Killing An Ant With A Sledgehammer:Once Upon A Time In Iraq.

"Removing Saddam Hussein from power was the right decision and rescued millions from unspeakable horrors" - George W Bush

"I do genuinely believe that the world is safer as a result" - Tony Blair

"You Americans. You don't understand what you have done. Iraq will become the playing field for international terrorism" - Saddam Hussein (after capture, before execution)

Once Upon A Time In Iraq (BBC2 & iPlayer) may have a title that belongs in the world of fairy tales but the story it tells is resolutely that of a nightmare. Five painstakingly researched hour long episodes (subtitled War, Insurgency, Fallujah, Saddam, and Legacy) tell the story of what happened to, and in Iraq, from the start of the US led Iraq War to the rise of ISIS and beyond but where it differs, vitally, from previous dramas is in who gets to tell that story.

This is not the story of the last two decades of Iraq told through politicians refracted in a way that will suit their own personal agendas. This is that same story but told through ordinary Iraqi citizens, ordinary US soldiers, embedded journalists and photographers, and even a former member of ISIS. Directed by James Bluemel and narrated by Andy Serkis, vintage footage and often heartbreaking interviews paint a picture of a confusing, terrifying, bloody, and seemingly endless conflict and it's the story of how the 2003 invasion of Iraq sowed the seeds that led to the rise of ISIS and made Iraq a more, not less, dangerous place.

It shows how war makes victims of all involved. Primarily the civilians caught up in them but also the active combatants. It's clear to anyone that Iraq suffered hugely because of US and UK action but Once Upon A Time In Iraq doesn't stop there, it shows how many who fought in the war are distraught and suffering because of what they've seen and, in many instances, what they did. What they found themselves capable of doing. Many will never recover. Many more will never get a chance to. You'll not be surprised to read that I was, on more than one occasion, in floods of tears.

The premise that started the war in the first place was, of course, a false one. That Iraq was somehow responsible for 9/11. The nineteen hijackers were primarily from Saudi Arabia (with two from the United Arab Emirates, one from Egypt, and one from Lebanon) and the plot was mastermind by Osama bin Laden, also a Saudi. Iraq demonstrably was not responsible for 9/11 but Iraq most certainly was to pay the price for it.

As 300,000 coalition troops (the coalition being the US, the UK, Poland, and Australia supported by Italy, Canada, and the Netherlands - with assistance from the Peshmerga, the military forces of the autonomous Kurdistan region of Iraq) were deployed to the region in early 2003 everybody knew that war was coming. Many welcomed it, seeing it as a chance to finally liberate themselves from Saddam's brutal and tyrannical reign.

One of those was teenage heavy metal singer Waleed Nesyif. Nesyif loved Hollywood, Coca-Cola, blue jeans, and American culture in general. But the two things he loved most about America were freedom and democracy and he desperately wished for his beloved Baghdad (despite Saddam's reign, already one of the most liberal cities in the region) to be liberated, to be free.

Playing gigs with his band, Nesyif had to always dedicate at least one song to Saddam to placate Iraqi intelligence services. He speaks of how, in public, there was no criticism of Saddam whatsoever. Regime propaganda and fear dominated and, for many Iraqis, Saddam was the only leader they had ever known. It was almost believed that he was immortal and, conversely, many viewed him as both a deity and a family member.

To say "fuck God" in Iraq, an Islamic country, was far safer than to say "fuck Saddam". Anyone including neighbours, family members, and friends could, and might, report you and it was well understood that Saddam, and his people, regularly beat, tortured, and killed their rivals and enemies.

Nesyif describes how, despite this, Saddam provided safety and security. People were free enough to not have to worry about car bombs and murderous Islamists. All they had to worry about was Saddam and Saddam's regime. While other Iraqis, rural farmers and the Sunni minority particularly, in the programme speak, even now in some cases, of Saddam with reverence and even love (even how beautifully he smoked his cigars), Nesyif was resolutely pro-war.

Another Americanophile, also interviewed, was Ahmed Al Bashir. Al Bashir's a hugely successful comedian in Iraq now but then he was a young Backstreet Boys fan who called himself Kevin. Al Bashir and Nesyif's stories, as with many others, punctuate Once Upon A Time In Iraq with both insight and piquancy but so do those of US soldiers and journalists.

