TONY JONES, PRESENTER: Michael Ware was in Bagdad after the US-led invasion of Iraq when things went pear-shaped. He was there when al-Qaeda in Iraq, under the brutal leadership of a man named al-Zarqawi, began a campaign of suicide bombings and videoed beheadings. He set out to find out who they were and witnessed up close the genesis of what we now know as Islamic State, or Daesh.

Well just last month, Islamic State took back the key strategic town of Ramadi from Iraqi troops.

Its ongoing control of key areas of Iraq and Syria has brought world leaders together in Paris this week to work on a new strategy to destroy it.

Addressing the gathering, Iraq's Prime Minister called on the world for help, but denied that the Islamic State movement was born in his country.

HAIDER AL-ABADI, IRAQ PRIME MINISTER (voiceover translation): As you know, Daesh was not born in Iraq, it was not developed in Iraq, but in Syria because of events that have nothing to do with the situation in Iraq.

TONY JONES: Well that argument seems strangely deluded, since it was the actions of his hardline Shia predecessor which enabled Islamic State to emerge in Iraq, posing as the protector of Sunni Muslims. The US general who turned things around in 2007 understands that hard reality and says force alone won't stop the rise of Islamic State.

DAVID PETRAEUS, FORMER US COMMANDER IN IRAQ: They must be killed or captured, defeated. But to enable that will require political initiatives on the part of those key Iraqi leaders, starting of course first and foremost with Prime Minister Abadi, who knows and has stated what needs to be done indeed to give the Sunni Arab community a reason to support the new Iraq rather than to oppose it.

TONY JONES: David Petraeus believes the Iraqi Army will retake Ramadi in the next few weeks, but the city could be tough to crack. The Americans struggled there against al-Qaeda in Iraq a decade ago.

That fight was documented by Michael Ware and features in his new film called Only the Dead, which is playing at the Sydney Film Festival.

Shaun Hassett looks back at Michael Ware's war.

MAN (Baghdad, Aug., 2003): Michael, I believe something's just occurred.

MICHAEL WARE, WAR CORRESPONDENT: Yes, Steve. A suicide bombing has just taken place at the Jordanian embassy.

SHAUN HASSETT, REPORTER: This attack in August, 2003 was the first car bombing of the Iraqi insurgency and Australian journalist Michael Ware was there on the spot filming, something that will become common as the war rolled on. But just a few months earlier, Saddam Hussein was still in power and Michael Ware was just another journalist.

MICHAEL WARE (Only the Dead): I was a war correspondent for Time magazine, sent in to cover the conflict from the north. I was in my 30s and still young and dumb enough for war to have its false sense of adventure. I simply couldn't have been happier.

SHAUN HASSETT: But he's now seen things other journalists have not and is releasing a documentary called Only the Dead, drawn largely from hundreds of his own tapes.

MICHAEL WARE (Only the Dead): This was the first day I ever held a camera. A small, beat-up Handycam I've carried with me ever since.

SHAUN HASSETT: The documentary details his obsession with this man, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the founder of al-Qaeda in Iraq.

The Islamic State militants earned headlines last year when they started to behead Western journalists, but it was Zarqawi who shocked the world first.

TONY JONES (May, 2004): The website claims the murder was the work of alleged al-Qaeda operative, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

REPORTER: These were the last moments of American hostage Nicholas Berg's life. Then he was pushed to the ground. The video goes on to show his head being hacked off.

SHAUN HASSETT: That was just the start of Zarqawi's media rollout. When he wanted to ramp up his presence, he turned to Michael Ware.

REPORTER II: This Western journalist views horrifying video sent to him by an Islamic insurgent group in Iraq.

MICHAEL WARE (July, 2004): This is a very, very sophisticated part of Zarqawi's information campaign stamping him as the star of the new global jihad.

SHAUN HASSETT: Zarqawi was drawn to Michael Ware because he was one of the first journalists to make contact with other insurgents.

MICHAEL WARE (Only the Dead): This home-made tape they gave me was proof I'd made contact. It's probably the first insurgent video of the war. I know these men and feel bad about this tape, filmed just for me when I insisted on proof they were really fighting.

SHAUN HASSETT: Contact by contact, he gained their trust.

MICHAEL WARE (Only the Dead): Soon, I wasn't just watching their tapes. They began taking me to secret meetings in the dead of night. That's my breathing as I am doing the filming. It was frightening. I'd surrendered myself to these guerrillas, men the Americans were hunting and I had found, not knowing if they were friends or if they were going to kill me. I guess I knew it was insane, but I couldn't help myself. They insisted on taking me and Uri on our first attack.

