Iraq's view of the Gulf War

Iraqis want to show their side of the Gulf War story

By Roger Hearing in Baghdad

For many people in the UK, the book and subsequent film Bravo Two Zero, provided a strong and attractive impression of the Gulf War - heroic endeavours against a cruel and brutal foe.

It is an account of the experiences of a group of SAS soldiers (British special forces) who went behind Iraqi lines to try to find Scud missile launchers. When it all went wrong they put up a brave fight, some were captured, and tortured, one managed to escape.

Of course, Iraqis see it all rather differently.

Iraqi officials say it is important that Iraq has things to be proud of

Sami Mohammed, a well-known playwright and magazine editor here, is now intent on putting the record straight. He is in the last stages of a screenplay for a film that will show the same story as the Iraqis tell it.

In the UK, critics are currently getting exercised about the US film industry's alleged distortions of history, in movies like U571 - wherein US rather than British sailors uncover secret German codes in World War II - and The Patriot, which shows alleged British atrocities during the American War of Independence.

Many Iraqis regard Saddam Hussein as a great leader

Sami Mohammed, a tall urbane intellectual, with a slow methodical manner, thinks there is the whiff of hypocrisy in all that. He says he wants to tell the Gulf War story as it really was.

In truth, he has not read the book Bravo Two Zero, and he only has a shaky pirate copy of the film, but he knows the gist.

Sami has spoken to one of the key people involved - an Iraqi soldier called Adnan, who was captured by the SAS soldiers, and who subsequently led them into a trap. Adnan is very much the hero of Sami's film - a true Iraqi patriot.

It is going to be a movie full of action and passion, Sami told me. He does not know anything about the ill-treatment the SAS claim they received after their capture - that is not in the scope of his story.

Will it be biased? Yes, of course, says Sami - because he is an Iraqi and he will tell it from an Iraqi point of view.

'Lavish' Baghdad

And it is not the only film that Iraqis are making to set the record straight. Last week, in the desert west of Baghdad, they were reconstructing the events of February 1991 when they claim hundreds of Iraqi soldiers were buried alive in their trenches by American bulldozers.

It is only when I think back to the country I visited 10 years ago... that I realise how much has changed

That, and the mass killings of Iraqis fleeing on the road out of Kuwait, will form the subject of two more films to be released in the autumn - when the roasting summer heat has cooled to the point that the non air-conditioned cinemas become bearable.

You might wonder what a society on the edge of collapse after 10 years of sanctions, is doing spending money making feature films. Coming here fairly regularly over the past three years, I would have to say that I have been surprised by the number of lavish building projects, grand theatrical events and prestige media events the country seems to be able to afford.

It was a land with the same level of education and healthcare as Greece

Iraqi officials say it is important that Iraq has things to be proud of, and I suppose I can see how they can be useful gestures of defiance to an apparently hostile world.

But combined with a clear abundance of items in the shops, these things can deceive the visitor into hardly noticing sanctions at all, at least in Baghdad.

It is only when I think back to the country I visited 10 years ago, in the first few weeks of the crisis, that I realise how much has changed, how much Iraqis have lost. There are beggars at the traffic lights, holes in the road, shabby and cracked concrete pillars at the Ministry of Information, and in the countryside, the pools of greenish black fetid water beside people's homes.

It would be nothing too surprising for a developing country, but this was not a developing country. It was a land with the same level of education and healthcare as Greece. Per capita income put it even higher.

Iraq may be the first country in history to have been forced, by the international community, back down the developmental ladder. And that is a tragedy, whoever we hold responsible.