Coach Ehab Abu Jazar is guiding a national team that carries on its shoulders all the hopes and sorrows of Palestinian football, but it is his mother, forced by war to live in a Gaza tent, who is his main inspiration and motivation.The war that broke out following Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, 2023 put an end to Palestinian league matches, and left athletes in exile fearing for their loved ones in Gaza.But Abu Jazar’s mother refuses to let the conflict overshadow the sporting dreams of her son, to whom she feeds tactical advice from the rubble of the Palestinian territory by phone.”She talks to me about nothing but the team. She wants the focus to remain solely on the tournament,” the 45-year-old manager told AFP.”My mother asks me about the players, who will play as starters and who will be absent, about the tactics, the morale of the players and the circumstances surrounding them.”The coach’s mother Huda Mahmoud Abu Jazar, 62, is now displaced in Gaza’s Al-Mawasi camp, near Khan Yunis, living in a tent with her other son, his wife and their children.”My feelings are indescribable from the amount of happiness I feel for my son and his amazing team,” she told AFP.She beamed with pride about him and the Palestinian squad, saying her entire camp cheered when the team beat Qatar in an Arab Cup match last week.”You could hear ululations everywhere. They brought back a joy we had forgotten in Gaza,” she said.”He made us all proud. It is a great honour for us.”The manager, himself a former left-back, says he wants his players to convey the spirit of his mother and Gazans like her.”We always say that we are a small Palestinian family representing the larger family,” he said.”Undoubtedly, it puts pressure on us, but it’s positive pressure.”The Palestinian team are 96th in the FIFA rankings, and their hope of playing in their first World Cup vanished this summer.But the squad, most of whom have never set foot in Gaza, is within reach of the Arab Cup quarter-finals, keeping their message of resilience alive.Palestine play Syria in their final Arab Cup group match Sunday, where a draw would be enough to achieve an unprecedented feat for the team.He said progress would show the world that the Palestinians, if given the right conditions, can “excel in all fields”.- ‘Genes of resilience’ -Abu Jazar finished his playing career in 2017 before managing the Palestinian U-23 team and eventually taking the top job last year.After the war broke out, his family home was destroyed, displacing his mother in Gaza, like most of the territory’s population during the height of the conflict.He now feels pressure to deliver for them after witnessing from exile the horrors of the war, which came to a halt in October thanks to a fragile US-backed ceasefire.”At one point, it was a burden, especially at the beginning of the war,” he said.”We couldn’t comprehend what was happening. But we possess the genes of resilience.”If we surrender and give in to these matters, we as a people will vanish.”In her maternal advisory role, Abu Jazar’s mum is only contactable when she has power and signal.But she was able to send a message to the team before their match against Syria.”I send my words to my son and his team and pray for them every moment — may God guide their shots, and God willing, victory will be theirs today,” she said.Her and her family will find a way to watch the team’s match against Syria from her camp, praying for another victory.”From between the tents we will watch it on a TV screen. Everyone is waiting for the moment the match begins,” she said.Her determination is pushing Abu Jazar to give Gazans any respite from the reality of war.”My mother and siblings… struggle greatly to watch our matches on television. They think about how to manage the generator and buy fuel to run it and connect it to the TV,” he said.”This is what keeps us standing, and gives us the motivation to bring joy to our people.”All these circumstances push us to fight on the field until the last breath.”

As city after city fell to a lightning rebel offensive in Syria last December, Iranian forces and diplomats supporting Bashar al-Assad saw the writing on the wall, abandoning the longtime ruler days before his ousting, sources told AFP.During Syria’s civil war, which erupted in 2011 following the government’s brutal repression of pro-democracy protests, Iran was one of Damascus’s biggest backers, sending Assad military advisers and forces from its Revolutionary Guards.Iranian and allied regional fighters — mainly from Lebanon’s Hezbollah, but also from Iraq and Afghanistan — had held key locations and helped prop up Assad, only to melt away in the face of Islamist-led forces’ headlong rush towards the capital.Syrian officers and soldiers served under the Iranian Guards, whose influence grew during the conflict as Assad’s power waned.A former Syrian officer assigned to one of the Guards’ security headquarters in Damascus said that on December 5 last year, his Iranian superior summoned him to an operations centre in the Mazzeh district the following day to discuss an “important matter”.The former officer, requesting anonymity due to fears for his safety, said his superior, known as Hajj Abu Ibrahim, made a bombshell announcement to around 20 Syrian officers and soldiers gathered for the meeting.”From today, there will be no more Iranian Revolutionary Guards in Syria. We’re leaving,” they were told.”It’s all over. From today, we are no longer responsible for you.” He said they were ordered to burn or otherwise destroy sensitive documents and remove hard drives from computers.- Border bottleneck -The announcement came as the Islamist forces were making huge gains, but it still took the Syrian soldiers by surprise, he said.”We knew things hadn’t been going well, but not to that extent.”They received one month’s salary in advance and went home.Two days later the Islamist forces captured Damascus without a fight after Assad fled to Russia.Two Syrian employees of Iran’s consulate in Damascus, requesting anonymity for security reasons, also described a hasty Iranian exit.The consulate was empty by the evening of December 5 as Iranian diplomats scarpered across the border to Beirut, they told AFP.Several Syrian employees “who held Iranian nationality left with them, accompanied by senior Revolutionary Guards officers”, according to one of the former employees.At Jdeidet Yabus, Syria’s main border crossing with Lebanon, taxi drivers and former staff reported a massive bottleneck on December 5 and 6, with an eight-hour wait to clear the frontier.Both of the former consulate employees said the Iranians told their Syrian personnel to stay home and paid them three months’ salary.The embassy, consulate and all Iranian security positions were deserted by the morning of December 6, they said.- Russian base -During the war, forces under Iranian command were concentrated in sensitive areas inside Damascus and its suburbs, particularly the Sayyida Zeinab area, home to an important Shiite Muslim shrine, and around Damascus airport, as well as near the Lebanese and Iraqi borders.Parts of the northern city of Aleppo and locations elsewhere in the province were also major staging areas for personnel and fighters.At a site that used to be a key military base for Iranian forces south of Aleppo, Colonel Mohammad Dibo said that when the city fell early in the rebels’ campaign, “Iran stopped fighting”.Iranian forces “had to withdraw suddenly after the quick collapse” of Assad’s military, said Dibo, who took part in the rebel offensive and now serves in Syria’s new army.On the heavily damaged walls of the abandoned base, an AFP journalist saw Iranian and Hezbollah slogans, and a painting of a sword tearing through an Israeli flag.Tehran’s foe Israel had launched hundreds of strikes on Syria over the course of the war, mainly saying it was targeting Assad’s army and Iran-backed groups.The former Syrian army officer who requested anonymity said that on December 5, a senior Iranian military official known as Hajj Jawad and several Iranian soldiers and officers were evacuated to Russia’s Hmeimim base on the Mediterranean coast, then flown back to Tehran.At the abandoned site near Aleppo, Dibo said that after the city’s fall, “some 4,000 Iranian military personnel were evacuated via Russia’s Hmeimim base” where they had taken refuge.Others fled overland through Iraq or Lebanon, he said.Their exit was so rushed that “when we entered their bases” in Aleppo province, “we found passports and identity documents belonging to Iranian officers who didn’t even have time to retrieve them.”