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.”
In the years since, El-Munir has forged a career abroad while striving to support his parents and two brothers in Libya, which he left in 2011. Los Angeles represents the latest stop in an odyssey that has taken El-Munir from Tripoli to Serbia, Belarus and Florida. In the process, he has confronted loneliness, poverty and constant anxiety about his family. Even with his wife and two young sons living with him and the financial stability a career in Major League Soccer provides, that anxiety never disappears.
“It’s difficult, to tell you the truth,” El-Munir tells the Guardian. “I have good days, bad days. There’s nine hours’ time difference [between California and Libya] so the only time I can reach my family, if there’s a network, is the hour before I get to training. It’s going to be seven or eight in the morning here.
“If I reach them and they tell me that they are good, I can feel much better because I know that they are safe. But if I can’t get in touch with them, that’s going to be a problem. I’m trying to concentrate but, still, I have it on my mind.”
El-Munir tries to send money home to his family because Libyans often cannot access their bank accounts. “People are standing in line for weeks just to get their own money,” El-Munir says. “They wake up at 2am just to get a number for the line. They come back at 8am to get in line because the bank opens at 9am. This line is not 50 people; this line is like 500, 1,000 people. But the guy who is responsible says, ‘We already changed the numbers’ because he’s going to put someone else ahead who paid him money. They treat old women, sick women, standing in line like slaves.”
Profiteering says takes no prisoners: “My mother needs insulin. The hospitals get insulin but [people] steal it so they can sell it.”
The constant civil disorder has upset soccer in Libya too. The country’s national team, which El-Munir has represented 19 times, have neither played nor trained at home since 2013. Their “home” qualifiers for the World Cup and the African Cup of Nations were played in Egypt or Tunisia. Those nations also provide “home” sites for Libyan clubs in the Confederation of African Football’s Champions League.
Libya’s Premier League has played only two full seasons since the revolution. The LPL suspended play in February 2011, when the violence started, and competition did not resume until September 2013. The league cancelled the 2014-15 season, played for five months in 2016, missed 2016-17, then completed 2017-18. The current season, which began in November, was suspended in May.
“People can’t go out from their homes so there’s no training, no games, no nothing,” El-Munir says. “We have good players but because of the problems we have, they play one game every two or three months. Then they play two, three games and they stop again for two, three months. They don’t have the rhythm of the game. There’s no discipline.”
After the revolution Libya’s former under-20 coach, Branko Smiljanic, arranged for El-Munir to transfer to Serbia’s Partizan Belgrade for the following season. The pair left in August 2011 but militia allied with Isis commandeered the main highway along the Mediterranean coast. Consequently, they had to drive seven hours through the Nafusa Mountains to reach Tunisia.
When the pair reached Serbia, Partizan reneged on the agreement, so El-Munir joined FK Jagodina. But he had not played in six months, and would not play for another eight while trying to regain fitness. Since he never played, El-Munir was not paid. “Those six months, every day I was thinking like I wanted to go back home,” he says. “I’m living alone. I’m not doing anything. I don’t have money even to buy water or bread.
“But if I’m going to go back to Libya, what am I going to do? There are no colleges. There is no soccer. There’s nothing. Am I going to go back just to be like the militia to make my family live? Or am I going to be like the people where one day, we have food to eat and one day, we don’t have food to eat? So I had to wait until I got a chance.”
El-Munir got that chance when he became Jagodina’s starting left-back in 2012-13, and made enough of an impression to interest Al-Ittihad in reacquiring him. “It was good money, big money,” he says. “I saw it as a chance to change the life of my family.”
El-Munir rejoined Al-Ittihad in January 2014. But in May, political factions began the ongoing civil war. That July, battle raged for six weeks at Tripoli’s airport. “My family was living 10 minutes from the airport,” he says. “One morning, we had to leave our house. We were hearing the bombing and the shooting. It wasn’t safe but we had to leave. I couldn’t come back to check the house because I got a call saying that many people were [breaking into)]the houses and stealing. I had to wait for a week.”
When El-Munir returned, he found a pillaged home. “They stole everything,” he says. “The house was a mess. When I returned with my family, I decided I was going to leave.”
El-Munir left Al-Ittihad after eight months without receiving his salary. He returned to Jagodina on a free transfer, moved in 2015 to Belarus’ Dynamo Minsk, joined Partizan Belgrade in 2017 and signed with Orlando City in MLS in 2018. After spending last season as Orlando City’s starting left-back, he went to LAFC in a trade in December 2018.
“I asked last year if maybe I could bring my family here with me but it’s not possible because of political reasons,” El-Munir says. “Thank God I’m still finding ways to help them. I hope the situation changes because I don’t know how long I can keep doing this.”
