He emigrated from Iraq and was saved by soccer. Now he’s giving back.

Warshan Hussin sauntered up a hill onto the soccer field in front of Northeast Middle School in Baltimore’s Moravia neighborhood, where long sheets of paper covered the windows of the abandoned school.

Two metal soccer goal frames lacking nets and adorned with bird droppings bookended the field.

“This used to look a lot better than this,” Hussin said.

He took a deep breath and smirked. “Smells the same.” Then he started to laugh.

For years, the top of the hill represented an escape. Hussin was 13 when he and his family immigrated from Syria to Baltimore in 2009. They arrived three years after being forced to leave their home country of Iraq, where his father was kidnapped by military forces and returned 24 hours later.

Bullied at school in Baltimore, he felt anxious and adrift. He had only two friends at school, both named Mustafa, who spoke Arabic. The little English he knew came from asking American soldiers for candy. Then he joined Soccer Without Borders, a program for refugee youths who sought community.

“That feeling, as soon as you step on the field, it’s like the whole world back there is kind of forgotten about for a little bit,” said Hussin, who now serves on the program’s board of directors.

The World Cup — which will conclude Sunday with Argentina and Spain playing for the championship — has captivated millions throughout the U.S. while attracting visitors from all over the world, providing a rich opportunity for the program to engage with kids. Soccer Without Borders ran its own World Cup tournament and hosted watch parties.

Hussin knows how powerful the community built around this sport can be.

The hours he spent here helped turn America into home and gave a kid who had seen too much suffering and death rare carefree moments. He made friends, including Aganze Barongozi, who helped Hussin learn English. He met Jill Pardini, the first female soccer coach he’d ever encountered.

Now 29, he stopped at midfield and looked around. The field was empty — the program hasn’t used it in years. Yet Hussin’s memories brought him back to the 25 kids from 11 countries standing in circles ahead of their first practice.

Hussin graduated from the program in 2015 and returned four years later as a coach. Serving on the board is a fulfillment of the message he’d heard as a kid.

“They made sure to tell us: You could be whoever you want to be,” Hussin said. “You come from somewhere that is very limited to now you have the world under your feet, could be whoever you want. ... That is just powerful.”

Iraq

Hussin was 10 when armed men wearing face masks entered his father’s store in Fallujah, a city in Iraq’s Al Anbar Governorate.

They were with al-Qaida. His dad was an electrician who sold supplies to Americans during the Iraq War, because he felt he had no other choice.

After a few moments, the men covered his father’s face, loaded him into the back of a vehicle and drove away.

Hussin walked a mile and a half home, attempting to find the words to explain to his mother that they might never see his father again. She’d already lost her brother in the war. Hussin was almost certain his father would never return.

“That was the story of every person that was taken by the militias,” Hussin said.

Hussin has hazy memories of that time: an F-15 dropping bombs on the outskirts of his home city, the first of many dead bodies and his father’s chilling warning never to move a body because it might have a bomb underneath it.

He even remembers running toward his grandfather’s house, only to end up dodging sniper fire and losing a flip-flop.

School wasn’t safe, either. Every day, he’d avoid bullets while crossing the street. One time, a missile hit the school (but did not explode.)

“We’d literally say goodbye to my parents every day we go to school, because you don’t know if you’re coming back,” Hussin said. “That was the toughest thing to do as a kid and for the parents, but we lived it.”

Hours after the abduction, Hussin and his family began looking for his father’s body and the closure that finding it would bring. In a miraculous turn of events, his father was dropped off at his grandfather’s house. The skin on his back was ripped up as a result of torture. He’d been shocked, submerged in water and shown videos of acquaintances being murdered. To this day, he is disabled from his lower back down.

Warshan’s mother, inconsolable with grief, developed heart problems and has been unable to work ever since.

The militia gave his family two orders, Hussin said. First, his father couldn’t get medical treatment in the country. Second, the family had 24 hours to leave or his father, mother and brother would die. So they left for Syria with nothing.

Moravia

Hussin stood with the Iraqi kids in one corner of the field at Northeast Middle School. The Eritreans, Congolese and Nepalese kids stood in their corners. All of them stared at Pardini, who arrived on a bike with a soccer ball, an index card and a vision for the future.

Hussin’s three years in Syria had been painful; he had trouble connecting with peers who didn’t understand what he’d gone through. When he’d confide in them, Syrian kids called him a traitor for abandoning his country.

Soccer was their common language. He’d grown up in Iraq playing barefoot on the street. No rules, no referees. No uniforms. Just kids kicking the ball.

So, when the family was granted a chance to come to Baltimore so his father could be treated at Johns Hopkins, Hussin found community again through a pitch — and just so happened to become one of the first to join a fledgling effort.

It was 2010 and Pardini, a graduate student at Johns Hopkins, had just served in the Peace Corps. As part of her graduate school work, she began working in the community with families. Those kids often wanted to play soccer after meetings.

She did research and discovered Soccer Without Borders, a nonprofit founded in 2005 in the Bay Area by Ben Gucciardi. She asked to use his 501(c)(3) to expand the program into Baltimore. He agreed.

She biked from Hopkins for practice to find the children segregated by where they’d come from. She looked down at her index card, with its carefully scripted practice plan, and came to a sudden realization. She couldn’t communicate it to the kids. She tossed it. Slowly, by tugging shirts and hand gesturing, she mixed the groups together.

“My thought was: You kids all have more in common together than you do compared to anyone else who lives in this part of the city, or any other Baltimorean,” Pardini said.

Hussin had never seen a female coach before.

He did see a classmate who had immigrated at the same time.

