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It looked more and more real that this is it. It is happening. In fact, I had a to-do list that was almost impossible to achieve, of preparing for the war.

What did the list say?

[CHUCKLES]:: That list said, starting with grocery-shopping, canned food, grains, fuel, kerosene, up to digging an actual well in your garden.

Operation Iraqi Freedom. The attack came in waves cruise missiles, followed by the F-117 stealth bombers, with so-called bunker-busting bombs.

[EXPLOSIONS]

Its the night that everybody was anticipating. Weve had all these conversations. Were staying, were staying, were going to, you know, weather it. Were going to stay here our home, our resources, our network of people. Were not going anywhere.

Then, the siren kicks in. My sister started panicking. My mother seemed very scared. And here, I realized this is my very small window to actually take them out of this mess.

I decided, OK, all the food we got in the car. Everything we need in the car. IDs, documents, everything, all the cash we had in the car, immediately.

And then, we drove. Its about 180 kilometers west of Baghdad.

And we find a small apartment through my brother-in-laws contacts and family members. They secure an apartment for us, and we stay there. But I had two Great Dane dogs that I had to leave behind, with some food and some water, because they were too big to take with us in the car.

So I established a routine of driving back every other day to feed the dogs and refill the water. They were not even my dogs. They were my brothers dogs. And when he left the country, I was like, I am counting on you to look after them. And this is something in me, that I dont like to let people down.

I know that about you.

[ALI CHUCKLES]

I didnt know what was waiting for me. What am I heading into? What are the risks? Working with foreigners, that is, like, an immediate death sentence with certain groups, because youre looked at as the collaborator, the spy.

My family, of course, didnt want me to do it. They were like, no, no, screw it. No money, no nothing is worth it. Stay here with us and be safe. And that was just not me. I thought, I will be doing something more important by joining the media.

You thought you were going to be doing something more important than being a doctor by being with the media. What did that mean for you at that time? What was that important thing that you thought you were going to be doing?

I thought I would have a chance at actually telling the true story. Youve seen the fog of war. Theres so much blabbering going on, so many inaccuracies. And of course, truth gets buried in the process.

And let me tell you, from an Iraqi perspective. Because we were sitting, back then in Baghdad, listening to all the allegations of WMDs and ties to al-Qaeda and 9/11. And for us, this was a sad joke.

Because we knew that the Iraqi army didnt have a functioning tank, barely had a rifle that could fire a few bullets before exploding. And the ties to al-Qaeda give me a break. Saddam would never have allowed any other group to claim power or to seek power. And it was so frustrating for us as Iraqis yes, we wanted to get rid of Saddam, but not based on a false-flag operation like the invasion.

Let me ask you this. I have, literally, no recollection of when we first met. Do you have a do you know when we first met?

Yes, in a car, in a moving car. We stopped very quickly. You jumped in, in a very Lulu fashion.

And James introduced you. I

Was Yasser driving the car?

Yes, yes. Yasser was driving the car.

Yasser was the driver that we were very close to, and I still remember his laugh in my head someone we all loved very much. Can you, for people who may not understand, what was a typical day like for us?

I mean, I remember I would be dressed in my abaya, my robe. You would tell me to pretend I was mute, in case we got stomped. Because I look Iraqi, but I certainly dont sound Iraqi. I guess every day what I remember is that every day was very different.

Well, we dont really what is happening at the moment. All the press is assembled there, but they have not been led into the actual chamber where Saddam Hussein is tried. So we dont really know what

You would be meeting, maybe, a top official one day, and another day, youd be rushing towards a bombing.

Well, it was a double bombing. It happened near the center of town, near a bridge that leads to the green zone, which is the seat

Yes, a typical day in Iraq back then was anything but. There was nothing typical about it. But let me tell you about that abaya and the hijab. That was my favorite attire for you. [LULU LAUGHS]

And I always wished that in my head, I was like, can we just leave James behind, please, with his blond hair and blue eyes?

Well, do you remember when he dyed his hair black and he looked like Elvis? Yeah.

Uh, he did, and it made it actually even worse, because it looked comical and attracted more attention. It didnt look real. It looked so funny.

And we were doing that, of course, because if youre in a car, you just dont want to attract attention from anybody, and you want to look like you belong there. And having a foreigner in the car, of course, is a problem.

