Can Ultimate Frisbee Heal the Middle East?

Starting an Ultimate Frisbee league to repair a war-torn country sounds like the plot of a buddy comedy, yet it's a reality in Iraqi Kurdistan. After German and American aid workers introduced Frisbees to the country in 2019, the sport quickly caught on. By 2023, the scrappy Duhok Shepherds team was flying to Dubai for the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) Ultimate Club Championship. It was the first time many team members had left Iraq. By November 2024, the team was competing in Doha, Qatar, their uniforms proudly displaying both the Iraqi national flag and the Kurdish tricolor.

The spread of Ultimate Frisbee testifies to a kind of Western soft power in the Middle East, one far friendlier than bombs or bullets. Invented by New Jersey high schoolers in the 1960s and popularized by hippies, the sport is now the basis of a European relief effort. Beyond those aid organizations, European players have run grassroots fundraising efforts to get the Iraqi Ultimate league off the ground. And Kurdistan is not the only part of the region in the grip of Frisbee mania. The MENA Ultimate Club Championship, a tiny affair when it debuted in 2015, now boasts over 400 players across 20 teams, representing everyone from oil-rich monarchies to stateless nations such as the Kurds and Palestinians.

"The happiest moment for me was when I was teaching an American [how to play] Frisbee from zero," says Bakri Dasoki, a former team captain from the Iraqi Kurdish capital Erbil. "This sport was born in his country, but now I found it really funny that I was teaching him."

Part of the sport's appeal is its low barrier to entry: All it takes is two teams, a disc, and the simple goal of reaching the opposing team's end zone. (Because "Frisbee" is a registered trademark, organizations often shorten the sport to "Ultimate" and call their equipment "flying discs.") Unlike more established sports, such as soccer, Ultimate is not associated with gang violence. Its noncontact nature allows men and women to play together, even in conservative societies that frown on gender mixing. For kids and teenagers in places like Iraq, the game encourages them to leave their comfort zones, meet their peers across ethnic or religious lines, and practice conflict resolution in a low-stakes way.

Yet there are questions about how viable a sports league that relies on the goodwill of foreign donors can really be. While international charities introduced Ultimate Frisbee and continue to fund player training, the league itself is run almost entirely by volunteers. Will these local aficionados succeed at implanting Ultimate Frisbee in Kurdistan and other parts of northern Iraq? Or, once foreign interest fades, will Ultimate Frisbee become yet another failed attempt at implanting American culture in Iraq?

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Zane Wolfang, a journalist who helped foster both the Palestinian and the Kurdish Frisbee leagues, did not have such grand ambitions when he first joined the Middle East's nascent Frisbee scene in 2016. As an undergraduate in Delaware and Rhode Island, he found Ultimate balanced "my athletic skill set and my desire to compete" nicely with "wanting to have a social life and probably not being a Division I caliber athlete."

After graduating, Wolfang headed to Bethlehem University to teach English as part of a Catholic volunteer program. He was excited to discover a weekly Ultimate Frisbee pickup game in Beit Sahour, a suburb of Bethlehem, run by Dan Bannoura, a Palestinian teacher who had studied physics at the University of Florida. After realizing that he was the most experienced Ultimate player there, Wolfang "sort of politely inserted myself as a volunteer coach." From there, Ultimate came to consume Wolfang's entire life outside work. What started as coaching at pickup games turned into a much more ambitious project to build an internationally competitive league.

"In Palestine, the ties between sports and politics are much more obvious, and it's a place where politics prevent you from being able to accomplish simple things in the field," Wolfang says. He was once two hours late to a practice due to the traffic caused by an Israeli military checkpoint.

An American nonprofit project, Ultimate Peace, had already been trying to bring Israeli and Arab players together since 2010. But Bannoura and Wolfang wanted to create an independent Palestinian team run for and by Palestinian players. Their efforts paid off when the World Flying Disc Federation officially recognized Ultimate Palestine as the local governing body in 2020. "It was really a proud moment, not just as an Ultimate community, but because we were doing our small part to lend to the legitimacy of Palestine as a state," Wolfang says.

Wolfang left the West Bank after his visa expired in 2018. While working a series of odd jobs back in the U.S., he set up a nonprofit charity to raise money for his old Palestinian teammates to continue competing abroad. Wolfang learned that the German government's International Cooperation Corporation (GIZ) had started to fund Ultimate Frisbee training in Jordan as part of its "sports for development" program. He also found out that GIZ's office in Iraqi Kurdistan was interested in starting its own sports program. With Wolfang's help, the German aid organization began supporting a local Frisbee league.

Dasoki, the team captain from Erbil who was then a schoolteacher, got into the sport after hearing about it from two Germans. "Of course, first thing, it was a new sport that was not around. Second, it's a mixed one, so boys and girls can play it," he says. "Also, seeing internationals, I got to know new people."

