They fled war in Syria and found cricket in Lebanon

On July 27, the Kaskas ground located in Beirut, Lebanon, was a hive of activity. But it was not the usual kicking of a ball that one would associate with this almost full-sized football field. The centre of the Astroturf surface was converted into a 22-yard cricket pitch, with stumps on each side. A few goalposts were placed along to mark makeshift boundaries and the first-ever official Lebanon T20 tournament was in full swing.

For most of Lebanon, and West Asia at large, cricket is an alien sport. A few immigrants from the Indian subcontinent might play the game on weekends in car parks, but the country has not seen a proper T20 tournament like this one, played with a white leather ball and equipment and rules.

Three teams played: one from Sri Lanka, another a mix of players from India and Pakistan, both sides composed of migrant workers. The third team comprised Syrian refugees entirely, making them the first-ever Syrian side to play in an official T20 tournament.

The teenagers in that team are all part of the Alsama Project, an NGO based in Beirut that provides schooling to over 800 Syrian refugees. Alsama was co-founded in 2018 by Richard Verity and Meike Ziervogel, an English-German couple, Kadria Hussein, a Syrian refugee, and Mohammad Kheir, a Palestinian-Syrian. Cricket has been a vital part of the curriculum from the start.

It was Verity - a distant relative of the legendary England spinner Hedley Verity - who introduced the sport to the Shatila refugee camp. He couldn't speak Arabic, so he used cricket to communicate and connect with the children. It was a simple concept, Verity says: "Once you've committed to joining Alsama, you're committing to play cricket on the weekend." It worked like a charm.

Crucially, cricket at Alsama is not limited to boys. Girls have embraced the sport with especial vigour. In fact, on the morning of the event, the Alsama women's team played a friendly T20 game against a Sri Lankan women's side.

While the Alsama boys did not make it to the final, for a group of teenagers who hadn't even heard of cricket up until five years ago, it was incredible that they could play and compete against older players - albeit amateurs - from countries with a long-standing history of the sport.

Cricket has had a liberating effect on 18-year-old Louay Al Kadro, a talented fast-bowling allrounder and captain of the Alsama men's team. He is also a coach and teaches his peers the basics of the game. He supports England, Sunrisers Hyderabad in the IPL, and idolises Ben Stokes, because "if you remember 2019, you would know why I chose him".

From the outside, Louay seems like your everyday teenager. He loves talking sport, and dreams of going to Leicester University to major in marketing. But his sparkling eyes do not betray his traumatic childhood, marked by the kind of tragedy that can shatter the strongest human spirits.

Louay was only seven when he witnessed his first public execution. It was someone he knew. Growing up in a village in Raqqa, in north-east Syria - which served as the de facto capital of the militant organisation ISIS between 2014 and 2017 - war, bloodshed and deaths were a part of his everyday life.

He uses the word "indescribable" multiple times during a video call when recalling some of the events of the Syrian civil war he saw growing up. He says the visuals still haunt him and the smell of decaying bodies remains in his mind even after all these years. He has seen ISIS at their worst, war at its worst.

Louay fled Syria in 2017 with his family after the war intensified. They settled in a camp in Shatila, Beirut, like several other Syrians who had sought refuge there since the beginning of the war in 2011. With limited means, Louay was forced to find work and earn money for his family. One day he saw some children walking to a playground, who said they were going to play cricket. Intrigued, he went with them, and it was here that he met Kheir and Hussein, who were looking to get students to take up the sport.

"At the beginning, it was a weird game for me," Louay says. "It was hard for me to keep my arms straight [while bowling], concentrate, or hit the ball straight. The rules were very hard to follow. But I challenged myself to do it and I loved it."

There is no cricket culture anywhere remotely close to Lebanon. It's tough to get live coverage of the sport in the country, so students rely on YouTube for highlights. In a way, that has helped them learn the game since they don't have preconceived notions about it.

"Cricket acts as a school for me," Louay says. "It teaches me how to be confident, how to work with my team, how to communicate with them. What makes cricket exciting is that it's not only a physical game, it's also a mental game. It's about trying to be in control, trying to control the batters if you are a bowler. Or if you are a batter, trying to control the fielders.

"Why is cricket special for me? Because it teaches you how to play and react under pressure."

Kheir, the 39-year-old head coach, describes Louay as a leader who has a natural talent for sport. One of four brothers, Kheir came to Lebanon in 2013, two years after the war broke out in Syria, to "support my people". He was introduced to cricket by Verity and while he wasn't interested in the game initially, once he got the hang of it, he was hooked.

Kheir is a Rajasthan Royals supporter and a Jos Buttler fan. "He is one of the best players," he says, to which Louay, sitting next to him, quickly counters: "Let's say I would put Ben Stokes at the top. You see how strong he has come back after his knee injury? He is such a great leader. He is an allrounder!"