Yes. One thing that I may have not always conveyed perfectly, I would say, is how much people resented your presence in the country, how much people, literally, hated foreigners, because they associated them with the invasion. And when I say that, of course, youre aware of all the groups that targeted journalists, but Im telling you, even the closest people to me, even the people who are educated, the people who know that you are there just to do journalism even those people resented your existence.

But of course I always had to find the balance between keeping you safe and aware of your basically, situationally, aware, but also not to demoralize you by telling you how much people hated your existence.

It is very complicated and sometimes puts me at risk of being seen as the collaborator. And I would wake up in the morning. I would deliberately go to work different time of the day every day. I will take a different route, because we knew that some groups were watching.

So if someone spotted me or seen me with foreigners, then that is it. That is the end of it. And I remember a very funny now, its funny, it wasnt back then incident where one morning, I was leaving home, and I saw one of my neighbors who waved me down and [INAUDIBLE]..

And he goes, are you going to work? I instinctively said, yes, I am, because I was. And he goes, great. Because my son has an X-ray appointment at Baghdad hospital. I need to take him there. Can you please give us a ride?

Oh.

And of course, I wasnt heading there. Of course, I was heading to the media compound. So he jumps in the car, and we drive completely the opposite side of town. I drop him off. As soon as he leaves, I rush back to the office. Of course, James was sitting there, waiting, asking where the hell have I been. And that was the story of my life the double life I lived because of this job.

That must have been really, actually confusing.

Yeah, its its an identity crisis of some sort. And who am I, and how long will this last for? But remember, there was no clear

End in sight.

way out, yeah, of it.

Ali, I think about and thought about the risk to you a lot. And I think one of the moments where that really hit home was in the moments where you actually saved our lives. You know, James got kidnapped in Sadr City. Thats a Shiite area in Baghdad. It was overrun at the time by militia members.

How do you remember that day?

I was going to say, when you said, the moment you saved our lives, I was going to say, which one?

But that was part of my job, or my commitment, to be honest. And I remember that very clear.

We get stopped by two cars filled with gunmen, who jumped out. They started yelling and screaming and shouting at us, pointing their AK 47 towards us. We step outside the car, and I start hearing them saying, only the foreigner, [SPEAKING ARABIC] which means, foreigner, in Arabic.

And then, I realized that I had a choice to make. I can just let them take James, and here I am, safe and sound, and I can leave.

Or I can help James. Then in a split second, I realized James chances of survival were almost zero.

And without me helping translating, James would be clueless of what was going on. So I immediately started yelling, Im with him. Im with him. And they kept saying, just the foreigner.

I jumped into the kidnappers car. And I kept saying, Im with him, Im with him. Take me. Im with him. And I ended up sitting in Jamess lap, actually, because the car was so crowded. At least some fun funny moment in that not-so-funny situation.

And Yasser followed you in his car. He also

Yes.

put himself in harms way.

Absolutely. Yasser, instead of just driving away, as he was instructed he goes, no, no, no, no, Im also with them. Im coming. So I immediately started talking to them and reassuring them, Im just an ordinary Iraqi. And then, I tried to, basically, psychologically manipulate them into thinking Im on their side.

And after many hours, they eventually let you go. And I think the story about this, for me, is just how unbelievably brave you were. Did you think, like, why are these people here

Oh, trust me, I asked this question every day. Why are they here? Its so much nicer on the other side of the world. Just go away, go live your lives. You dont have to be here. And actually, that brings me to a question to you. Why were you there in the first place?

I mean, I dont know that I asked myself that question then. I think 20 years on, I ask myself that question a lot now. And Ive come up with a different answer now than I had then.

I would say I believe that we were really there to tell the story of this country, to make sure the real story got out, that when the government of America would say everything was going great, we were there to say that it was a catastrophe. I felt that it was, on balance, important.

And I was also willing to put my life on the line for that. But as you know, I ended up getting PTSD quite seriously. It started at these multiple bombings in Karbala very early on in the war, when I was in the crowd there, and all of a sudden, these suicide bombers started detonating their vests.

And there were so many people, that the bombs acted like meat grinders. And I remember running through the crowd and seeing these pools of blood and the chaos and the fear. And it broke something in me, and over the course of the war, that only got worse.

Did you have something like that at all?

Of course. If I didnt, then probably, theres something wrong with me. In fact, it is something that we Iraqis always joke about that if youre an Iraqi with no PTSD, there is something wrong with you. But maybe it manifested differently.

