Mohammed Yaseen Mohammed took up weightlifting at the age of 11, and within a year won the Iraqi junior national weightlifting championships as a lightweight, a prelude to the many that he would win at the senior level. At the age of only 17, he represented his country at the 1980 Moscow Olympics, where he placed 17th in the lightweight category. Four years later, at the Los Angeles Games, he was sixth in the middleweight division. In-between, he won bronze as a middleweight at the 1982 Asian Games. Following his retirement from active competition, he moved to Sweden, where he died in June 2020, after having contracted COVID-19 a few months earlier.