Deniz Undav’s World Cup success for Germany lifts Yazidi and Kurdish pride

KHIRBET AL-GHAZAL, Syria (AP) — Deniz Undav, one of the surprise stars of this World Cup, is playing for powerhouse Germany. Yet with his Yazidi and Kurdish heritage, the 29-year-old striker is representing two communities on the global stage with no realistic chance of having World Cup teams of their own.

After entering as a substitute for Germany, Undav scored three goals and set up two more, putting him just behind top-scoring superstars such as Argentina’s Lionel Messi, Kylian Mbappé of France and Vinicius Jr. of Brazil on the leaderboard.

Undav, who identifies as a Kurdish Yazidi, is the son of Yazidi refugees. His success is being celebrated by a small, insular community that has endured decades of oppression and violence, notably a 2014 onslaught in which thousands of Yazidis in Iraq's Sinjar region were killed or abducted by militants from the Islamic State group who considered them to be heretics.

Responding to a question at a news conference Wednesday, the German-born Undav said he hoped his performance would inspire fans everywhere, especially within the Yazidi community.

“I always get the news from my parents how they view me, how they see me and it’s making me proud, you know, that we finally have somebody,” he said.

In the village of Khirbet al-Ghazal in northeastern Syria, a small group of Yazidis gathered Thursday night to watch the Germany-Ecuador match at the home of community leader Ismail Dalaf. Many residents are related to Undav’s mother, who is from a now-deserted nearby village whose residents left for economic reasons or fled during Syria’s long civil war that began in 2011.

Dalaf said Undav’s World Cup performance has made him “a symbol that shows Yazidis can reach a higher position and be seen with respect.”

“When people see a Yazidi entering the field, scoring goals and changing the result of matches, it changes public perception,” he said. “It tells the world that Yazidis have a role in the world.”

The Kurds are among the largest stateless ethnic groups in the world, with roughly 30 million living as minorities in Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria. Yazidis are a Kurdish-speaking religious minority mostly found in Syria, Iraq and Turkey. There are around 235,000 Yazidis living in Germany today, according to Irfan Ortac, chair of the Central Council of Yazidis in Germany. Many arrived after the 2014 onslaught.

“Until now, we have mostly been known as victims of violence,” Ortac said. “Whenever we spoke about Yazidis, we always had to talk about genocide, discrimination, and displacement. It makes us very proud and happy to be able to talk about something positive.”

In Iraq — home to the largest concentration of Yazidis in the world and the location of their most holy site, the Lalish temple — members of the community also have embraced Undav's success.

“It makes me very happy to see a Yazidi bringing our name to the World Cup and playing in front of the whole world,” said Luqman Sleiman, spokesperson for the temple.

Diyar Bakir, 29, a Yazidi from Sinjar, hopes to travel to Germany one day to see Undav play.

His family "came from a place where his ethnicity and religion were not appreciated, yet he is now recognized and valued by a great team like Germany,” Bakir said. “He emerged from the womb of suffering, and we wish him every success.”

At times, Undav has faced abuse over his heritage from spectators and on social media.

When his club team Stuttgart played in Turkey at Fenerbahce last year, German media reported the outbreak of obscene chants about his mother. Two Kurdish anti-discrimination groups said social media insults were part of a growing campaign of “racist and ethnically motivated hostility.”

Undav’s decision to represent Germany and not Turkey, as other eligible German-born players have done in the past, also resulted in some online hostility from Turkish fans. But now, his popularity is surging.

Düzen Tekkal, a German documentary filmmaker and author of Kurdish Yazidi heritage, is from northwestern Germany, like Undav. She is the co-founder of Scoring Girls(asterisk), a nonprofit offering free soccer classes for girls from diverse backgrounds.

“There definitely is a Deniz Undav effect and it’s very important,” she said, referencing children who can celebrate their heritage and feel they belong in Germany at a time when migration is often treated as a political problem.

“It is no coincidence that he plays with this lightness and freedom,” Tekkal added. “People are asking how come he’s so good under pressure or he can cope with so much pressure? Because he doesn’t know it any other way. That is the DNA, that is the resilience. ... That’s how he scores these goals because what is that pressure compared to being Kurdish or Yazidi?”