SHAUN HASSETT: His connections allowed him to gain access to areas that would normally be considered no-go zones.

MICHAEL WARE (Only the Dead): Zarqawi had seized the equivalent of midtown Manhattan, right in the middle of Baghdad. Zarqawi's black flags lined the streets, his fighters everywhere. We made one pass down the boulevard, then another, until we were spotted. One of Zarqawi's men stepping out from the kerb, pulling the pin on the grenade, stopping our car.

SHAUN HASSETT: Ware was then dragged out of his car and kidnapped. They were going to behead him, as they had other Western journalists. But his insurgent escort threatened to carry out a turf war with Zarqawi's men and Ware's life was spared.

Many journalists might've gone home at that point, but Zarqawi had become an obsession for the Australian and now the US was preparing to take Zarqawi on in Fallujah and Ramadi.

DONALD RUMFSELD, THEN US DEFENCE SECRETARY: If Iraq is to be free and a peaceful society, one part of the country cannot remain under the rule of assassins and terrorists.

US GENERAL: We will hunt down the criminals. We will kill them or we will capture them.

REPORTER III: US commanders made a sombre prediction: this street fighting could be the heaviest since Vietnam.

SHAUN HASSETT: Michael Ware followed the trail and linked up with the Americans.

MICHAEL WARE (Only the Dead): It's only 200 yards to home. Nowhere in Iraq was the war as bloody for the Americans as it was here.

US SOLDIER: This platoon, since July, we've had eight WIA and six KIA. ... All of my squad leaders and section leaders have been wounded. For a while our company was fighting at less than 70 per cent, which gets hard 'cause when you're in static defence, all you're doing is sitting around waiting to get hit.

MICHAEL WARE: Zarqawi was now as wanted a man as Osama bin Laden, the Americans putting a $25 million bounty on his head.

SHAUN HASSETT: The Americans eventually got their man in 2006. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was killed in an air strike north of Baghdad.

This is how Time magazine broke the news. In that edition, Michael Ware's colleagues wrote that Zarqawi's ideas, "... will haunt the world long after he is gone," and that his death was, "... a much-needed dose of good news from Iraq. But the insurgency is not dead ...".

Nine years later, it still isn't.

TONY JONES, PRESENTER: Ahead of the first screening of Only the Dead, I caught up with Michael Ware just a short time ago.

Michael Ware, thanks for being here.

MICHAEL WARE, WAR CORRESPONDENT: Tony, thank you.

TONY JONES: Now, first I should say that the film is as gripping as it is disturbing, but you've survived these events quite a long time ago, so why now? Why make this film now? Is it relevant to today?

MICHAEL WARE: Well I think this film could not be more relevant than it is today. I mean, we've seen the rise and rise of the Islamic State, their blitzkrieg across the Middle East. And the events of this film take place within the pre-history of the Islamic State. It's dealing with the man who created it and we're there at the moment of its inception. So if you want to understand the Islamic State today, then this film is almost essential viewing. But more than that, if you want to truly understand what it takes to fight, to combat the Islamic State, then you need to see this film 'cause that's the true cost that we're still not talking about.

TONY JONES: No. In the past 24 hours, the Iraqi Prime Minister has come out and side, "Oh, Islamic State is not an Iraqi issue. It didn't start in Iraq, it started in Syria." Well that's plainly wrong, isn't it?

MICHAEL WARE: Oh, that's absolutely wrong. And I would very much challenge the Prime Minister of Iraq on that. I mean, when we removed - we of the West removed the regime of Saddam Hussein, we presented a new platform for global jihad, right there in the Middle East. And the man who stepped into that breach was the founder of the Islamic State, a man called Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. And I was there in Baghdad in August, 2003 when he launched his first-ever attack, historically, the first-ever attack of what we now know of as the Islamic State, and that was the car bombing of the Jordanian embassy.

TONY JONES: In fact the scenes in the film of that - 'cause you were there ...

MICHAEL WARE: Yes.

TONY JONES: You got there - probably the first camera there. People saying, "Don't film, don't film these bodies," and the bodies are everywhere. It's an horrific scene.

MICHAEL WARE: It's hard to imagine now, looking back, but an event like that, a suicide bombing, a truck bombing, had never occurred in Baghdad. That was the first one ever. None of us knew what it was. Not the foreigners, not the press corps, not the military, not the Iraqis themselves. So as we see this enormous black plume rising above the houses behind us and drive towards it, none of us could've ever imagined what we were going to find.

