Tickets for the 25th Golf Cup, the first major soccer tournament to be played in Iraq in more than 40 years, went on sale on Saturday.
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Saudi Arabia will play the tournament in January in the city of Basra in the south after its World Cup appearance in Qatar. There, they provided one of the shocks of the competition by beating eventual champions Argentina 2-1.
Qatar, which left the World Cup after the first round, will also compete along with Yemen, Bahrain, Oman, the United Arab Emirates and host country Iraq.
Hosting the cup is a challenge for Iraq, which has experienced decades of conflict following the overthrow of long-time authoritarian Saddam Hussein in the US-led invasion of 2003. The security situation remains fragile in large parts of the country.
“Today we are starting sales of Golf 25 tickets,” Adnan Dirjal, chairman of the Iraqi Football Association, told reporters in Basra on Saturday.
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Tickets for the competition from January 6 to 19 cost between $10 and $30.
Iraqi authorities announced earlier this month that fans visiting Iraq for the competition will not have to pay visa fees. The country hopes to attract soccer fans from across the region, including Kuwait, whose border with Iraq is less than 50 km (30 miles) from Basra.
One of the city’s stadiums has a capacity of 65,000 spectators, the second offers space for 30,000 fans and will be inaugurated on Monday with a friendly match between two clubs from Iraq and Kuwait’s domestic leagues.
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the beginning of this year, soccer’s governing body, FIFA, lifted a ban on international competitions in Iraq that had been in force for years for security reasons.
In January, a friendly between Iraq and Uganda was played at the overcrowded Al-Madina Stadium in Baghdad, the first international match in the capital since 2013.
Iraq hosted the Baghdad Golf Cup for the first time in 1979, when it also won the tournament. The country was supposed to host the 2014 Cup but was moved to Saudi Arabia instead.