'I saw my friends die in the street': Mohamed El-Munir's journey from Libya to LAFC
The defender has forged a professional career after leaving the chaos of his homeland. But his thoughts are always with those he has left behind
When the Libyan revolution started, Mohamed El-Munir was a 19-year old playing for Al-Ittihad Tripoli. “Nobody expected it,” the Los Angeles FC defender tells the Guardian. “It just happened so fast. We just finished the first half of the season, so we were getting ready to play the second half. The problems started and they said, ‘We’re going to stop the league for a week or 10 days until we solve these problems.’”
Chaos quickly ensued. “I had to see many of my friends die in the street,” the 27-year-old says. “If I had to go out, I wouldn’t know if I was going to come back. We didn’t have electricity from 7 o’clock to 12, 1 o’clock. In June or July, it started to be so difficult to find food.”
But the people did have weapons, thanks to raids on government armories once the armed forces and the police disintegrated. “You’d even see a child, 12-years old, and he’d have a gun; he’d have a bomb,” El-Munir says. “At that time, everyone had weapons. They wanted to protect themselves. Nobody protected nobody.”
from Football | The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/football/2019/jul/23/mohamed-el-munir-lafc-mls-soccer-libya
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