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Iraqi footballers -- freed from the threat of beatings and jailings under Saddam Hussein -- celebrated their return to the national soccer stadium on Tuesday by thrashing a US military side 11-0.

US forces have been using top sports venues as military bases since entering Baghdad nearly three months ago.

Colonel Michael Tucker, from Charlotte North Carolina, the commander of the US Army's 1st Brigade, shakes hands with Iraqi soccer players June 24, 2003 before a friendly soccer match in which Iraqis played against soldiers from his brigade. The Iraqi team won 11-0. [Reuters]

Tuesday's match was the most prominent of four events this week to hand the stadiums back to civilian use -- though due to still shaky security, there were no Iraqi spectators to watch.

In the past, Saddam's playboy son Uday ran sport as part of the family empire in brutal style -- imprisoning players, having them whipped with electrical cables or forcing them to have their heads shaved if he decreed they had played poorly.

But Uday has fled with his father and he was conspicuous by his absence from his old VIP lodge as Iraq's US occupiers held a modest ceremony to hand over the stadium.

"We feel safety and freedom now, playing here," striker Omar Kadhim Waleed, 18, said after scoring three goals for the youth side of Baghdad club Zawra as they drubbed the military select of a country where soccer is only a minority sport.

SPORTS STARVED OF RESOURCES

Uday, Saddam's elder son, cultivated the impression of lavishing resources on sport, particularly soccer.

But players and officials now say he took out much more than he put in, seizing large cuts of players' salaries and keeping grants from international organisations for himself.

''He never spent money on sports, he got money from sports,'' said Ahmed Al-Samarrai, head of an interim Iraqi sports federation charged with replacing Uday's one-man rule.

''All the Iraqi facilities for sports are zero,'' he told Reuters before the match at the Al Sha'ab stadium, a 1960s construction where most of the seating has no roof.

US officials hailed the stadium handover as a sign normal, civilian life was taking root in Iraq, despite the ban on having a local audience.

A couple of hundred US soldiers in desert camouflage fatigues watched from the main stand and rigged up a cardboard scoreboard as their makeshift side in running shoes proved no match for the skilful and better equipped Iraqis.

Some words before the game from a US official in Iraq's interim administration proved prophetic.

''We recognise that Iraqis take their sports seriously -- especially their football,'' he said.

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