Members of Iran\u2019s national women\u2019s football team were greeted with a welcome ceremony upon their return to the Islamic Republic after several of the players had sought asylum in Australia.<\/p>\n
\u201cFirst of all we are so happy to be in Iran, because Iran is our homeland,\u201d midfielder Fatemeh Shaban said.<\/p>\n
People in the crowd waved flags, while some players held bouquets of flowers and signed what appeared to be miniature soccer balls. Iranian media had reported that the team returned Wednesday.<\/p>\n
\u201cI wasn\u2019t expecting this many people to come to welcome us, and I am happy to be the daughter of Iran,\u201d Shaban said in translated comments.<\/p>\n
Two players, Fatemeh Pasandideh and Atefeh Ramezanisadeh, chose to remain in Australia and have been training with the Brisbane Roar club.<\/p>\n
Others who initially sought asylum after the team was knocked out of the Women\u2019s Asian Cup later changed their minds and said they would return.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Members of Iran\u2019s national women\u2019s football team were greeted with a welcome ceremony upon their return to the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":485970,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[141,49,585,50,2987,163474,51,47,52,48],"class_list":["post-485969","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-donald-trump","tag-headlines","tag-iran","tag-news","tag-oil","tag-strait-of-hormuz","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/485969","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=485969"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/485969\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/485970"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=485969"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=485969"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=485969"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}