TONY JONES: Zarqawi would go on to blow up the UN compound, ...

MICHAEL WARE: Yes.

TONY JONES: ... he would begin beheadings on camera, Nicholas Berg ...

MICHAEL WARE: Yes.

TONY JONES: ... famously was beheaded, apparently by Zarqawi himself. That's what we've come to understand. And he hangs - or his presence hangs like a kind of dark cloud over the film. How significant was he? He was - at that stage, he was said to be the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, but that is the beginnings, isn't it, of Islamic State?

MICHAEL WARE: Very much. Very much. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in effect single-handedly hijacked the war in Iraq and turned it to his own design to fulfil his own vision of holy war. Because in the beginning, the insurgency was what was driving the war. This is former Iraqi soldiers and officers and generals fighting against an American occupier on their own land while Zarqawi showed up and bit by bit, piece by piece, devastating attack by devastating attack, hijacked that entire conflict. And in doing so, he brought about a revolution in holy war. He did what Osama bin Laden would never have dared to have done nor wanted to have done. In fact, when he started, he was not al-Qaeda. Al-Qaeda would not allow him to join and he did not want to join al-Qaeda. It was only after a period of time that the two forces, I argue reluctantly, had to come together.

TONY JONES: Well actually, this is one of the most startling historical ironies in a way because when you think about it, George W. Bush made it one of the reasons for going in - for invading Iraq in the first place was his claim, based on false intelligence, that al-Qaeda was already operating in Iraq at a high level with Saddam Hussein - highly exaggerated intelligence. And now they've actually created it, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

MICHAEL WARE: Well, of the many tragedies of the war in Iraq, this ranks certainly among the greatest, in that, indirectly, inadvertently, we of the West created the very thing that we say we went to Iraq to prevent. There was no al-Qaeda under Saddam before we went there. There was no Islamic State. There was barely any Islamic militancy because Saddam himself didn't allow it. But by removing that regime, we accidentally created the environment perfect for them to rise up and to flourish.

TONY JONES: Let's take one step back, because as a reporter in Iraq with a tiny little video camera, when it all started to go pear-shaped for the Americans after the successful invasion, the occupation goes horribly wrong and you go out to try and find the insurgents that are blowing up American vehicles, that are doing all these things. How did you do it, first of all, because no-one else managed to do that?

MICHAEL WARE: Well, what struck me early on during the American occupation is the Americans clearly didn't understand who they were fighting and why these men were shooting at them in the first place.

TONY JONES: But how did you find them? Because this is the key thing. I mean, first of all, you're the enemy, or you should be considered the enemy 'cause you'd been working alongside the Americans. You're actually an Australian.

MICHAEL WARE: Yes.

TONY JONES: Did you use that? I mean, did they think you were a neutral or something?

MICHAEL WARE: No, no, that worked against us, because often you would hear the refrain in Iraq and in other parts of the Middle East: "Bush, Blair, Howard". We as Australians did not escape the accusation from the Arab ...

TONY JONES: So why didn't they consider you to be an enemy? Why did they bring you onboard and allow you to film behind the scenes?

MICHAEL WARE: They considered my nationality an enemy. But the way I was able to penetrate the insurgency, certainly at first, was piece by piece. It was one personal relationship after another. As we say in the film, I start with one man who I knew and who'd served in the military and he certainly wasn't an insurgent. But, friends of his friends certainly were or his cousin or someone he served with in a military unit, you know, under Saddam was.

TONY JONES: And then, you know, with your camera, at night, you're out with them when they're actually firing mortars at the Americans, when they're planning and doing operations.

MICHAEL WARE: That's right.

TONY JONES: I mean, were you conflicted at that point?

MICHAEL WARE: Oh, of course I was. I mean, here I am with, you know, our so-called "enemy" attacking, you know, our Western forces. But like I said, no-one had any idea who these guys were. They were being ridiculed as amateurs and criminals and yet here they were, clearly sophisticated, with well-defined command and control structure, and nationalised. But the thing was, I considered it like an embed. Now, I've been on literally hundreds of embeds with the American forces. Now when I go on those embeds, I am seeing Iraqis being attacked and dying and civilians in collateral damage. I had to treat it as the same thing, that I was on an embed with them for a purpose to find a piece of the truth.

TONY JONES: Well it's forever been the role of journalists to try and see both sides of the story. It just becomes quite complicated. Here's what happens. As a trusted journalist, they start bringing you videos of their actions to your hotel and to other places, I imagine, not only against US troops, but of their street executions, of really serious and horrific violence that they've done. Why do they choose you to do that and did you feel at that stage you were there their conduit to Western television, western media?

