‘I witnessed the birth of Isis’: how one film-maker captured the horror of Iraq

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.”