Hussin envied him, because he spoke English fluently and had plenty of friends at school. Barongozi, whom everyone called Glory, had come from Uganda as a refugee from the Democratic Republic of Congo — and, despite his outward confidence, was struggling.

“It was a little bit of happiness, also a little bit of kind of anxiety because you don’t know what’s gonna happen or what’s next,” Barongozi said. “You don’t have no idea how your future will turn out, how anything will be tomorrow.”

Soccer felt familiar, but the diversity of kids in the program was a shock.

“We didn’t know how to interact with each other. We didn’t actually even like each other,” Barongozi said. “Everybody had their own viewpoints, but we all connected through soccer.”

The day after that first practice, he walked up to Hussin during science class and handed him an empty binder. For weeks, Hussin had been carrying his papers and homework in an unruly stack.

From that moment, they became best friends and started attending practices together. Eventually, with Glory’s help, Hussin learned English.

“We connected because we all had the same past that brought us here,” Hussin said. “We knew what it was. Even if a kid was from Nepal or Congo or Eritrea or Ethiopia or Tanzania, or whatever it is, you have the same struggle.”

Building the program

When it came time to play a game, the immigrants fell behind 9-0. They finally scored late and left the opponent bewildered. As soon as the ball hit the net, every kid on the team rushed the field to celebrate.

That game was a reminder of how much the players had to learn. The kids didn’t know how to kick off from midfield to resume play. They didn’t know to keep two feet on the ground for throw-ins — there’s no need to learn those rules if you’re playing with friends on a makeshift pitch that has no markings.

Fixing a problem like that might seem simple, but consider Pardini’s challenge. To ensure kids arrived to practice, she’d either write the time on their arms in permanent marker or print papers with an analog clock that said “Meet Up Time.”

“It started with predominantly soccer,” Pardini said. “Then, as we started learning more about what the kids needed and what they were struggling with, we added academic components. We added health components.”

Eventually, Pardini’s bike turned into a van, which turned into more transportation. More soccer balls were purchased. More volunteers joined.

The Baltimore chapter had 657 participants in 2025 and a high school graduation rate of 93% and it held 643 events, according to the organization. It hosts after-school programming, field trips, a soccer league and family programming.

The program, which relies on philanthropy for most of its funding and spends about $6 million a year, according to its most recent tax filings, also provides food to ensure kids have energy to practice.

Baltimore’s chapter reaches two areas — the Northeast, composed of participants from Central and East Africa as well as the Middle East, and the Southeast, where Spanish-speaking families have settled.

Donald Trump’s second term as president and the increased presence of Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the area have created noticeable change in the community and forced Soccer Without Borders to adjust policies, program manager Ryan Gitonga said.

Staff members were trained on how to respond should ICE visit a practice. Then, in conjunction with local schools, they worked to inform families of their rights.

Carson McFadden, the Maryland director of Soccer Without Borders, has noticed growing nervousness, uncertainty and fear among families in the program.

That only makes the mission more urgent.

“It seems like a soccer team from the outside, and it very much is a soccer team,” McFadden said. “At the same time, we aim to deliver a lot more just by getting people to the door with soccer first and foremost.”

‘Terrorist’

It was 2015 and Hussin’s team was playing in one of the final games of the season. Players’ families were in attendance on the spectator side across from the team benches. Suddenly, one of Hussin’s teammates heard a shout from the crowd.

“Terrorist!”

The shouts continued over and over.

“That was kind of a reminder of, like, you’re still something that people are not comfortable with,” Hussin said.

Pardini sensed tension. She gave her team a simple message: “You can’t control what’s coming at you. You can’t control the circumstances around you. But you can control your reaction to it or your lack of reaction,” Pardini recalled.

Another message from that huddle stuck with Hussin.

“She said, ‘Take this anger and take this moment, and later on in life, think about it and put it into something positive,’” he said.

By 2017, Hussin had reached an inflection point. He’d earned a financial package and a spot on the soccer team at Stevenson University but broke three bones around his left eye during freshman year and had to retire. He also struggled with the increase in anti-immigrant sentiment when Trump became president.

But he remembered what Pardini said about using his anger for good — and it made sense to him. He decided to volunteer with Soccer Without Borders in 2019.

Hussin joined the full-time staff in 2020, balancing his role as he earned his business degree from the University of Baltimore. He worked with the organization’s finance department during the day. In the afternoons, he coached. It was a dream. And a reminder of his purpose.

He was coaching a game in 2022. Kids on the opposing team started hurling racist terms toward his team — a déjà vu moment. He found it difficult to explain to his players why someone would say that. Yet he realized why he’d returned.

“We let the kids just have an open conversation about their feelings and how the game went,” Hussin said. “You can tell everybody was just really frustrated with the situation and felt like it was really important to talk about, to let them know things like that still happen in the real world.”

Despite having a dream job, Hussin left his role in 2022 to make more money and help support his parents. He accepted a job as a facility manager of a hospital parking lot in Maryland. Now he oversees more than 10 locations, a mix of garages at hotels, hospitals and commercial spaces.

Yet he knew he wanted to stay involved. For the last two years, Hussin has served on the board of directors for Soccer Without Borders, helping with programming and fundraising.

“It’s cool to see him playing that role now, because it was something I always said to the kids: If I do my job right, one of these days in the future, one of you will be doing this job,” Pardini said. “One of you should be the leader of this organization, because it should be someone like you.”

Hussin doesn’t play as much soccer as he’d like, and he misses coaching. He rooted for Iraq this summer — it returned to the World Cup after a 40-year absence — and cherishes what the game gave him.

“Sometimes it felt like some of my childhood just went on quickly,” he said. “Like I don’t really remember much. The only part of it I do remember is being here and playing soccer and making memories with good people.”