In March 2003, as 170,000 troops move in to Iraq and the aerial bombardment begins, Saddam Hussein ensures the Iraqi people that they are winning the war while Donald Rumsfeld, the US Secretary of Defense, gives his people a very different, but equally bellicose, rendering of events.

Former US Marine Sergeant Rudy Reyes is ripped to the core, covered in tats, and swigs tequila straight from the bottle as he's interviewed. Reyes was one of a small group of marines who were sent ahead of the main invasion. A self-described "jedi" who fought for three weeks solid without sleep. Reyes describes moving in to Iraq in a vehicle with "no armour, no doors, no roofs, just very capable violent professionals".

He speaks of the conflict in biblical terms and says he had no moral concerns about the killings he did because he and his colleagues had been "systematically programmed to kill". Reyes:- "we speak of people as bodies and acknowledge an order by screaming KILL". He describes killing civilians simply because they were illiterate and unable to read the signs, in Arabic, ordering them not to pass down certain roads. He says "we killed every one of them. Grandpa, mommy, and the kids". Over footage of Reyes drowning his demons, he tells us he feels "lucky" and that not everyone has coped so well since returning to the US.

Reyes is incredibly articulate, retains his humanity despite of everything, and, quite possibly, is in a fairly advanced stage of PTSD. At the time Reyes, and the coalition forces, were entering Iraq Sally Mars was six years old. She describes US troops handing out sweets to children like her and how if they did such things they must be good people. She thought their backpacks made them look like Ninja Turtles and she gave one of them a flower.

Soon both Baghdad fell and, infamously attacked by men with their shoes, so did Saddam's statue. Days after holding huge rallies in the Iraqi capital Saddam simply disappeared from view. Baghdad had fallen to the US forces in fairly short order but an invasion on its own is not a war and with no plan in place for the future of the country the war had just begun.

There was, initially, little resistance in Baghdad but three hundred miles north in the city of Mosul things were very different. Freelance photographer Ashley Gilbertson arrived in Mosul woefully unprepared, he'd packed more beer than he had medical aid or masks to protect him from chemical warfare, but he arrived just as riots and looting were breaking out and, with journalist Dexter Filkins, describes how the crowds in the mosques of Mosul went instantly from praising Saddam to railing against him.

Banks and hospitals were looted in both Mosul and Basra yet the only building that the US forces protect from the looters is the Ministry of Oil. Donald Rumsfeld goes on television to explain that looting, crime, and "bad things" are all part and parcel of freedom. Normalising the behaviour - and still there is no plan on what's to follow the spiralling chaos.

Lt Col Nate Sassaman now says he'll "never fire a weapon again, ever" and talks of his problems reintegrating back into US society following his active duty in Iraq. How when driving down the freeway he constantly expected an IED (improvised explosive device) to go off and how he was ready to shoot someone dead if they so much as flipped him the bird.

In Iraq, he led a battalion of almost one thousand soldiers and many saw him as a future General. Sassaman knew nothing of Iraq or its culture but he believed he was doing the noble thing and helping the country to reconstruct. It was believed by the US that the army needed to win 'hearts and minds' and Sassaman, willingly, at first, began to befriend sheikhs and leaders.

A charismatic and seemingly friendly guy, some of the Iraqis were dubious and some hostile but many loved him. They drank Coke together and Sassaman, it appeared, was winning those all important hearts and minds over. But soon it all starts to go a bit Colonel Kurtz for Sassaman.

We'll check back in on him again soon but Sassaman sips fizzy drinks while Neysif secures himself a job as a translator for English language journalists. He describes driving round a Baghdad that had become a ghost town and how as the months passed there was still no water, still no electricity and it was becoming clear to everyone that the US was not rebuilding Iraq. In fact it was both dirtier than it had been during Saddam's reign - and also less secure.