The newness of the sport—and its "nonelite" nature—offers young people a sense of freedom, says Timothy Sisk, author of Sports in International Politics: Between Power and Peacebuilding. Since it is not part of the Olympics and is rarely seen in a professional context, Ultimate Frisbee does not come with the pressure of other common sports.

It's not just about the low cost or the novelty. Ultimate is governed by a principle called Spirit of the Game, an honor system that counts on players to call their own fouls and enforce the rules themselves. Learning to play the game is an exercise in peacebuilding on a small scale. The noncontact nature makes conflict resolution even more straightforward than in other sports. Players can't run with the disc; they can only move it by passing it to another teammate.

Before he discovered Frisbee, Dasoki "really hated" playing soccer, he says. "There was always a bit of pushing, a bit of lying—you need to be a bit tricky. Negative competition, let's say."

Since boys and girls can play the game together—rare in Kurdistan, a very conservative society when it comes to gender—it is often girls' only outlet for sports. Benni Splitt, a German aid worker, says girls often become more invested in Ultimate than boys.

To reduce physical contact even further, Middle Eastern players often replace the traditional postgame high-five between teams (part of the Spirit of the Game) with a bump of Frisbees, according to Will Thompson, a Frisbee coach in Jordan. Still, accidents happen. Thompson recalls an instance when a man and woman collided during practice. The experience was so jarring for the woman that she quit the sport.

The sport also helped bridge barriers of religion, language, and physical distance. Regardless of how someone prayed or what language they spoke, they knew how to throw a disc. Wolfang attributes a lot of his success to Samyan Barwari, Jihan Alfindi, and Hariwan Akrayee, three local GIZ employees who translated his coaching from his "just good enough" Arabic into Kurdish for the players.

Erbil's early Ultimate league was largely "for the international people, a hobby they're coming to after work," Dasoki says. But in Duhok, a smaller and less international city, it became a test of the sport's ability to grow local roots.

Splitt brought his first set of Frisbees to Sharya Kevin, a suburb of Duhok, in 2020. The village had been hollowed out by not one but two genocides. In the 1990s, Saddam Hussein's forces bombed the area as punishment for a Kurdish rebellion. Later, Sharya Kevin was repopulated by Yezidis, a religious minority seeking refuge from the Islamic State's campaign of mass killing and enslavement.

There was nowhere to play sports except for a muddy, rocky patch—far better suited for throwing Frisbees than kicking a ball around. At first, the kids asked when they would be able to start playing soccer, but the newfangled disc game soon grew on them. A few months later, someone in Sharya Kevin built a proper sports field and began renting it out to Ultimate players.

Splitt set up a sort of foster system, in which German teams "adopted" Iraqi teams. The German fans helped pay for Frisbees, uniforms, and most importantly, rental time on the field.

"Many times I had Muslims coming for a league match into a Yezidi village or camp, and they told me this is the first time that we ever entered a Yezidi village or a refugee camp," Splitt says.

Wolfang returned to his native Rhode Island in 2022, but before he left the region, he paid a visit to nearby North and East Syria, also known as Rojava, an isolated area controlled by Kurdish-led revolutionaries (as of early January 2025). The local North Press Agency had hired him on a one-month contract to teach its staff the conventions of English-language journalism. "Well, let me see if I can do some Frisbee stuff while I'm out there," Wolfang thought to himself, he says. "So I straight up cross the Tigris River [on the Iraq-Syria border] with a plastic shopping bag of like 10 or 15 Frisbees. Maybe eight of them are cracked and broken."

The Syriac Cross, a local Christian aid organization, connected Wolfang with a youth soccer team in the city of Hasakah, where he taught the boys to supplement soccer with Ultimate. Later, Wolfang ran a Frisbee training session for internally displaced people fleeing the Turkish invasion of Syria. The setting was a refugee camp straight out of a dystopian movie: nothing but tents on rocky ground.

Wolfang was not able to stay in touch with his Syrian trainees, but Iraqi Kurdistan has since become home to around 20 Ultimate Frisbee teams, representing everyone from dispersed villages and camps to the region's three major cities of Duhok, Erbil, and Sulaymaniyah. International aid organizations have supported the sport's growth by offering weekslong and monthslong training camps for prospective players.

The Iraqi Kurdish league's new international team, Duhok Ultimate, brings together players from across the region's diverse communities. In 2023, the team played their first international tournament in the Jordan Ultimate Cup, and later competed in the eighth MENA Ultimate Club Championship in Dubai, along with 18 other teams from the region. There were a lot of languages spoken on the international team, with players including Yezidis, Muslim Kurds, Christian Assyrians, and foreigners—both Westerners and two Iranians. Somehow, Splitt says, they all get along.

"We play such a special sport. There are only a few in this country," he says. "They meet these Yezidis and Muslims and Christians who do the same thing, and that quickly connects them."

