At some point during this film from deep inside Iraq’s many wars, one asks oneself, shattered: “Do I need to watch this?” Jihadi executioners clear a pavement opposite a marketplace and shoot a suspected informer while he kneels, hooded, then kick the body casually. Next, the Islamist fighters are hanging alleged looters from a rafter by their bound wrists so that their quarry dangles there – “like piñatas”, says the commentary – before bullets rip through them. And there is worse to come, in a different way, from the less fervent but more arrogant cruelty of American soldiers.

And the answer is: yes, we absolutely do need to watch this film. For the violence is not gratuitous, quite the reverse: it propels a searing film-essay by the cameraman and subject of the piece, Australian reporter Michael Ware, who is unique among we correspondents who covered that carnage, for having actually lived in Iraq for seven bloody years, after which he suffered what can only be called a breakdown before mustering the courage to make his “video-diary”. Unique too for having penetrated deep within first the insurgency loyal to Saddam Hussein, then the Islamist genesis of what is now Isis. “I witnessed the birth of what is now Islamic State,” says Ware. “It’s there in the film.”

The result, Only the Dead, is the most disturbingly poignant reporting to come from this horror, initiated and ignited 13 years ago by decisions made in London and Washington and which, never-ending, spilled into Syria, France, Tunisia and elsewhere. And rages still, for the foreseeable and unforeseeable future.

Ware’s film, from the beginnings of this nightmare in 2003, was released on digital platforms last week and will soon be shown by HBO in America. He may be criticised for showing the violence as it was and is, and as the Iraqi insurgents want it shown; for being “embedded” with them, as well as with western forces like most others (though not me, I hasten to add). There is also the haunting closing scene, when Ware watches and films American soldiers search and insult a man they have fatally wounded in the head, who takes a horribly long time to die, and to whom they do not administer first aid – rather: “Hurry up and die, motherfucker.”

But the criticisms should be seen as fatuous. Ware has made the remarkable equivalent for his generation of Michael Herr’s book from Vietnam, Dispatches, an incendive personal journey through the savage kernel of war which arrives at a cry against not only the war in which he was immersed as deeply as a reporter can be, but all war.

Speaking from his home in Brisbane, Ware is disarmingly honest about how his video-diary came to be. “It took me a long time to arrive at this film. I did seven years in Iraq, full time, not flying in and out. I was resident 11 months a year, so that my experience of the war was the same as the Iraqi experience, same trauma, same day-to-day.”

He began in early 2003, with American reporter Tom Pennington, who procured a “$300 Handycam” on which Ware began to record his diary. “I was a writer for Time magazine, I wasn’t making a film,” Ware explains. “If I’d ever thought this’d be a film, I’d have shot a whole load of other stuff, and it’d probably be completely different. But it wouldn’t have been so honest or raw; it would not have been an attempt at the visual truth.”

Ware finds himself in Baghdad alongside “hundreds of other reporters who were all more experienced than me”, listening, like them, “to the Americans, to the war machine, through the summer of 2003, talking about ‘criminals’ and ‘terrorists’. The more I listened, the more I realised the Americans didn’t know who these people were who were shooting at them and couldn’t figure out why. So, purely on the principle of old-fashioned journalism, I set out to find the other side of the story. I found that the so-called ‘enemy’ was nothing like it was being described. There was a disconnect between those running the war and the war itself.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Libyan rebels on the outskirts of Ajdabya, eastern Libya, in a still from Only the Dead. Photograph: Franco Pagetti / VII

Ware’s remark reminded me of a call I made to the US state department in November 2002, having been in Iraq first time around in 1991, preparing to return and wanting a briefing on the Sunni and Shia – the rift that has now torn Iraq asunder since invasion: “What’s the plan?” I asked. “How are you spelling that?” replied the official.

At the film’s opening, Ware cuts a gung-ho figure. But once he crosses to the insurgent side his tenor changes – the unease he feels palpable. “I know these men,” he whispers as a hooded group prepares a mortar attack. “I feel bad about this tape.” However: “I went to their villages, listened to their grievances, their sense of injustice under an occupying army.”

