Mick Hartley

Christina Lamb in the Sunday Times, on the Iranian women footballers:

“My Choice, My Homeland” was emblazoned across a giant billboard in Valiasr square in central Tehran. Iran’s female football team stood on stage flanked by officials and cheered by flag-waving crowds for a heroes’ welcome shown live on national television.

The Lionesses, as they are known like the English team, had lost all three of their matches in the Women’s Asian Cup in Australia, and the ceremony on Thursday did not last long because of the nightly bombings by US and Israeli jets. But, to the Iranian regime, their return home was a major victory given that days earlier, the captain, five players and their kit-woman had been in a safe house in Brisbane, hoping to defect. In the end only two stayed behind.

“What is certain is that these athletes are loyal to the homeland, flag, leader and revolution,” declared Mehdi Taj, the president of the Iranian Football Federation. The women standing on stage, wearing the mandatory black hijab over their kit, sang along to the national anthem as the camera zoomed in. Then they stood grim-faced, presumably wondering what their future holds.

Less than three weeks earlier they had been denounced on state television as “war traitors” for staying silent as the anthem played before their opening match.

Just that morning another athlete — Saleh Mohammadi, a 19-year-old wrestler — had been executed, along with two other young people for their role in the protests in January, in which as many as 30,000 are believed to have been massacred by regime forces.

The goalkeeper from the men’s national team, Rashid Mazaheri, has been missing since comparing Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the former supreme leader, to the devil in an Instagram post shortly before the start of the war on February 28.

The Lionesses, some as young as 21, had faced an impossible choice between returning to a war-torn land and a repressive regime that had slaughtered thousands, including some of their friends, or asylum in Australia that would give them freedom and safety but put their families back home at risk.

“This is a terrorist regime which will find anything they can to use to put pressure,” says Mohammad Taghavi, 58, who once played in the national team and is now living in exile in the UK and working as a sports commentator. He said he was in indirect touch with the team. “If they find your weak point is your family, they will use that. And these girls are just kids, imagine them listening to their mums begging them not to let them be killed.”

It may be surprising that a country like Iran, with so many restrictions on women’s behaviour and dress, has a national women’s football team. Until recently, women were not allowed to attend matches, sneaking in disguised as men. In 2019, a young woman named Sahar Khodayari, known as the blue girl, was arrested after trying to get into the Azadi stadium in Iran. She set fire to herself on the steps of the court and died in hospital.

But countries must allow female spectators and have a national women’s team to be Fifa compliant, so the men can qualify for international tournaments such as this summer’s World Cup, where Iran is due to play.

The Iranian Lionesses receive little funding and facilities and are often the target of abuse by hardcore supporters of the Islamic regime. To meet dress codes, they play in long-sleeved jerseys, leggings and black hijab to cover their hair.

Eventually all but two of the Lionesses returned home: that is, were forced to return home.

As half the team waited at a hotel in Kuala Lumpur, their team-mates in the safehouse in Brisbane were beginning to get cold feet.

“The regime in Iran started threatening their families and basically took their families hostage,” Shiva Amini, a former Iranian national football player who now lives in exile, wrote on social media.

“Because of that, they were forced to withdraw their asylum and go back to Iran.”

Taghavi, the former player now in the UK, said: “I told them, ‘Don’t come back.’” He believes the regime got to someone inside the safehouse to persuade the others not to defect.

“Plants from the intelligence were to tell the others in the safe house, ‘If you don’t go back, your families will be killed’,” he claimed.

[Leigh] Swansborough said: “If you know the regime, it was more than likely someone was going to be a compromised mole. Had it been handled differently, I think the outcomes would have been very different. I really think the Australian government doesn’t understand how far-reaching the power of the regime is.”

By last Saturday night, only two remained — Atefeh Ramazanzadeh, 34, and Fatemeh Pasandideh, 21. They were photographed last week, training with the Brisbane Roar, without hijab for the first time.

The others joined up with their team-mates in Malaysia and then flew to Turkey from where, last Wednesday, they travelled by bus to Tehran. They find themselves in Iran, now in its fourth week of bombing and with the regime still in control despite losing so much of its leadership.

There was to be no Hollywood-style happy ending. “These players, the ones that went home and the ones that stayed, had to make the hardest choice of their life and there was no winner,” said Swansborough.

Despite the heroes’ welcome, she fears the worst. “When things get quiet, they will get their punishment,” she said. “And we won’t hear about it because there’s no internet. It could be as minimal as football suspensions. It could be punishment. It could be torture.

“We know they kill athletes. And this is why people need to take it seriously. There’s still a chance that some of these players could be killed.”

Nothing yet from Gary Lineker.