RUGBY IN A WAR ZONE
MARTYR DAY, in May 2014. Samer Al-Akhras will never forget it. “I was a newly married man, so I was out with my new wife when the opposition started shelling the city,” the proud Syrian says. “Mortars landed near the restaurant we were in and a woman and her two teenager daughters were wounded. I went outside to provide first aid – I volunteered with Red Crescent for 12 years – and after providing the first aid, an ambulance arrived to take them.
“Another mortar fell and gifted me 1,200 (pieces of) shrapnel in my whole body. Five of them caused me bleeding inside the chest. Yeah, I was wounded.”
The woman, her daughters and all at the restaurant survived. But Al-Akhras’s abiding memory is not of falling horror in Damascus that day but of the bonds of rugby. Now administration manager for the Syrian men’s national 15s, Al-Akhras had only been playing for five months when team-mates from the Zenobians club rushed to his bedside. Overseeing his recovery, they allowed his wife to continue working and tend