MICHAEL WARE: What I was trying to find out was: who was doing these suicide bombings? What was this sinister force that was behind the insurgents? They had a totally different agenda, and that was Zarqawi, and his forces, who now we know as the Islamic State. It was them, it was their videos.

TONY JONES: Yeah. So through cut-outs, they start providing you with their videos.

MICHAEL WARE: Don't forget: this was not quite a pre-internet age, but it was pre-social media. There was no YouTube, there was no Twitter, there was no Facebook. So, when Zarqawi decided for the first time to really declare his arrival on the global stage, he'd been secretly making this video. And when it was ready, as the courier told me, the Command Council sat down all day and argued about what to do with it. Do we give it to al-Jazeera? Do we give it to this one? Do we give it to that one? And they say at the end of the day it was the prince of princes himself who said, "Give it to the infidel," and it came to me. Now that was the one that I publicised widely because that gave us an insight into who was doing this, how they were doing it and the fact that they were not going away.

TONY JONES: I wanted to ask you whether you ever met Zarqawi, but there's a moment in the film, we see it, where you kind of cross the line between - where you cross the safety line. You know, you're never really safe, but you cross a line and I think it's in Haifa Street. And here's where Zarqawi's people have actually taken over a main boulevard in the centre of the capital of Iraq. So you go there. Tell us what happens.

MICHAEL WARE: Well, essentially, as Zarqawi was hijacking the war, one of the first great acts that he did was he captured a central part of Baghdad. It was well within mortar and rocket range of the US embassy, and this is right under the Americans' noses and there's nothing anyone could do about it. When this happened, some of the insurgents who'd been ousted in that takeover came to me and told me about it. And I needed proof before I could report this. This was a significant development in the war, right in the heart of the capital.

TONY JONES: So you go to secretly film Zarqawi's men having taken over a key boulevard in the capital. What happens?

MICHAEL WARE: This key area. As I'm driving in a car with an insurgent guide and my trusted driver, I'm in the back seat, filming between the headrests the flags of Zarqawi's - the black flags that are now lining this central boulevard. As I'm doing so, I could clearly see scores of Zarqawi's jihadis up and down the street, but I went to pains not to film them. Unfortunately, as we were leaving that area, we were spotted. And, with one of the black banners flapping behind him, one of Zarqawi's men steps out from the median strip, pulls the pin on a grenade, cocks his arm and stops our car. And that's when I was dragged from the vehicle.

TONY JONES: Yeah. And that's the point where you actually think, "This is it for me. I'm going to end up like Nicholas Berg."

MICHAEL WARE: Yes.

TONY JONES: Was that a serious threat? Did you think you were going - did you think they were going to behead you, literally?

MICHAEL WARE: They were going to behead me. This was at the height of the period where Zarqawi's men were targeting Westerners, taking them and beheading them. I was a target of opportunity. When I was taken, there was some commotion there on the street and it was clear that I wasn't going to be spirited away and held hostage. It wasn't too long before I was dragged behind one of the apartment blocks and there was a hastily slung black banner like we were seeing in all the execution videos. And there lined up were the men who were going to cut my head off; indeed, a man with a knife. And in fact, they were going to film it with my own camera. But it was at this moment, where there's two of them arguing about how to work my camera, that my insurgent escort finally piped up and stepped in and said that they could not kill me. He said that there will be a turf war between our two groups if you kill this man because he's our guest, and it was only through gritted teeth that Zarqawi's men literally pushed me back and I became the only Westerner who ever survives Zarqawi's organisation.

TONY JONES: So it becomes really too dangerous at this point for you spend time with the insurgents. You actually go back with the Americans and you embed again with American Marines and others, and particularly in some of these battles for key towns in Al Anbar Province, which as we see, now are all being fought over again, Ramadi among them. Tell us what - how you actually win a fight in one of these towns, because you could see with all their arms, with all their resources, the Americans seem to find this almost impossible.

MICHAEL WARE: Look, I think a lot of people forget that Ramadi was the first-ever capital of the Islamic State. And when it was declared that capital, there was a small group of American soldiers and Marines who were posted there and told to hold the line. It was so bad at that time, they were fighting for their lives just to keep one road through the city open. And they were under constant attack. It was very, very clear that they didn't have enough troops, and even in they did, there was no way that they were going to be able to win that fight for that city. There was no way they could kill their way out of that battle.