Outside the playing field, the players still don't necessarily mix. This is partially due to language barriers—Yezidis and Muslim Kurds speak Kurdish, Arabs speak Arabic, and Assyrians speak a variety of Aramaic. But there are deeper questions about whether sports can actually bring people together in the long run.

Salma Mousa, an assistant professor of political science at UCLA, ran an experiment with a Christian soccer league in northern Iraq in 2018 and 2019. Muslim players were randomly assigned to some of the teams. (All of the Muslims had fled from the Islamic State, so in theory, they were in the same political boat as the Christians.) Mousa followed up with players from both the Christian-only and the mixed Christian-Muslim teams after the tournament was over, surveying their attitudes and assessing whether they would attend mixed social events.

Although people on the mixed teams became more tolerant of teammates from different religious backgrounds, they weren't much more likely to socialize with people of other religions off the field. Interestingly, members of the winning teams had the biggest increases in tolerance, which suggests that "an exceptionally positive experience may be needed to overturn the negative experiences instilled by war," Mousa wrote.

Of course, sports don't have to heal society as a whole. "We're not trying to bring peace to the Middle East," Ultimate Peace chief executive David Barkan told The New York Times in 2018, after Hamas rocket fire disrupted one of his summer camps.

Sisk says that "sport for development" programs have demonstrated significant benefits for players around the world. Peer violence, including bullying, can decrease dramatically, especially among girls. Participants report increased resilience and feelings of empowerment. These programs also provide health benefits associated with exercise and play.

Dasoki proudly showed Reason photos of some of the Frisbee community's accomplishments. Some feature aid giveaways for Yezidi refugees, while others capture a Christmas celebration that the players held. ("I thought it was a nice thing to do as a Muslim person, celebrating Christmas with Yezidi IDPs," he says, using the acronym for internally displaced persons. "It was a nice thing to do for mixing the religions.") Another photo shows a Frisbee that Dasoki helped design, showing local pride. It depicts a Frisbee flying through the Erbil skyline, leaving a Nike-style swoosh underneath the ancient citadel.

The return of war could destroy such gains. The fate of the Palestinian league is a cautionary tale. "Players have realized that sports is not an escape," Bannoura told The Nation in February 2024. By September, two of the league's coaches in Gaza had been killed by Israeli forces, Ultimate Palestine coach Maha Shabat said in a video message from the tent city where she now lives. "My team's players are now suffering from many disabilities and amputations of their limbs, their arms and legs, and a number of them have lost their parents and are now orphans," she added.

Bannoura, who is now studying Christian theology at the University of Notre Dame, has been leading a campaign to get the World Flying Disc Federation to call for a ceasefire. Through its anti-war advocacy, Ultimate Palestine has raised tens of thousands of dollars from American players, Wolfang says. "The sad irony of that is that there's no kids in Gaza who are playing Frisbee to use that money on," Wolfang says, adding that the focus is now "to try and just provide humanitarian cash assistance to our coaches and their families."

Even in peacetime, the game faces a much more mundane threat: lack of interest. With the German sport for development program in Jordan and northern Iraq set to end in 2024, questions remain about whether Ultimate has actually developed deep enough roots to survive without foreign support.

Though Splitt's contract with the German aid organization expires in August 2025, the plan has always been for locals to pick up the mantle. Splitt insists his work is mostly administrative now, as Iraqi captains now run their teams independently. But across the Middle East, the American sport is still dominated by Americans and other Westerners.

"I think the Middle East and North Africa flying disc federation, the regional entity, has enough local development capacity and buy-in to continue, even if every foreigner stopped participating tomorrow," Wolfang says. "I do think that certain countries would see a huge drop off in their ability to participate and compete. Not all countries have achieved equal levels of local leadership, or a baseline of local participation."

Perhaps the biggest difference that foreign funding made was the time and energy it bought. Although private donations could pay for Frisbees and field rentals, Dasoki found it hard to balance Ultimate Frisbee with his job as a teacher and tutor. "The good thing that Benni [Splitt] had was the NGOs' and GIZ's support," he says. Dasoki himself wishes that he could do this as his main job.

At the same time, most of the foreigners involved in Ultimate Frisbee were not working on sports full time. Wolfang started as a volunteer. Thompson, the American coach in Jordan, still balances coaching with his day job—conducting research on regional water resources. Yet he has managed to coach his team, Citadel Ultimate, all the way to the last two MENA Ultimate Cups, both times winning the Spirit Award for good sportsmanship and team culture. International organizations aren't the only ones with the resources to promote sports. As a high school teacher, Dasoki spent a long time trying to convince skeptical administrators to recognize Ultimate as a legitimate sport for students, alongside more traditional offerings. After he left for Europe in 2022, Dasoki received a surprising message from an old colleague: a link to a Facebook post on the school's official page, advertising a student Ultimate Frisbee tournament.

After all, that's how Ultimate began in the first place. American high schoolers started with pickup games, won recognition from their school, and began organizing leagues to spread the sport around the country—and eventually, the world.