EVERY day, says Rabin Omar, he feels grateful for what he has: family, friends, a great life in Scotland. But it might all have been so different for Annan Athletic’s young Kurdish striker, who is now a football hero in Scotland, had his family not fled the terror of Saddam Hussein more than 20 years ago.

When Omar, after striking two goals for Annan to knock Hamilton Academical out of the Scottish Cup on Saturday, appeared on BBC Scotland’s Sportscene on Sunday evening, there was no hint of the terror and bloodshed – and genocide – that once threatened his very existence.

“I guess it is quite a story,” the young footballer told me yesterday. “I had a grandfather – a Kurd – who died after being called up to serve in Saddam Hussein’s army years and years ago. I don’t really know what happened to him, but it was a very dangerous time for Kurdish people. Before I was born my mum, dad and older brother had to flee [Saddam’s regime].”

Omar’s father, Ayad, and mother, Chenar Salim, were Kurds who lived in what was to become a very dangerous part of the world in the 1980s and 1990s: southern Kurdistan or “Iraqi-Kurdistan” which had become consumed by northern Iraq. The Kurds suffered ferocious persecution under Saddam, including the infamous Halabja massacre of 1988, when as many as 7000 civilians were gassed by the dictator’s forces. Internecine fighting also posed a danger.

“It got to the stage eventually, with a [Iraqi Kurdish] civil war going on, when my parents decided they had to get away,” said Omar. “The Halabja massacre became infamous and was an example of the danger my family faced. So my parents somehow got out and made their way to Holland, where I was born, and where I lived until I was nine years old.”

Out of this tragedy and mayhem, Rabin Omar’s prodigious young life has emerged. The 18-year old is a first-year student of pharmacology at Glasgow University, having left school with nine highers from Whitehill Secondary in Dennistoun in Glasgow. He is also fluent in three languages: Kurdish, Dutch and English. To add to this merriment, after his breakthrough season, he is now a goalscoring hero for Annan Athletic.

Biologically, Omar’s football prowess has its roots in Kurdistan. But his game was honed and reared in Holland, one of Europe’s great football nations.

“I was maybe four years old, and living in Delft near The Hague, when I started playing,” he says. “My older brother, Warin, was playing with a team, and they were all older than me, but I pestered them and pestered them to let me join in, and eventually the coach said: ‘Okay, let him play.’ By the time I was eight both Den Haag and Feyenoord were interested in signing me, but my parents by this time had decided to move to Scotland.”

Omar arrived in this country in 2007, aged nine, and gradually wound his way to the Jimmy Johnstone Academy based at Toryglen, where he fell under the wing of Jim Simmonette, now the academy president, and coach, John Joyce, who is now the assistant-manager of Annan with Jim Chapman.

It was Joyce who paved a road to Annan for Omar, who last season was signed up by Chapman and is now in the first team. “He [Omar] is still young and he obviously still has lots to learn,” Chapman told me yesterday. “But Rabin is as good as any 18-year-old I have seen.”

Once or twice a week Omar shares a car journey with Glasgow-based team-mates down to training at Galabank, where the conversation is pretty unusual. “It is mainly political – quite often with me explaining where I come from and what happened to my family and the Kurds,” he says. “The journey down to the club from Glasgow takes an hour and 15 minutes, so I quite often tell them my story and explain my point of view.

“My background is important to me. Whenever I can I go back to the Kurdistan region, where I have family, although it is still a dangerous place. You now have Islamic State and everything that is going on around them. Cities such as Erbil and Dohuk can still be dangerous. But these places are where my roots are and I always want to go back there.”

His family are practising Muslims, in an age of heightened tensions here in Scotland and across Britain and Europe. Is it ever an issue for him? Is he ever the subject of fear or goading or anxiety because of his faith?

“Nope, never,” says Omar. “I have never had a single incident in my life in Scotland where being Muslim has caused me a problem. I’ve never had any abuse, I’ve never had any bother, I’ve never heard anything being said about it. Not once. It has been brilliant living here and playing my football.”

Gradually over this past weekend his exploits on Saturday afternoon for Annan have filtered back to relatives and surviving grandparents in Kurdistan.

“They obviously can’t get to watch the BBC out there but we have sent them some links or streams of the game, and they also got a link for Sportscene,” he says. “When the BBC phoned up and asked me to go on Sportscene on Sunday, I felt a bit nervous, so I put some chewing-gum in my mouth. One of my aunties out in Kurdistan said, ‘oh, look at him, eating chewing-gum like that!’

“I think my family have felt very proud. It was a great weekend for me and for Annan. When you think of where my family have come from, they all feel very appreciative. It has been amazing.”

Yesterday afternoon, after all this hoopla, Omar stumbled in late for his biology lecture at university. The auditorium was already full, so the new young hero had to sit on the stairs and take notes. “It didn’t matter,” he said. “These have been among the best two or three days of my life.”