These players made decisive contributions to some of Syria’s biggest soccer wins, including a run in the 1991 World Youth Championship where they helped knock out an England squad featuring Premier League star Andy Cole. They also won the under-20 Asian Cup in 1994.
They entered these tournaments by using “special mission” passports, issued by the Foreign Ministry, which contained false dates of birth. Syria’s soccer authority, the Syrian Arab Football Federation, then submitted these passports to FIFA, even though it is far more common for countries to use regular passports.
Reporters from OCCRP and its partner SIRAJ, along with a Swiss reporter, obtained birth certificates for 40 players through a source whose identity is being withheld for security reasons. Reporters selected the players for their prominent roles both on the field and later as analysts, officials, coaches, and other positions in the sports world.
The reporters compared the dates on the birth certificates with those listed in the special mission passports and on FIFA’s website. For three additional players, they found real ages acknowledged in sources such as social media posts, TV interviews, a coaching certificate, and a standard passport.
The differences in the submitted and real ages ranged from one to six years. The biggest gap was for Mazen Koussa, the goalkeeper for the 1991 squad: According to the “special mission” passport submitted to FIFA — which gave his name as “Malek” — he was born in 1971, but on social media and in an interview with a Syrian TV station he has said that he was actually born in 1965.
The reason for the discrepancy in the first names was not clear, and Koussa did not respond to requests for comment.
Walid al-Mehdi, who headed the committee that oversees Syria’s national team from 2005 to 2011, told SIRAJ that the practice of faking ages was so widespread that the number of players with genuine ages on some youth squads “did not exceed the number of fingers on one hand.”
He insisted that he had “categorically” rejected the practice during his tenure, and had once urged the head of the football federation to “appear in public and tear up the mission’s passports.”
The federation persisted in the practice to “demonstrate achievements to the political authorities,” he said.
Mustafa Shakoush, a goalkeeper with Syria’s youth team during the 2005 tournament, acknowledged in an interview with SIRAJ that the federation had changed his date of birth by a year, from 1985 to 1986, in his special mission passport.
Shakoush, now a football coach at a sports academy in Mersin, a city in south-central Turkey, said the forgery was carried out with “high-level support from multiple state institutions.”
Syria’s Foreign Ministry, football federation, and the General Sports Federation did not respond to requests for comment. A FIFA spokesperson told OCCRP that after checking their data, they “found no records of a disciplinary issue or complaint being submitted to FIFA on the topic.”
A String of Victories
Syria’s victories struck a chord with many in a country that loves soccer but rarely gets to see its teams thrive in international tournaments. The national team has never qualified for a World Cup.
After the youth team took the 1994 Asian Cup in a 2-1 win over Japan, the legendary Syrian sportscaster Adnan Bouzo published a book called “The Victory of the Youth.” He compared the day of their win to “the nation’s wedding day” and recalled how Damascus airport “turned into a human flood” as crowds flocked to greet the champions.
President Hafez al-Assad, who had ruled Syria since seizing power in a 1971 coup, proclaimed that the victory had “brought great joy to our people.”