12,400 miles away off the Californian coast near San Diego, George W Bush announces "mission accomplished" but mission, most definitely, was not accomplished. Bush's envoy Paul Bremer arrived in Iraq and issue two crucial orders:-

(1) To remove Ba'athists from power and to remove Ba'athism from Iraq forever
(2) To dissolve the entire Iraqi military for loyalty to Saddam Hussein

These two orders were not just crucial. They were lethal. The problem with the first order was, Neysif says, is that everyone in Iraq was in the Ba'ath Party. They had to be. Saddam Hussein had made sure of it. The de-Ba'athification of Iraq meant doctors and teachers could no longer work and hospitals and schools were shut down, crippling any attempts at reconstruction. The second order, to dissolve the military, only added to the unemployment statistics. Another 400,000 men lost their jobs and not only were they unemployed but they were angry and in possession of "an abundance of weaponry". What could possibly go wrong?

Unable to support their, often large, families the perfect conditions were being created for an insurgency. An insurgency that was initially almost exclusively driven by Sunni Arabs in the Sunni Triangle, north and west of Baghdad. Insurgent attacks on the occupying American forces, using small arms and IEDs, started to happen on average about eight times a day and soon began to spread in to other parts of Iraq.


In 2003, Alaa Adel was twelve years old. She lost an eye and suffered huge facial scarring after being hit by shrapnel during an attack intended for the Americans. Neysif describes the scars on Adel's face as a microcosm of the scarring, the irreparable damage, done to Iraq during the war.

As insurgent attacks using car bombs and RPGs (rocket propelled grenades) increase, Paul Bremer gives press conferences where he lies that things are improving - it's what Bush wants to hear with an election due in a year so Bush amplifies, rather than questions, Bremer's message - and democratic elections start to be held in Iraq. Despite the insurgency, Iraqis are eager to govern themselves for the first time. The transition to democracy and the insurgency were happening concurrently but only one could win out in the end.

One man resorts to particularly aggressive tactics to ensure the result is the correct one and that man is Lt Col Nate Sassaman. Sassaman's already described how if anybody took a shot at one of his soldiers he would make it his personal mission to ensure that the day they did so would be their final day on Earth and his attempts, no matter how violent, looked to be working in quelling the insurgency and were endorsed by high ranking US officials.

Then one of Sassaman's men, Staff Sergeant Dale Panchot is ambushed and killed and Sassaman, in response, ups his game and becomes even more violent and even more draconian. ID cards are issued, villages are given curfews and surrounded in barbed wire and in the small town of Abu Hishma, where Panchot was killed, Sassaman wreaks his deadly revenge.

Those who live in Abu Hishma are dehumanised, humiliated, and abused (as Sassaman, now, admits) and as US forces were unable to distinguish between insurgents and civilians everyone was perceived as a threat. Houses were broken into and ransacked. Families would find themselves woken in the dead of night with forty soldiers going through their cupboards and drawers looking for weaponry.

On top of losing their jobs, their dignity, and their security in their home town they were now unable to sleep safe in their own beds. With the same tactics being repeated across Iraq this was, clearly, not liberation and this was, evidently, not reconstruction. But as a recruiting strategy for the insurgency it could not have been more effective. If the man whose house was broken into by US forces wasn't an insurgent when the troops went in, he sure as hell was by the time they'd left.

Sassaman's aggressive reputation had him sent to Samarra to sort out a rising insurgency that was getting out of hand there. Sassaman himself got out of hand and now describes himself, in Samarra, as going to "the dark side" and how his actions were "akin to killing an ant with a sledgehammer". Sassaman's psychotic bloodthirsty apocalyptic violence was now common across Iraq, a logical progression even, and things continued to get a lot worse. Not least in Fallujah.

The episode devoted to Fallujah begins with the image of the bodies of dead US soldiers strung up on a bridge. It's one of many powerful and sickening images that appear throughout Once Upon A Time In Iraq. By this time the US forces were not just fighting the Iraqi resistance but also against foreign jihadists and their allies. An initially loose group had, under the guidance of the Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, organised themselves into Al-Qaeda in Iraq. Described by journalist, and later Pulitzer Prize winner, Dexter Filkins as "a gigantic killing machine".