Then the suicide bombings – and Iraq’s nightmare of 2004 – begin, and Ware realises that this is not the work of insurgents he is with, but “someone even these people are scared of”. A video duly arrives showing, for the first time, suicide bombers preparing their “martyrdom” – what Ware calls a “first propaganda masterpiece” by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the jihadi leader – for Ware to pass on to the world. True, Ware had sought out the Saddam-ites, but once he had found them, the jihadis found him, and now he ventures into their terrifying orbit. The film thereby twists into an entwinement between existential crisis and documentary horror shot through, as Ware says, “a window no one else is looking through”. It needs someone like Ware to explain that, even after the invasion of 2003, and Blair’s and Bush’s grotesque proclamations of victory, “there was not one war in Iraq, there are at least four. First, that between the Americans and British and those initial insurgents – officers in Saddam’s army and their sympathisers. Then the holy war, waged by what we now call Islamic State. Third, civil war between the Iraqis themselves, Sunni and Shia. And fourth, Iran’s war against anything they call a Ba’athist [Saddam Hussein’s secular party]. And that’s without even mentioning the Kurds.”

There is a poignant moment when Ware prepares to leave his Iraqi bureau staff for a Christmas break, and there are filmed good wishes from all of them, one Omar included. When Ware returns, Omar has been killed. And when I ask Ware why he stayed so long, his answer is simple: “First, the story. But also, I knew that when I left I’d lose my Iraqi family. And I use the word intentionally. For seven years, we went to hell and back together, and I’d be defiling my bond with them if I’d left without getting them out. So I had to stay for the time it took to find them places in the UK, Australia and US; that’s what kept me there.”

As he returned each year for a break, “I would disgorge the batch of tapes. I didn’t watch anything – I just stashed hundreds of hours of tape into a Tupperware box under my mother’s bed”. In 2010 Ware “returned to Australia and realised this had to be the end of my war. And for the next two years I was holed up alone. I struggled, gripped by pain. Not day-by-day or hour-by-hour pain – it was minute-by-minute pain. It didn’t have a face, or voice or place, just formless pain. I’d see what I thought was an IED flashing while I was driving, and accelerate – it was a speed camera! I’d swerve to avoid rubbish in the road – I ended up losing my licence.” And yet: “It occurred to me, I should have a look at what is on those tapes. I started to watch them, in snippets. Then I’d go on a bender, have an outburst of all the wrong emotions. But I began to wade through all this. I felt honour bound to do something with it. There’s been a conversation as old as time about what war does to human nature, and I felt if I could add just one half-thought to that conversation – about my experience and that of the Iraqis around me – it’d be worthwhile.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Michael Ware in Iraq in a still from Only the Dead. Photograph: Yuri Kozyrev / Noor

Ware teamed up with an Irish colleague, Paddy MacDonald, with whom “I ingested the tapes, but then the whole thing ground to a halt again. I had another period of disintegration”. However, “I got through the minefield of my own demons and incapacity to write anything and stuck with the one narrative there is: the camera, and the person behind it, even if there are scenes there I had entirely forgotten – there is a glimpse of me reflected in a shop window! And that is how we made the film”. When we reach the end, and the slow death of the Iraqi before our eyes, surrounded by jeering soldiers, we are with Ware: we simply do not know what to think or do, so like him, we just watch.

“I’m still struggling with it all,” confesses Ware in conversation. “Even now. I’ll never see the world the same way again.” We talk about how, “once back in ‘normal life’, obstacles and sanctions which are perfectly normal to most people become impossible to bear” for those suffering from what Ware calls “combat trauma”. Yet now, he says: “I’ve found my way through that rabbit hole. The road rage escapes me now.” Making the film was, he says, “a challenge, but the greatest challenge was to reclaim my life”.

I remember asking Michael Herr how he reclaimed his life. And for a man so articulate about war, he replied not with Ghandian rhetoric, nor the philosophical bon mot I was probably pursuing journalistically, but by talking with curious innocence about love and Zen. Ware is not Herr, but he does say this: “I don’t necessarily want to put it that I’ve kind of ‘Zenned’ my way back to life, but I have, actually. I came to understand that in war you cannot lie to yourself. The film happens to be set in Iraq but it speaks to all war, any war.” Ware’s video-diary is a filmed illustration of Edwin Starr’s great lines: “War, huh/ What is it good for? / Absolutely nothing!”

“The politicians, the calculations that got us here, they dissolve,” continues Ware. “All war is pointless, but it is inherent within us, there’s no moral compass. We can’t tell you what to think – you have to make your own peace. And you realise that at the end of the blood and pain and gallows wit, there’s only one thing left intact: that ultimately this is about love. That’s what sustains you, and I wouldn’t trade that lesson for anything.”

Only the Dead is now available to watch on iTunes



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