TEHRAN: Iranian women were allowed Thursday for the first time in almost three years to attend a football match of their country’s national team in a Tehran stadium.
“I am very happy. This is the first time I have attended a match at Azadi Stadium,” said a 26-year-old civil engineer who gave her name only as Mahya. She carried the national green, white and red flag, and covered her head with a grey scarf.
The Islamic republic has generally barred female spectators from football and other stadiums for around 40 years. Clerics, who play a major role in decision-making, argue women must be shielded from the masculine atmosphere and sight of semi-clad men.
World football’s governing body FIFA ordered Iran in September 2019 to allow women access to stadiums without restriction and in numbers determined by demand for tickets.
A month later women were able to attend a 2022 World Cup qualifying match between Iran and Cambodia in Azadi Stadium.
For the first match since then, 2,000 of the 10,000 tickets were exclusive to women on Thursday for the 2022 World Cup qualifier between Iran and Iraq, ISNA news agency reported.
“I bought the tickets online and got an SMS confirming it,” Mahya said, adding that “if we win, we will go celebrate the victory in the streets.”
She got her wish, witnessing a 1-0 home side win over Iraq.
“There is nothing strange or complicated” about a woman going to the stadium, said Mahya.
“It should have happened earlier,” she said. “I hope that this will continue.”
The female fans entered through a special entrance via a car park, controlled by policewomen wearing black chador robes and red badges on their arms.
“I wished to have my husband beside me but they said men and women are segregated,” said another female spectator, Golnaz Bahari, 24.
“It will be a lot better if families can come together,” said Bahari, carrying her child in one hand and a vuvuzela horn in the other.
Iran’s female fans sat behind the Iraqi goal.
Wearing thick coats against winter’s chill, some had the national colors painted on their cheeks, and many carried Iranian flags or horns in the national colors.
They sat apart from the men but united with them in supporting their side, with shouts of “Iran! Iran!” drowning out the few fans from Iraq. The two countries were at war for years in the 1980s.
The 2019 FIFA directive, under threat of Iran’s suspension, came after a fan named Sahar Khodayari died after setting herself on fire outside a court in fear of being jailed for trying to attend a match.
Dubbed “Blue Girl” because of the colors of the club she supported — Esteghlal FC — she had reportedly been detained in 2018 when she tried to enter a stadium while dressed as a boy.
Her death sparked an outcry, with many calling for Iran to be banned and matches boycotted.
Since Iran’s Islamic Revolution in 1979, women have borne the brunt of swift changes in the nation’s moral codes.
Women are subject to a strict dress code, and while deemed more liberal than that of many Arab countries, Iranian legislation since the revolution has been criticized as detrimental to women in cases of marriage, divorce and inheritance.
Women may hold high positions, including in parliament and the government, but cannot serve as judges and have not been allowed to run for president.
FIFA had been pushing for years for Iran to open its stadiums to women, but Tehran had until 2019 only allowed a limited number of them to attend matches on rare occasions.
Since October 2019, when women last attended a national match, Covid-19 restrictions put an end to attendance by any fans — until Thursday.
Women attend Iran-Iraq match in Tehran stadium
https://arab.news/r4ajy
Women attend Iran-Iraq match in Tehran stadium
- "I am very happy. This is the first time I have attended a match at Azadi Stadium," said a 26-year-old civil engineer who gave her name only as Mahya
- "I wished to have my husband beside me but they said men and women are segregated," said another female spectator, Golnaz Bahari
Filipinos master disaster readiness, one roll of the dice at a time
- In a library in the Philippines, a dice rattles on the surface of a board before coming to a stop, putting one of its players straight into the path of a powerful typhoon
MANILA: In a library in the Philippines, a dice rattles on the surface of a board before coming to a stop, putting one of its players straight into the path of a powerful typhoon.
The teenagers huddled around the table leap into action, shouting instructions and acting out the correct strategies for just one of the potential catastrophes laid out in the board game called Master of Disaster.
With fewer than half of Filipinos estimated to have undertaken disaster drills or to own a first-aid kit, the game aims to boost lagging preparedness in a country ranked the most disaster-prone on earth for four years running.
“(It) features disasters we’ve been experiencing in real life for the past few months and years,” 17-year-old Ansherina Agasen told AFP, noting that flooding routinely upends life in her hometown of Valenzuela, north of Manila.
Sitting in the arc of intense seismic activity called the “Pacific Ring of Fire,” the Philippines endures daily earthquakes and is hit by an average of 20 typhoons each year.
In November, back-to-back typhoons drove flooding that killed nearly 300 people in the archipelago nation, while a 6.9-magnitude quake in late September toppled buildings and killed 79 people around the city of Cebu.
“We realized that a lot of loss of lives and destruction of property could have been avoided if people knew about basic concepts related to disaster preparedness,” Francis Macatulad, one of the game’s developers, told AFP of its inception.
The Asia Society for Social Improvement and Sustainable Transformation (ASSIST), where Macatulad heads business development, first dreamt up the game in 2013, after Super Typhoon Haiyan ravaged the central Philippines and left thousands dead.
Launched six years later, Master of Disaster has been updated this year to address more events exacerbated by human-driven climate change, such as landslides, drought and heatwaves.
More than 10,000 editions of the game, aimed at players as young as nine years old, have been distributed across the archipelago nation.
“The youth are very essential in creating this disaster resiliency mindset,” Macatulad said.
‘Keeps on getting worse’
While the Philippines has introduced disaster readiness training into its K-12 curriculum, Master of Disaster is providing a jolt of innovation, Bianca Canlas of the Department of Science and Technology (DOST) told AFP.
“It’s important that it’s tactile, something that can be touched and can be seen by the eyes of the youth so they can have engagement with each other,” she said of the game.
Players roll a dice to move their pawns across the board, with each landing spot corresponding to cards containing questions or instructions to act out disaster-specific responses.
When a player is unable to fulfil a task, another can “save” them and receive a “hero token” — tallied at the end to determine a winner.
At least 27,500 deaths and economic losses of $35 billion have been attributed to extreme weather events in the past two decades, according to the 2026 Climate Risk Index.
“It just keeps on getting worse,” Canlas said, noting the lives lost in recent months.
The government is now determining if it will throw its weight behind the distribution of the game, with the sessions in Valenzuela City serving as a pilot to assess whether players find it engaging and informative.
While conceding the evidence was so far anecdotal, ASSIST’s Macatulad said he believed the game was bringing a “significant” improvement in its players’ disaster preparedness knowledge.
“Disaster is not picky. It affects from north to south. So we would like to expand this further,” Macatulad said, adding that poor communities “most vulnerable to the effects of climate change” were the priority.
“Disasters can happen to anyone,” Agasen, the teen, told AFP as the game broke up.
“As a young person, I can share the knowledge I’ve gained... with my classmates at school, with people at home, and those I’ll meet in the future.”