A sentiment he echoes later in the show when he describes eight thousand US marines marching into Iraq as "a massive killing machine". As these two killing machines create further death and chaos in Iraq it is al-Zarqawi's who are being the most effective in achieving their aims. They've taken complete control of Fallujah, just forty miles from Baghdad and Bush knows he has to act before the capital is taken.

When US troops start moving civilians out of Fallujah it becomes obvious to everybody there that the the American led coalition is preparing for a full attack on the city. Not every civilian was able to leave Fallujah though. Nidhal Abed, like many working class mothers, was simply too poor, and had too few connections, to move out.

At the time Nidhal's first child, Mustafa, was nearly two and, like so many boys of his age around the world, all he really cared about and all he really wanted was his first ever bike. Which Nidhal also could not afford. During Ramadan Nidhal was carrying Mustafa, who had a fever at the time, home. Or she was one second. The next second he was lying in the street with his guts ripped out screaming 'mama'.

Mustafa also lost a leg and a testicle during the attack but he survived and was taken to hospital - and then the hospital was bombed too. Incredibly he survived again but all the doctors in the hospital were arrested. In an almost perfect example of the contradictory nature of US interference in global affairs an American non-governmental office arranged for Mustafa to be taken to Oregon where he received treatment. His mother said that all he knew at the time was that "Bush hit me". Movingly, Mustafa is interviewed for the programme. Unsurprisingly he's got a pretty dim view of war.

Outside Fallujah two US soldiers, Billy Miller and Christian Dominquez, are deployed. Representing The New York Times, Dexter Filkins and the photographer Ashley Gilbertson would accompany them on their mission. Filkins and Gilbertson are free to report the story as they feel fit but, that aside, the marines were, initially at least, not keen on the embedded press.

Not least at a time when the rules of engagement have been dialled back so far that it's deemed permissible for a marine to kill a man for looking at his phone. They're working on the theory, untrue as we've established, that all civilians have vacated Fallujah and anyone still there is, by the very nature of still being there, an active combatant.

It led, of course to civilians being crushed to death, shot, and subjected to deadly chemicals. Gilbertson tells of passing out and waking up in piss stained jeans and of how he considers most of the photos he took in Iraq, with the exemption of The University of Jihad Motherfucker (below), to be failures because when people saw them they thought they looked like stills from movies. Absolutely not his intention. Which was to show the true horror of war.

A horror he got to witness himself - and even become part of. Insurgents in Fallujah were, at the time, breaking the Geneva Convention by using mosques to snipe from. When one sniper was shot dead in a minaret, Gilbertson wanted a photo of the aftermath but he was not allowed to go in on his own.

Despite it being a breach of his own non-interventionist policy, Gilbertson agrees to Dominquez, along with the blond Texan Lance Corporal Billy Miller, accompanying him. Miller goes ahead to clear the scene for Gilbertson. All of a sudden, from the rubble strewn stairs of the minaret, half the word "shit" is heard as a second, previously unnoticed, sniper shoots Miller in the face. It would be the last half of a word that Billy Miller ever said.

Gilbertson, tortured by guilt, speaks of visiting Miller's family and Miller's mother talks of refusing to be come full of hatred because it was hatred that killed her son. It's a moving scene. Back in Iraq things were about to get even worse.

During the first Gulf War of 1990/91, the US encouraged Shias in southern Iraq to rise up against Saddam Hussein but then, when they did, the Americans didn't back them up. It resulted in Saddam Hussein killing 80,000 of his own people and strengthening his hold on Iraq. Among those who survived the slaughter was Samir, a translator, who, for his own safety, left Iraq soon after.

But he didn't forget what Saddam had done and he, like many others, wanted revenge. When George W Bush was President, John Nixon was one of the senior leadership analysts and he was nearly as obsessed with Saddam as Samir was. He studied videos of Saddam's speeches and describes his fascination with the Hussein family's petty rivalries and jealousies as "The Simpsons - with guns".

With the theory that the capture of Saddam, still in hiding, would cause the insurgency to die out there is increased pressure from Washington to find him and, when a $25,000 reward is offered it leads, no shit, almost immediately to lots of fake sightings. But eventually, as we all know, Saddam is found in a bunker in December '03. George W Bush:- "ladies and gentlemen, we got him".

