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Crossing Continents: The Battered Champions of Aleppo

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Syria Footy

31/12/2015

The Battered Champions of Aleppo

BBC Radio 4 - Crossing Continents, The Battered Champions of Aleppo

Tim Whewell is on a quest to find a Syrian football team who were torn apart by civil war.

Reports from around the world. Tim Whewell seeks to reunite a Syrian football team who were torn apart by civil war with only a fuzzy team photo from the 1980s as his guide.

A fuzzy team photo from the 1980s sends Tim Whewell on a journey to track down football players from a small town in northern Syria who were once the champions of Aleppo province. In the last four years of war their hometown, Mare'a, has become a war zone - bombed by the Assad regime, besieged by Islamic State, subject even to a mustard gas attack. And the civil war has torn through what was once a band of friends - some now pro-rebel, some pro-regime. They're scattered across Syria and beyond, some fighting near Mare'a, some in refugee camps abroad. What have they gone through since they won that cup? And do they think they can ever be reunited? 

Shabnam Grewal producing.

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