ARTE – TUESDAY, MARCH 30 AT 8.50 P.M. – DOCUMENTARY
“It’s easy to invade a country, to go to war, but what happens when you win? ” The question, launched by Australian photographer Ashley Gilbertson in the introduction ofOnce upon a time in Iraq, by James Bluemel, is purely rhetorical. “We sowed the seeds of Daesh in 2003”, asserts, in response, the American lieutenant-colonel Nate Sassaman, in a sigh strangled by tears.
It is through the voices of witnesses – Iraqi civilians, foreign journalists and soldiers engaged on both sides – that this three-part documentary returns to the chaos in which Iraq has sunk since the American-British invasion of March 20, 2003, until the reconquest in 2017 of the territories conquered by the organization Islamic State (IS). This polyphonic narrative shows, as a counterpoint to the triumphalist speeches of decision-makers drawn from the television archives, the devastation that this war has left in the lives of those who witnessed it.
These testimonies shed light on certain tragic events, like those of Nadia and Nidal, residents of Fallujah, whose son Mustafa was seriously wounded in 2004 in the battle waged by American forces against Al-Qaida in Iraq. Or those of Ali Hussein Qadhoum, a Shiite conscript of the Iraqi army, who miraculously survived the massacre perpetrated by IS against more than 1,400 soldiers on the Speicher base, in June 2014, and Umm Qussai, a Sunni resident of Al-Alam, who took in dozens of survivors.
Terrible finding
Waleed Rabiah, self-taught English speaker and self-proclaimed fan of America and its freedom, tells how he first supported ” 100 % “ the war against Saddam Hussein, before “The myth turns into a nightmare”. Fixer for foreign journalists, he discovered with them the massacres committed against the population, then suffered in his family the consequences of the demobilization of the army and of “debaathification” – the exclusion of members of the single Baath party (Baath) of all positions of responsibility. Threatened when civil war broke out in 2006, he was forced into exile in Canada.
Lieutenant-Colonel Nate Sassaman delivers the terrible report of his Iraq war. Appointed commander of the province of Balad in 2003, fervent architect of the strategy of “conquering hearts and minds” carried as a standard by the American army, he slips into violence and reprisals after the loss of a soldier in November 2003 in the face of the Sunni insurgency. He received a reprimand in 2004 and resigned. “We stole the childhood of all these children. War is the worst hell ”, concludes the officer, who lived in the trauma of his mission, “The best and the worst year of his life”.
The documentary ends with the rise and fall of the Islamic State organization, notably with the testimony of Omar Mohammed, a young historian who chronicled, on the anonymous blog Mosul Eye, the reign of the jihadists in Mosul from 2014, before being forced into exile. Against the backdrop of images of his devastated city, his last words sound like a warning: “I’m only 33 years old and I’ve been through it all since 2003. (…) It’s a wonder I’m still here to talk about it. It is dangerous to forget, because memory is all we have left. “
Once upon a time in Iraq, documentary series by James Bluemel (UK, 2020, 3 × 52 min). On Arte.tv until March 29, 2022.