Samir is in the group that find the dishevelled former dictator and delights in giving him a few kicks and punches and calling him a pussy and a bitch. At least while he can. Bush announces that Saddam Hussein will receive the justice he denied his own people. The Shi'ite majority of Iraq celebrated wildly but the 20% Sunni population are very concerned that this will mean the end of the centuries of power they've enjoyed.

John Nixon interviews Saddam and asks him about the infamous WMDs (Weapons of Mass Destruction that much of the validity of the invasion was reliant on). Saddam replied, not incorrectly, that the US leaders were terrible, they had no idea what they were doing or how much trouble they were causing and that there would now be more, not less, terrorism.

The Shi'ites in Iraq were now free to celebrate, and commemorate, festivals like Asurah but on 19th December 2004 at two Shia holy sites in Karbala and Najaf nine bombs killed 175 people (though other accounts have the death toll one hundred lower). Al-Qaeda in Iraq were getting more organised. Al-Zarqawi knew there was no way the Sunnis could win a democratic election so sought to start, and win, a civil war.

Al-Zarqawi informed his leader Osama bin Laden that he planned to bomb mosques, hospitals, and schools in order to provoke the Shia backlash that would spark this war. A completely evil plan but a very successful one because soon enough retaliatory attacks began. Many of them carried out by Shi'ite policeman as a kind of 'overtime' following a day's shift.

2005's elections were marred by more insurgent attacks and further suicide bombings and the Sunni minority lost control to the Shia majority but the campaigning had divided Iraq even further into religious factions. There were even rumours at one point that the Americans had asked Saddam Hussein to speak to the nation so as to heal it. The story was that Saddam said he'd need one single hour:- forty-five minutes to have a wash and shave and fifteen to give a televised address.

Of course that didn't happen and in October that same year Saddam began his trials for crimes against humanity. His angry, demanding, and contemptuous court performances saw his popularity rise but it certainly didn't heal the nation. Sectarian violence intensified and millions began to flee Baghdad. Often to Syria.

The American line was that Sunni v Shia was nothing to do with them and they only intervened when they, or their interests, were personally under threat. Eventually, a bombing of one of Shia's holiest shrines in Samarra, in February 2006, finally pushed Iraq into a full civil war.

Ahmad al-Bashir describes his brother being brutally killed by a mortar shell to the head, "he became pieces. We collected the pieces to make a body so my mum thinks there's a human", and then lights a cigarette, turns away from the camera, and asks for the interview to stop.

Saddam Hussein, seemingly at peace with himself and firm in the belief that he did his best for the Iraqi people, is forced to suffer one final indignity. It had been Saddam's wish to be shot by a firing squad but instead he was hanged - and in the middle of the night too.

Under his reign, Iraqis had known that the one enemy you needed to avoid, the one that would kill you without hesitance or regret, was Saddam Hussein and his troops. Now it was al-Zarqawi's Al-Qaeda in Iraq who were slowly morphing into something quite extraordinarily medieval and terrifying:- ISIS.

After receiving death threats for his work in Iraq, Neysif had been living in Toronto (smilingly complaining about it being "fucking cold") and when he returned to Iraq in 2012 he found it wasn't the same country as the one he left. His Shia friends no longer spoke to his (and their former) Sunni friends.

Sunnis were being further angered by the Shia Prime Minister Noura al-Maliki (according to Filkins, a "breathtakingly corrupt" individual). Al-Maliki oversaw mass arrests, and prisoners were kept in dungeons and not given trials. Despite this the Americans hung on to him.

A dawn morning, Mosul, June 2014 and Tahany Sahel wakes up to hear, through a megaphone, "we are the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant". ISIS had taken over and soon all men of fighting age were being prepared for war and any form of education that didn't praise Allah was overthrown. The new caliphate flew black flags and operated checkpoints (and even promoted a bizarre video called  A Fun Day Out Under The Islamic State showing funfairs with big wheels and pirate ships).

