BBC’s Once upon a time in Iraq – a devastating documentary masterpiece

The Iraq War weighs heavily on the conscience of many in Britain and the United States.

In 2003, coalition forces sought to oust President Saddam Hussein’s regime and bring freedom to the Middle East. Instead, the invasion brought chaos, state collapse and civil war, unleashing sectarian insurgencies which tore the country apart and led to tens of thousands of military and civilian deaths. It was in Iraq perhaps more than anywhere that the idealism of the post-Cold War West collided with reality. Seventeen years and two presidential administrations later, US forces are still on the ground.

The BBC’s new documentary, Once upon a time in Iraq, explores these shattered illusions through intimate interviews with those who lived through the Iraq War and its aftermath. The costs of this conflict have been immeasurable, but what is special about this documentary is the way in which it takes us down to the raw, human level. It shows us the experiences of those caught up in these events, their lives changed forever, from Iraqi civilians trapped in the crossfire to the American journalists and soldiers who saw historic events unfold.

The series is directed by James Bluemel with Waleed Neysif acting as an informal presenter throughout the series. They make a natural pair: Bluemel is the director of Exodus, a BAFTA award winning documentary on the refugee crisis. For Neysif, the Iraq War is a very personal story and he appears in the documentary as both a witness and a guide for the audience. He was 18 years old at the time of 2003 invasion, and now lives in Canada. In the documentary, he reflects with candour and sadness on how his teenage infatuation with the West turned into horror at the anarchy unleashed after the coalition invasion.

Bluemel’s documentary is crafted from an extraordinarily rich variety of eyewitness accounts. It is a story told in five parts, with episodes examining key themes – War, Insurgency, Fallujah, Saddam, and Legacy. Each chronicles a different chapter, with Legacy providing a troubling insight into life in Mosul under the Islamic State.

The result is a devastating documentary series: in Insurgency, we hear from Alaa Adel, a young Iraqi woman who still bears the scars from where her eye was hit by shrapnel during an insurgent attack. In Fallujah, we are shown the anguish of one Iraqi family caught up in the fierce fighting that engulfed the city in 2004. Others bear emotional scars, such as Sally Mars, who was eight at the time of the US invasion and who recounts the constant fear she felt as a high school student in 2014 as the Islamic State advanced close to Baghdad.

The sense of loss and hopelessness it has created for Iraqi people across the world is as heart-breaking as the war itself. Omar Mohammed, a history professor who has now fled Iraq, despairs in Legacy: “They (the Americans) didn’t bring freedom, they brought chaos.” His sadness at the wasteland created in his home city of Mosul is echoed by an Iraqi friend of mine, who told me recently: “Iraq is the cradle of civilisation, and now it is in ruins. How did the Americans allow this to happen?”

Yet the American accounts are no less heart-wrenching or haunting. Perhaps the most moving of all is the fate of Lieutenant Colonel Nathan Sassaman, a West Point graduate who commanded a unit of US troops in the heartlands of Iraq’s Sunni triangle. Tasked with the impossible, of acting as a civilian governor as well as a military leader in one of the most volatile parts of Iraq, Sassaman lost his way.

Getting to see – and feel – the tragedies of the Iraq War in this way is vital. So many other depictions of this conflict leave the audience divorced from the bitter realities of what actually happened.

For instance, Adam Curtis’s documentary Bitter Lake, which explores the history of America’s entanglements in the Middle East more generally, is cinematic and provides a compelling political narrative. Yet that is the problem – it is too cinematic, and too polished. The experience feels too much like watching a story rather than a documentary about real events and real people.

Then there are Hollywood films, such as Clint Eastwood’s propagandistic action thriller, American Sniper, which provide one-dimensional, heroic tales of individual servicemen detached from geopolitics. Such portrayals are a form of escapism from confronting the ways in which Iraq broke down the simplistic dividing lines between liberation and terror, regime change and chaos, democracy and destruction. Once upon a time in Iraq grapples with precisely these challenging and uncomfortable questions.

If I have one criticism, it is that this documentary could have done more to frame the historical context effectively. This would have allowed an uninitiated audience to better understand key political events covered, such as de-Baathification or the rise of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. In all fairness to the directors, this might have ended up taking us slightly away from the human perspective that makes Once upon a time in Iraq so powerful and unique. Yet I can’t help but feel that such an approach would also have yielded further insights, insights which Bluemel is clearly equipped to provide.

A book co-authored by Bluemel and Chatham House fellow Renad Mansour to accompany the series promises to fill these gaps. But for those wanting to know more, the perfect complement to this series is Emma Sky’s The Unravelling. Sky served as a political officer in Kirkuk Province after the 2003 invasion and later as a senior adviser to the US military leadership during the 2007 surge. In her account, she provides a crucial explanation of the conditions that led to insurgency and later the rise of ISIS, as well as the continued role played by Iran in destabilising the Iraqi state.

The overwhelming theme of Once upon a time in Iraq is tragedy. Yet there are fleeting moments of resistance and hope, even amid the ruins. It’s a devastatingly honest examination of what went wrong that is long overdue – and after all the terrible events of the last seventeen years, we owe Iraqis like Neysif the chance to tell their tale, and be heard.