s football; FIFA itself has noted that for years it acted as a development route for many players for logistical and infrastructure reasons. And it was there that the one major title arrived: in June 2022, Iraq were crowned champions of the WAFF women’s futsal tournament with a 4-2 win over hosts Saudi Arabia in Jeddah, with several of the scorers —Shokhan Salihi, who netted twice, Direen Mullabakar and Tbarek Al Ghazawi— coming from Iraqi Kurdistan.
From there, the signs begin to stack up. In July 2023, with support from the FIFA Forward programme, the Iraqi federation staged a futsal tournament in Duhok with 140 players from ten teams, conceived as the first step in a strategy to build bridges between futsal and the eleven-a-side game. A year later, in 2024, came a quiet but real milestone: FIFA included Iraq in its women’s world ranking for the first time, in 172nd place. They now sit 166th —still at the back, but on the map at last.
The next step was to be properly tested. In qualifying for the 2026 AFC Women’s Asian Cup, Iraq were drawn in Group B, played in Thailand between June and July 2025, alongside India, Thailand, Mongolia and Timor-Leste. They drew 0-0 with Timor-Leste and beat Mongolia 5-2 —four points that, for a side with so little international experience, felt like a lot— but the gap to the elite soon showed: 0-5 against India and 0-7 against Thailand left them out. Months later, at the WAFF Championship in Jeddah in November–December 2025, they finished third, which by their own standards is progress too.
There is no need to dress it up. Iraq are nowhere near Japan, Australia, China or South Korea, nor do they have a long history to lean on. But they no longer start from zero. Between the 20-0 of 2010 and the FIFA ranking of 2024 lie fourteen years and rather more than an improved scoreline: there is a sign of permanence. As the Lions of Mesopotamia take to the field in North America with a whole country behind them, their compatriots keep earning, match by match, the right to compete. Because Iraq’s football cannot be contained in a single team: it is also the football of those still fighting to play.