Al-Qaeda were covert but now they'd morphed into ISIS they were overt - and as they had taken the territory they could afford to be. Morphing into ISIS is an oversimplification of what happened but, for the most part, the men in ISIS were the men who'd been in Al-Qaeda in Iraq before and had become even more radicalised since their leader Abu Omar al-Baghdadi sent about a dozen or so of his fiercest fighters to Syria.

The change takes about two years but when Al-Qaeda is, essentially, rebranded as ISIS they are a different, and more formidable, beast. Having taken Mosul, ISIS push on to Tikrit, Saddam Hussein's birthplace. Camp Speicher in Tikrit was built by the Americans during the war and is now being used by the Iraqi army for training. Knowing of the imminent arrival of ISIS many officers fled Speicher leaving thousands of untrained cadets to fend for themselves.

It ended as badly as you might expect. ISIS sent the Sunni cadets home and rounded up the Shia cadets and put them in lorries. They said if they repented they would not be hurt and that, of course, was a complete lie. They were then tied up and beaten before being lined up and shot in the back. One thousand and five hundred of them.

The only known survivor Ali Hussein Kadhim tells his story. The ISIS guy tasked with shooting him missed. ISIS knew Kadhim wasn't dead but believed he had been shot and that he was fatally injured. They had the option of finishing him off but they decided it'd be preferable to let him to die a slower and more agonising death. Amazingly it was the sheer scale of their cruelty that saved his life.

As for the sheer scale of ISIS murder it is impossible to track and it is almost certain that the exact number of people they have killed will never be known. Sunnis who helped Shi'ites to escape ISIS were killed instantly but still some, like Um Qusay (below), risked their life to do so.

In Baghdad, videos of ISIS atrocities are being widely shared and everybody knows that ISIS are on their way and the PM al-Maliki will do nothing to help them. Nesyif, who's earned enough money to do so, moves his entire family to Turkey to save their lives.

Former ISIS member Ahmad al-Matyouti tells of being excited by the chants in ISIS videos and their attractive modern cars and weapons. He talks of how being in ISIS gave him status, gave him respect, and made him feel free. As if denying other people of their freedoms (and lives) is a form of freedom in and of itself. ISIS began the systematic destruction of all artefacts that challenged their beliefs and a constitution was put in place that demanded that everyone in ISIS territory lived under ancient laws dating back to the time of Muhammad.


Civilians had no choice but to submit to the caliphate and could be lashed for smoking, missing prayers, singing, or wearing make up. Al-Matyouti proudly boasts that under ISIS women would not be killed by guns but by the preferable method of 'stoning'. As if death by stoning doesn't really count.

One brave blogger, Mosul Eye (now revealed as historian and citizen journalist Omar Mohammed, born and raised in his beloved Mosul) wrote daily about life under ISIS. Other Iraqis speak of Mosul Eye offering them hope during the most hopeless of times and because of this ISIS hated him. They called him the 'black devil' and if they could only find they would most certainly kill him.

For Omar Mohammed, even now, to appear on Once Upon A Time In Iraq seems brave to me. A normal day in Mosul under ISIS control, Omar Mohammed relates, would involve at least one stoning and at least one execution by beheading. He didn't want those who died to die in vain and be written out of history so he published the name of every single person executed by ISIS for a year until the likelihood of his own beheading became so real that he had to leave the city and country he loved and was smuggled into Syria.

There's a brief coda at the end of this magnificent series that shows Barack Obama, at the end of 2016, intensifying US air strikes and Donald Trump incomprehensibly banging on about God in an army jacket and pretending to care about civilian casualties that doesn't really add much to the story but that's fine because this story, despite the liberation of what's left of the ruins of Mosul from ISIS control, is far, far from over.

With Once Upon A Time In Iraq, James Bluemel has shown a new way of telling stories that, hopefully, other documentarians and directors will follow. It managed to show how the wider story of the war(s) in Iraq could be told more powerfully than ever before by building it up from the individual, lived experiences of those that actually experienced it. Ordinary people living in, forced to live in, truly extraordinary times. Tony Blair may still believe that the world is safer as a result of the invasion but the testimonies of Alaa Adel, Ahmed Al Bashir, Waleed Nesyif, and Omar Mohammed have far more veracity and much less agenda than Blair's or Bush's and they tell a very very different story. To be continued.