Once Upon a Time in Iraq

DISCO MUSIC PLAYS

I'm an Iraqi, I was born and raised in Iraq.

It is a big-time culture shock.

Different lifestyle.

Completely different lifestyle.

Life in America, man, it just...it's beautiful.

When they started the war, 2003,

they want people to be a translator with the special forces.

I was like, "I'm in."

We go kick doors,

looking for anything that lead us

to the capture of Saddam.

I hated him, I hated the regime.

This man destroyed the country.

This man hurt me and hurt my family.

A lot of people ask me, like, "How come you?"

"How come you the one?"

I just...was there in the right time

with the right people in the right place.

In this series, the story of the Iraq War

is told by civilians, journalists and soldiers...

..who lived through the 2003 invasion

and the years of chaos that continue to this day.

We set up the perfect conditions,

it's the perfect storm for an insurgency.

The invasion basically radicalised the whole society.

It forced people to religious extremes.

That, to me, was always one of the great ironies.

How are you doing?

This one, we're asking 2,500 down and total price 6,900.

Samir grew up in southern Iraq,

but he was forced to leave when he was 22 years old,

because he'd taken part in a huge uprising

by Shia Muslims against the regime.

CHANTING

The rebellion ended

when Saddam used his army

to massacre over 80,000 of his own people.

And hundreds of thousands more had to flee their homes.

This is in Nasiriyah, my city.

That's the reason we left, quick.

You rather to die than get captured by these guys.

I have a lot of friends that are missing.

They didn't find their bodies.

ECHOING GUNFIRE, SHOUTING

Hmm.

HE SIGHS HEAVILY

Sometimes it feels like yesterday it happened, you know, just...

Yeah.

We were hoping one day a miracle was going to happen

that take Saddam away from power.

And I just want to be part of the operation,

to go and fight, to help free my own people.

I just want...

..revenge.

Here, I'm going to show you this appreciation letter

that I got from the military.

This is back in 2004, I met President Bush.

People, when they see these pictures,

they get so excited.

They always like to...

..hear the story.

They like what I did.

I wanted to be part of history in some way,

and I thought that working at the CIA would, uh, enable me to do that.

A-And I was right.

John Nixon was a senior analyst for the CIA

during the Bush administration.

He'd studied Saddam for years

and volunteered to go to Iraq soon after the war began.

In your own time, John.

Oh, I'm sorry, oh!

I thought you were mulling over what you were going to say. Oh, no.

From my experience working as a CIA analyst,

I've come to the conclusion

that all the best analysts have a bit of the obsessive in them.

Friend Of The Devil by The Grateful Dead

This is Apollo-Saturn launch control.

When I was young, I became fascinated by space exploration.

I knew all the names, I knew all the dates.

I even knew the Russian missions.

I wanted to be an astronaut.

It's very pretty out here!

After astronauts, it then became sporting teams,

like hockey and baseball and football.

And then after that, I became kind of obsessed

with popular music, like the Grateful Dead.

And then, when Saddam invaded Kuwait...

..I had kind of an obsession with him.

Colourful stories about his family.

There are all sorts of petty jealousies and hatreds.

It's like The Simpsons with guns.

# A friend of the devil is a friend of mine

# If I get home before daylight

# I just might get some sleep tonight... #

He was such a big part of my life.

We would spend hours every day talking about what he was up to -

for years and years and years.

He was becoming my new Neil Armstrong, you know?

We used to watch videotape of him all the time.

Oh, this is a GREAT clip!

One of the turning points in his rule

is the famous Ba'ath Party conference.

He basically assumes the presidency,

and there are a lot of people who don't like that,

and so he held this party conference to kind of get everybody in one room

under the pretext of having a very important statement.

He says, "There's been a plot," and he starts reading out

names of people he deems disloyal.

And, suddenly, everybody gets very nervous.

APPLAUSE

And at one point he even gets to a name,

and he says, "Mohammed..."

And then he pauses, and he says, "No, no,"

and he crosses that out, so everybody in the auditorium

who's named Mohammed is like, "Oh, thank God!" You know?

But he subsequently has these people arrested,

imprisoned and then executed.

It's political theatre, and that wasn't lost on him.

He sees a name, and he wipes tears away.

He's showing that he is doing this

not because he's bloodthirsty or ruthless,

but he has to do this for the good of the country.

I mean, he was making a point, that "I have the power now,

"and you're all going to sit here until I let you go.

"And some of you are not going to survive,

"and it's me making that decision."

And I have to be honest with you,

I thought that maybe if we do remove him from power,

we can create a better situation for Iraqis and we can help them.

And, you know, I look back

on those ideas that I had, and I think they're incredibly naive.

But, at the time, I supported what George Bush was doing.

I still had hopes that we could turn this thing around,

and catching Saddam was a very important part of that hope.

We acted quickly on the intelligence,

but it looks like we probably missed him by about 24 hours.

We were getting a lot of pressure from Washington

to find Saddam Hussein.

And hundreds of people are involved in this.

But it was just very difficult,

because the Iraqis know that the CIA is in Baghdad,

and they also know that they're paying money for information.

I am today announcing a $25 million reward

for information leading to the capture of Saddam Hussein.

And so there's a lot of reporting coming in, and most of it's...

most of it's garbage.

The one that I always thought was the funniest

was that he was dressed as a woman and hiding in a Baghdad bus station.

It's the hardest place

I've ever tried to cover

as a journalist, because it was so complicated.

It was changing so fast.

But I thought,

partly for that reason,

because it was a place that was constantly changing,

that...

..the thing could work. I felt that way for a long time.

Dexter Filkins covered the Iraq War

for the New York Times from 2003 until 2010.

HELICOPTER OVERHEAD

You may NEED that helicopter sound!

HELICOPTER APPROACHES

CAR ALARM BLARES

There was this whole theory at the time

that Saddam had always planned it this way.

That he knew that his army would not be able to resist the Americans,

and so he had essentially... planned for a guerrilla campaign.

And...that he is, in fact, actually,

not just the inspiration for the insurgency,

but he's actually running it.

And so the idea was, if we could capture Saddam,

then the insurgency would die.

US soldiers taking part in another predawn raid.

Their target - one of Saddam Hussein's bodyguards,

a man the US hopes could lead them to Saddam himself.

We killed his son in a firefight

right down here and around the corner.

They had launched RPGs - they were heavily armed.

We raided so many places.

Every time we get there, it's going to be a little bit late.

These guys are moving around.

We bring people in, they give us more information,

and we move to the next.

Ultimately, special forces were looking for a guy

named Mohammed Ibrahim Omar al-Muslit.

He was the chief bodyguard protecting Saddam.

This is the bodyguard, he's supposed to know where Saddam is.

The forces, at this moment, they're raiding the farm,

they're breaking doors, kicking doors.

All that screaming, guys screaming, yelling, all that.

They searched the farm - nothing.

I was like, "Mohammed, right now, where is Saddam?"

He was like, "It's OK, it's OK, he's inside the bunker."

I was like, "Where is the bunker?"

He's like, "The bunker you guys stand on."

We start looking, it was like, "Really?"

"How do you get to the bunker?"

And he started doing this with his feet.

Then he just...