When Iraqis play football in Kurdistan, local fans cannot hide their hatred

The mounting threat of war was no deterrent to the players of Naft, an Iraqi football team, as they travelled for a match yesterday in the heart of Kurdistan, even though the Kurdish government supports an American-led invasion.

The Iraqi players were keen that nobody should be in any doubt as to where their loyalties lay. Outside their dressing room in the new stadium in Arbil they did a little jig, chanting: "We offer our soul and our blood to you Saddam." Udai Abdul Ridah, a midfielder, confided: "All our players are ready to fight."

For an hour before the game Kurdish supporters of the Arbil club (known as Hawler in Kurdish) lined up to buy pink-coloured five-dinar (£1) tickets while stallholders beside the gates sold them bags of sun-flower seeds, pistachio nuts, baklava and fried rice balls.

"We play in a friendly way, but we don't cheer for Saddam," said Abdul Khalid Massud, the stadium manager. Indeed the main chant from 10,000-strong Kurdish crowd, when not cheering on their own side, was: "Stuff the Turks." For the past week Kurds have talked of little else but the Turkish threat to advance on a 200-mile-long front into Kurdistan.

Neither Naft nor Arbil are at the top of the Iraqi league, but the game underlined that there is not much animosity at a popular level between Arabs and Kurds in Iraq.

Arbil's star striker, Mohammed Nasser, is an Arab from Baghdad and the club's most popular player. "There is no difference between the Kurdish and Arab nation," he said. "We are against war and there will be no war."

The Naft goalkeeper, Sair Aldin Zamman, added: "We go back and forth. Sport is different from politics." Later he remarked, perhaps with that sense of self-preservation inbred in Iraqis: "We love Saddam Hussein and we will stay with him to the end."

The game was not particularly aggressive, but occasionally the crowd grew impatient with what they saw as Naft players feigning injury.A single goal gave Arbil the win.

There might have been a measure of official orchestration in all this. Their cheerleader, Adid Gharib, a Kurd who had fought in the Iran-Iraq war, was leading the chants against Turkey. He said: "I like the Arab team. Turkey wants to occupy our oilfields and take what we have achieved."

Arabs from the rest of Iraq often play for Kurdish teams because they are paid more, a fact that irritates some Kurdish football officials who think the money could be better spent.

The Iraqi population is divided into three communities – Shia Arabs, Sunni Arabs and Kurds – but they have never regarded each other withthe sectarian hatred seen in Northern Ireland or Lebanon. Violence against each community has normally come from the government.