Iraq Videos - The Documentary Network

Fighting the Islamic State with Iraq’s Golden Division: The Road to Fallujah

Documentary.net staff — Mon, 20 Jun 2016 15:44:35 +0000

In 2014, Islamic State militants swept into Western Iraq's Anbar Province, overrunning Iraqi security forces, enslaving minorities, and causing thousands to flee for their lives. The jihadist group captured Iraq’s largest city, Mosul, and the cities of Ramadi and Fallujah, where hundreds of US troops died fighting the Islamic State’s predecessor. Now, two years later, the Iraqi security forces, with help from Iranian-supported Shiite militias and US military advisors and warplanes, are fighting to take back towns and cities in Anbar, one battle at a time. But it’s a difficult task: Anbar has been the crucible of Iraq’s insurgency, and is the country’s Sunni heartland — long marginalized by and hostile to the Shiite-led government in Baghdad. VICE News embedded with Iraq’s Golden Division Special Forces unit as they fought their way into the villages surrounding the city of Hit, where they encountered ambushes, sniper fire, and tried to sort suspected Islamic State operatives and sympathizers from innocent Iraqi civilians.

Peshmerga vs. the Islamic State: The Road to Mosul

Documentary.net staff — Fri, 12 Jun 2015 08:16:19 +0000

A year after the Islamic State's lightning conquest of Iraq's second-largest city of Mosul, the poorly-trained and equipped Kurdish peshmerga forces are the international coalition's only reliable boots on the ground in northern Iraq. The Pentagon's hopes of recapturing the city by spring 2015 have been dashed by the military failures of the Iraqi Army further south, leaving the peshmerga to defend a 600-mile long frontline almost encircling Mosul, fending off constant Islamic State (IS) assaults with insufficient supplies of ammunition and modern weapons. For one month, VICE News embedded with the peshmerga fighters on the Mosul frontline, gaining an insight into the coalition's faltering war against IS through the eyes of the Kurdish volunteers bearing the brunt of the fighting.

Iraq’s Secret War Files (2010)

Documentary.net staff — Fri, 29 Mar 2013 09:10:35 +0000

The only TV doc to have advance access to the biggest Wikileaks release ever. This is what really happened during the Iraq war, not what the US PR machine of the time wanted us to believe. The reality behind the civilian death count; al-Qaeda's fictitious presence; torture, torture and more torture. A wall of truth revealing unprecedented levels of unwarranted aggression. "The detainee was blindfolded, beaten about the feet and head, electricity was applied to his genitals, and he was sodomized with a water bottle". These secret US military files from 2004-2009 capture 300 acts of torture of Iraqi prisoners; all after the world gasped at images of grinning US soldiers holding naked Iraqis on leashes. Far from winning the hearts and minds of the people, coalition forces have killed so many civilians, that insurgency has sky-rocketed. The air force launches Hellfire missiles at men with their arms raised in surrender, and goat herders digging for roots. George Bush said, "In the new Iraq there will be no more torture chambers, the tyrant will soon be gone, the day of your liberation is near". But the files show that rather than being the driving force for occupation, Al Qaeda flourished under the alienation bred by coalition troops. A handful of references to Al Qaeda in 2003 rises to 8000 in 2008. Troops manning checkpoints or riding convoy shoot at anything that moves: killing a doctor taking a pregnant woman to hospital, and the parents of a fourteen year old girl who was heard to cry: "Why did they shoot us? We were just going home!". And though the army said they weren't recording the death toll, 69 000 out of the 109 000 deaths recorded in these pages, were civilians. "The escalation of force, the killing of innocent Iraqis, paints a damning picture of force protection to the exclusion of everything else", comments Bob Dodge, who advised on both the Afghan and Iraq wars. Troops not only tortured Iraqi citizens themselves, but they witnessed almost daily incidents of torture of Iraqis by fellow Iraqis - exactly what George Bush had so valiantly set out to destroy. "They were settling old scores and taking revenge", says a former Head of Police. The result was Iraq-on-Iraq bloodshed on an unprecedented scale. The documents show US troops were instructed not to intervene however bad the levels of human rights abuse they witnessed. "They have killed my husband and my father - all the men no one remains", says Athra, sifting through the thousands of burnt and disfigured pictures of Iraq's dead. The documentary provides a glimpse of the shattered nation the coalition forces are leaving behind. Seven years after occupation, barely a street corner of Baghdad hasn't been bombed, Al Qaeda is stronger than ever, and around 500 innocents are killed a month. A Senior Iraqi officer exclaims: "this is the democracy you have brought along. You have forced us to live a terrifying nightmare of democracy". BROADCASTS INCLUDE: ZDF, CNN, Channel 4, SVT, NHK, Canal Plus France, ABC Asia Pacific, Infinito, ORF, DR by The Bureau of Investigative Journalism for Channel 4

James Steele: America’s mystery man in Iraq

Documentary.net staff — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 17:35:34 +0000

Iraq war: 10 years on. A 15-month investigation by the Guardian and BBC Arabic reveals how retired US colonel James Steele, a veteran of American proxy wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua, played a key role in training and overseeing US-funded special police commandos who ran a network of torture centres in Iraq. Another special forces veteran, Colonel James Coffman, worked with Steele and reported directly to General David Petraeus, who had been sent into Iraq to organise the Iraqi security services.