TONY JONES: Michael, I've got to say, I've seen a lot of war footage from that time. I've never seen this footage and it's amongst some of the most violent, chaotic, dangerous scenes that I've ever seen filmed. And, first of all, you want to know how you actually survived it, but then you think about the consequences, what it actually means fighting in a city like that, because you now you've got the Iraqi Army, a Shia army, supposedly going in to fight in exactly the same place where the Americans pretty much failed. I mean, how can they do it?

MICHAEL WARE: Well, I don't think that they can. And during the American experience, if there was a Khe Sanh of the Iraq War, it was Ramadi. And now that the Islamic State has retaken it, the Iraqi Security Forces, both the official and the unofficial, do not possess the capability, certainly not right now, to retake that city. In the end, the only solution that can possibly lead to a return of that city to any kind of normalcy will be if the local population and the tribes yet again rise up as they did in 2006 and 2007. But for a whole host of reasons, now, today, that's almost certainly not going to happen. It's not a battle that can be won.

TONY JONES: Yeah, you mentioned 2006 and 2007. It's when it finally dawned on people that this was a Sunni area and you had to actually have the support of the Sunni tribes to defeat ISIS, or IS, Islamic State - whatever you want to call them. Is there any way you can see now to actually defeat them in these places? Because the - when you send in Iranian-backed Shia troops to try and do this, isn't that just going to bring all those tribes together?

MICHAEL WARE: Well, it's just throwing fuel on the fire. And it's been the actions of successive Iraqi governments, but particularly since the US left that country, that has herded the Sunni population back towards the Islamic State. Many of them feel that they've had no choice. They certainly don't want to be living under a regime or in the kind of society that the Islamic State creates, but they feel that they're better protected that way from their own government.

TONY JONES: So how do you feel - I mean, we're watching now these talks in Paris where - our own Foreign Minister is there and everyone's trying to work out a strategy for defeating Islamic State. There does seem to be one obvious thing you could do and that is to change completely the way you deal with those tribes, but no-one seems capable of doing it.

MICHAEL WARE: Those tribes aren't there to be dealt with again, certainly not in the way that they were in 2006 and 2007. It took years of work for the US military to develop the trust and the rapport, because these tribes were the insurgency. And when the Americans, under the Bush administration, finally cut the deal with these tribes, essentially they put 107,000 - 107,000 insurgents on the US Government payroll at $300 a month and the insurgency virtually stopped overnight and the Islamic State woke up dead. Now the problem is: those tribes are not the tribes they used to be. They're not as powerful as they were back then, they're not as organised as they were back then and they're more vulnerable 'cause the Americans are not there to offer them assistance, particularly against their own government.

TONY JONES: Now finally, I'll bring you back to the film for the end of the interview. And in this horrific conflict, you say in the film that you found in yourself a kind of dark side. We see an existential fight going on around you and you find in yourself some darkness as well and there's a particularly gruelling, gruesome scene at the end of the film where it sort of seems to demonstrate that you felt you had crossed a line somehow. Tell us about that.

MICHAEL WARE: Well, you know, a soldier once wrote that there's certain dark chambers of the heart that once opened can never be closed again. And when you're living that human experience in war, which is stretched to its extreme, you start to find these places within your own self. There was an incident that I witnessed, in fact an incident that I filmed, and by my silence, I became complicit in what happened around me. All I had to do was clear my throat, all I had to do was say something and the situation would've changed. But I made a decision in that moment to keep filming and not to do anything.

TONY JONES: You did what photojournalists have been doing in war for years, which is to keep viewing it through the lens.

MICHAEL WARE: Yes. I mean, journalistically, in a way, it was a very clear choice. We're there to observe and to record, and by capturing one particular moment of horror, you hope that you can amplify it and tell a much larger story and perhaps achieve a much larger good. And I'd made that decision journalistically within myself years before. But morally, of course, we're still people. And someone's suffering does not change just because you have your journalist's hat on.

TONY JONES: You obviously have come to terms with it in some way.

MICHAEL WARE: Look, any soldier who's been to war, any civilian who's had to live it, will tell you that there are certain things that you just have to come to terms with to move forward. In so many ways, the experience of going to war is humbling. It brings you a whole new perspective to life. I will never see the world the same way again, and in so many ways, that's a privilege. That from now on, every day is a gift, for me and for so many of my friends. And I wouldn't trade that. But it takes work to get there, as any soldier will tell you. Often, the homecoming is harder than the war itself.

TONY JONES: Michael Ware, it's I think in the end a very profound thing that you've been there to witness this and to bring us the film, so, we thank you very much for that and for coming in to talk to us.

MICHAEL WARE: Tony, thank you very much.