When Undav scored one of those goals, against Curacao, he broke into a Yazidi-inspired jig with his hands clasped behind his back. He was joined by Antonio Rüdiger, a Black German soccer star who has faced racist and anti-Muslim abuse during his career, in what Tekkal called “one of the highlights, no matter how this World Cup goes from here.”

“Dancing is a form of expressing resistance for us,” Tekkal emphasized. “We dance on the graves of our dead. Our mantra is that resistance is life. He’s dancing there for his forefathers who were oppressed.”

Mahmoud Kanabi, a Kurd from Irbil, moved to Berlin in 2020 and works in a Kurdish restaurant. Because of Undav, he purchased a Germany jersey.

“Unfortunately, for us Kurds, we don’t have a team because we don’t have a country,” he said. “Now, when a Kurdish player is in a team, we have to be fans of it. It doesn’t matter what team it is.”

Martany reported from Irbil, Iraq; Fahey from Berlin and Ellingworth from Duesseldorf, Germany. AP Sports Writer Ron Blum in East Rutherford, New Jersey, contributed reporting.

Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.

See more of AP’s World Cup coverage here

A small group of Yazidis gather to watch the Germany-Ecuador match at the home of community leader Ismail Dalaf in Khirbet al-Ghazal, northeastern Syria, late Thursday, June 25, 2026.(AP Photo/Hogir Al Abdo)

A small group of Yazidis gather to watch the Germany-Ecuador match at the home of community leader Ismail Dalaf in Khirbet al-Ghazal, northeastern Syria, late Thursday, June 25, 2026.(AP Photo/Hogir Al Abdo)

Germany's Deniz Undav reacts after scoring during the World Cup Group E soccer match between Germany and Curacao in Houston, Sunday, June 14, 2026. (AP Photo/Eric Gay)

Germany's Deniz Undav, left, and Antonio Ruediger reacts after scoring the sixth goal during the World Cup Group E soccer match between Germany and Curacao in Houston, Sunday, June 14, 2026. (AP Photo/Eric Gay)

Germany's Deniz Undav (26) celebrates after scoring their second goal during the World Cup Group E soccer match between Germany and Ivory Coast in Toronto, Saturday, June 20, 2026. (Chris Young/The Canadian Press via AP)

WASHINGTON (AP) — Airlines across the U.S. worked to recover from the longest nationwide ground stop in 25 years that canceled thousands of flights Saturday, stranded hundreds of thousands of passengers, spread ripple effects around the world, and forced pro and college sports teams to scramble for alternate transportation.

New technology being added to the nation’s air traffic control system overloaded antiquated equipment and caused “intermittent” communications and radar gaps, leading to the flight shutdown of more than four hours, Trump administration officials said.

Airports were slowly returning to normal, Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy said, with planes taking flight and landing. But the effects could be felt for days. Officials say the system will likely return to normal in time to handle the Thanksgiving travel rush.

The nationwide stop was the first since January 2023, when another key Federal Aviation Administration computer system that sends notices to pilots malfunctioned, and the second since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Andrew Charlton, an aviation consultant, said Friday's stoppage affected about a quarter of the 45,000 flights in the U.S. each day.

“The knock-on effect of that is incredible,” said Charlton, managing director of Aviation Advocacy. “The aircraft doesn’t just fly from A to B and back to B and then stop. It then moves onto C and then over to E and around and around and around. It is, of course, exacerbated if you’re talking about long-haul flights, international flights over the Atlantic or over the Pacific.”

At airports, passengers stared at screens showing delays or rushed to find buses or trains to their destinations.

Emily Brown and her 14-year-old daughter waited more than four hours Friday at the Dallas airport for their flight to Columbus, Ohio, before giving up. They were traveling to surprise her daughter’s best friend. Instead, she had to settle for phoning the friend through tears in the airport, Brown said.

“She saved up her money to buy her own ticket, and she’s planned this whole weekend,” Brown said. “Now we’re not sure when we’re gonna be able to go.”

A cheerful Southwest Airlines gate agent greeted passengers at Dallas Love Field at dawn Saturday with, “Good morning, good morning,” then repeatedly said all flights were full and asked passengers to have boarding passes ready to expedite the process and help keep flights moving.

Sports teams scheduled to play this weekend adjusted game start times, searched for hotel rooms, rescheduled flights and chartered buses.

