Politics meets football after Iran take on the US, will Turkey start a new ground operation in Syria and Algeria sentences 49 people to death for a lynching. Here’s your round-up, written by Abubakr Al-Shamahi, Al Jazeera Digital’s Middle East and North Africa editor.
There are many who’ll tell you that politics and sport don’t mix. But come on, this is Iran against the USA that we’re talking about – the political undertones to this World Cup game were always going to be there. A roll call of some of the world’s major events of the last 70 years explains why: a CIA-backed coup against a democratically elected Iranian leader, the 1979 Islamic revolution, the Iran hostage crisis, the Iran-Iraq war, the Lebanese civil war and the Iraq war – all the way through to the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, and then the subsequent withdrawal from it by the Americans.