Kheir says it was initially tough to get the kids on board. In 2018 they got 40 students enrolled for the Alsama Project. What made them different from other NGOs in Beirut was that cricket was as important to their curriculum as English and maths. They wanted boys and girls to learn and play the sport together, which generated plenty of backlash from the parents and the wider Islamic community, although cricket being a non-contact sport helped Alsama.

As things stand, the project has close to 1000 cricketers, male and female, across four centres in Beirut and one in the tent encampments of the Beqaa valley north-east of the capital. They have now developed over 100 good hard-ball cricketers.

Two of those top-tier players are Wissal Al Jaber and Maram Al Khoder.

Originally from Deir ez-Zur in eastern Syria, Maram was 12 when she came to Alsama. At the time, she only knew Arabic. If not for the project, she would probably have been forced into marriage early. Now 18, she speaks fluent English and is one of the project's cricket coaches. Last year she became a cricket ambassador for the MCC and won the British Embassy's "Ambassador for a Day" competition, where she shadowed Hamish Cowell, the British ambassador to Lebanon.

Wissal was seven when her family sought refuge in Lebanon after war broke out in Syria, and 11 when she joined Alsama.

The families of both girls were initially apprehensive. Merely talking to boys was considered taboo in their households. Sharing the field, playing a sport together, was unthinkable.

"When I first started, my family didn't allow me to go outside the home," Maram says. "Traditionally, it's not good for girls, is what we were told. Sport is not a good thing."

Even after they did manage to convince their parents, they were asked to wear a niqab when going out. So they improvised. "I used to tell my family that every Saturday and Sunday, I am going to my friend's house to study, not to play cricket," Maram says. "I used to wear longer clothes as they told me to do, but then I used to go to the playground, change my clothes, wear the cricket T-shirts, and start playing."

Wissal is an offspinner and loves bowling, while Maram is a left-arm orthodox spinner and says she can turn the ball a mile.

Did they find the rules hard to grasp at first?

"It was really tough," Maram says. "We didn't understand anything. They were forcing us to keep our arms straight, keep our eye on the ball, hit as hard as we can. And I was like, 'What are you telling us to do?' But after one year, we fell in love with this game and now I'm addicted.

"You know what drove me towards cricket? You are asking girls who come from societies in which girls are like just something in the corner. They are not valued. They are underestimated, because they are girls. But when I first entered the playground, I saw the coaches, saying 'Good job, Maram, good ball, very nice shot.' Everyone is supporting and encouraging. Everyone is making sure that you are smiling and happy.

"When I enter the playground, I forget everything - family issues, society issues. And I feel this is my moment to shine."

Wissal echoes Maram's sentiments. "What fascinated me about cricket - it was the first game that we, as girls, saw two genders in the same game," she says. "Girls and boys playing together. We haven't seen that before in our society. They have always told us: you are a girl, you should not be with a boy in any place. But when we saw cricket, it embodied every girl and boy together playing. And everything was fine."

Maram is a Joe Root fan, while Wissal likes Jofra Archer and Smriti Mandhana. Their eyes light up when talking about Mandhana. "Have you seen her shots? When she strikes, when she hits the fours and sixes, it is just wow!"

It's astounding how despite being disconnected from most of the world, these kids are up to date with what's happening in cricket. Our conversation took place just after the fourth men's Test between England and India at Old Trafford last month. And the match was all they wanted to talk about.

But while the cricket field is a safe space for these children, life outside the game in Lebanon remains bleak. They live in desperate conditions in Shatila. It is not uncommon for as many as 14 people to live in a one-bedroom flat. Poverty is rampant. Challenges like scarcity of electricity, stale food, and limited access to clean drinking water need to be faced every day. Not to mention, security is a problem; even venturing out on the streets can sometimes be dangerous.

To make matters worse, last October many were forced to flee the refugee camps when several parts of Lebanon were devastated by air strikes by Israel that targeted Hezbollah, the political and military group that has historically violently clashed with Israel. Louay, Maram and Wissal went back to Syria at the time, but life there was worse. There were no schools, and barely any food and water.

Wissal says she missed school, cricket and her friends. She pleaded with her parents to return. When they refused, she packed her bags and left on her own. She was the first girl from her class to return to Alsama. Maram returned a month later, along with her sister.

"We put some of the students who returned in kind of dormitories, in the safe parts of Beirut," Verity says. "And so they came back, they continued their education, and cricket also continued in Lebanon. That is one of the stories that people still talk about here."

Sport has the power to help people overcome adversity, but sustaining the game in Syria in the long term will not be easy. Verity, however, is confident that cricket has the potential to become very popular in the country.

"I've seen it happening back in October of last year, when the bombs were falling in Beirut and children and families fled back to Syria," he says. "Syria is a country that is devastated by war. There's not much for the people there.