Auburn University's football team opted to take a bus to Mississippi State, and the Saturday start time was pushed back from noon ET to 4:15 p.m. Other universities affected by the stoppage included Baylor, Washington, Kansas State, Minnesota and No. 19 Ole Miss, which did not plan to fly until Saturday morning for its game against Oklahoma.

FlightAware, a website that tracks flights, said more than 4,100 flights had been canceled. Cirium, a similar site, put that number above 3,200 flights.

Corbyn Wascher's flight was on the tarmac at the Charlotte, N.C., airport for four hours Friday on his way home to Moline, Illinois, from a conference in Miami. The 37-year-old high school teacher paid $100 to take an Uber to a hotel 25 minutes from the airport after he was unable to find a flight until Saturday afternoon to Chicago.

At London’s Heathrow Airport, several flights to and from the U.S. were listed as delayed or canceled Saturday.

“While U.S. flights have resumed, there may be some follow-on disruption as airlines work to rebook affected passengers and get all services back to normal,” said Tim Johnson, consumer director at the U.K. Civil Aviation Authority.

Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin told reporters at the White House that no one was in any danger as more than 3,000 flights in the air at the time of the grounding order landed safely.

Duffy blamed Congress for failing to approve more funding for new technology, while downplaying the fact that trying to implement new fixes overtaxed the system. He suggested more disruptions might occur.

“We didn’t think we would have this kind of outage. We did,” he said. “We were able to review what went wrong, and then reboot the system and go. But, you will have more of these.”

Duffy said the failure involved old equipment and was not linked to the FAA’s new AI-powered system, which the agency is rolling out to help predict problems in the sky.

The problem was due to updating a system that can never shut down, Charlton said.

“What you’re watching here is trying to change the tires of your car when the car’s going at 80 miles an hour down the expressway, because nothing stops in aviation,” Charlton said. “It’s a 24/7 operation. And to make changes on the fly, if you’ll pardon that pun, is incredibly complex and dangerous.”

The FAA already replaced thousands of old copper wires with fiber optic lines and upgraded hundreds of radio systems as part of the overhaul that began last year after Congress approved $12.5 billion in funding. Duffy and the White House are pushing for $30 billion more to complete the work.

The problem appeared similar to a regional air traffic control communication outage in September that snarled hundreds of flights across the Northeast, although that disruption was linked to a construction crew cutting a fiber optic line. Aging equipment was also blamed for brief radar outages last year that disrupted Newark airport.

Aviation safety expert Steve Arroyo said the difference this time was the nationwide scale of the disruption, which left controllers unable to reliably talk to pilots.

“If you don’t have that ability, whether it’s because the old wires that they have are just run down or for whatever reason, you’ve got to stop airplanes on the ground and not put them in the air, where you’re going to risk not being able to communicate with them,” said Arroyo, a former United Airlines pilot.

It differed from the one after 9/11 because planes were not being told to land immediately and pilots likely were able to communicate with ground controllers at airports, Arroyo said.

Funk reported from Omaha, Nebraska, and Golden from Seattle. Associated Press journalists David Keyton in Berlin; Stephen Hawkins in Dallas; Mead Gruver in Fort Collins, Colorado; Jessica Hill in Las Vegas; Ali Swenson in Chicago; Alex Veiga and Jaimie Ding in Los Angeles; Seung Min Kim and Aamer Madhani in Washington; Hannah Schoenbaum in Salt Lake City; and Brian Melley in London contributed to this report.

Passenger watch as workers unload luggage from a United plane as flights are delayed at Los Angeles International Airport Friday, Nov. 13, 2026, in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Ethan Swope)

Passengers wait as flights are delayed inside a terminal at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport on Friday, Nov. 13, 2026, in Seattle. (AP Photo/Lindsey Wasson)

The sun sets over Dallas Fort Worth International Airport in DFW Airport, Texas, Friday, Nov. 13, 2026, after the Federal Aviation Administration grounded flights nationwide. (AP Photo/Tony Gutierrez)

A passenger moves through Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International airport as all flights are canceled or delayed, Friday, Nov. 13, 2026, in Atlanta. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart)

People wait at a terminal at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, Friday, Nov. 13, 2026, in Arlington, Va., after the FAA issued a nationwide ground stop. (AP Photo/Tom Brenner)

An agent helps travelers at a ticketing desk at LaGuardia Airport in New York, Friday, Nov. 13, 2026, after the Federal Aviation Administration grounded flights nationwide. (AP Photo/Ryan Murphy)