Because for you as a foreign journalist, when you come to Iraq, you know that youre leaving after, lets say, six weeks, eight weeks, or however long youre going to stay. For someone like me, this is where I am. This is where Im going to be.

And it is different. It is like that boiling frog effect, where you dont really sense the water boiling. You just keep adapting. But at a huge cost, though. Because this is not normal.

So it does break something in you, but differently. Because for you, you know that you can go out of it and seek, maybe, help. For someone like me, there is no way out. You have to deal with it.

But finally, something did happen, where you kind of broke. I never saw you as wrecked as when the assassination attempt happened in 2008. I wasnt there for that, but you were there with a colleague of mine, Ivan Watson.

NPRs Ivan Watson and a team from our Baghdad Bureau were reminded of that yesterday.

Residents say Rabia Street was once one of the prettiest places in Baghdad, a boulevard of boutiques

What happened on that day?

Yeah. That day started like any other day. We were reporting, ironically, on how the security situation in West Baghdad has been improving. And we were sitting with a restaurant owner, talking to him about how the situation is improving, and whether it is or not.

RPGs were everywhere in the street, and gunmen were everywhere, clashes, regularly.

Mojud invited us in for lunch.

And as we concluded our conversation and walked out, we hear people running and screaming at us, saying, stay back, car bomb. Car bomb.

Iraqi Army Lieutenant Mohammed

So we I remember, we hunkered down from just [INAUDIBLE] away from our our car.

[EXPLOSION]

[BLEEP]

And then, our own car explodes.

Its in our car!

Its our car. They put a sticky bomb in our car.

Wow.

Later on, we figured that apparently, what had happened is someone passed by our car and stuck what was called a magnet bomb back then

Sticky bomb.

A sticky bomb, yeah. Im sorry, sticky bomb. You can tell its been 20 years now.

Anyway, so they were trying to kill me and the rest of the crew, because we were foreigners. We were collaborators. We were considered the infidels.

And at that moment, I felt how real it was.

Later on, we went to the wreckage of the car. And I looked at my backpack. It was completely burnt. And the recording device that I left behind. And I was thinking, this was supposed to be me.

So in my head, I was like, when is it ever going to stop, though? And when is the time for me to say, this is it, Ive done my part? And that was, to me, the cutoff moment. I didnt want to be that boiling frog anymore.

This brings me to something, which is, during the worst of the civil war, I stopped going for quite a few months while I got treatment for PTSD.

Im wondering if you ever felt resentful that I could leave.

I was away when this happened. I wasnt there, because I didnt have to be. Even though I lived in Iraq and I worked in Iraq, I was able to go out when I wanted. Did that feel unfair? It must have felt unfair. It is unfair.

Unfair, yes. Maybe resentful is a big word. I would say I felt and specifically that time I remember I was on the phone with you after.

I remember.

And you were telling me, Im coming, Im coming. Im going to be there soon. And I, in my head in fact, you said, dont leave just yet, because I need to see you. I want to talk to you.

And I knew, deep in your heart, you wanted to make sure I was OK. Because like you said, we were friends. Were not just colleagues. But for the first time in my head, I was thinking, Lulu, you just dont get it. You dont get it.

Originally posted here:
Opinion | The Shameful Secret at the Heart of My War Reporting - The New York Times

Around 4 a.m. on March 21, 2003, U.S. soldiers and Marines crossed the border from Kuwait to Iraq, marking the start of a ground invasion that would reach Baghdad a little over two weeks later and ultimately destroy Saddam Husseins regime after 26 days of heavy fighting.

Two days later, U.S. troops began fighting a major battle in the southern Iraqi city of Nasiriyah, showing just how difficult the advance to Baghdad would be.

The U.S.-led military coalition that invaded Iraq had expected to face little resistance in southern Iraq, but instead, they encountered paramilitary forces including Fedayeen Saddam fighters that had been sent to southern Iraqi cities to buttress defenses, according to the first volume of the U.S. Armys history of the Iraq War.

At Samawah, Zubayr, and Nasiriyah, U.S. ground troops ran into tenacious resistance from the Fedayeen instead of the Iraqi Army units they had anticipated fighting, according to the official history.

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Nearly 6,000 Marines and sailors under Task Force Tarawa first entered Nasiriyah, on March 23, 2003, to capture two bridges on the eastern part of the city. The Marines were met with powerful and determined attacks from Iraqi paramilitary forces using pickup trucks with mounted machine guns, according to the Armys official history; and the battle for Nasiriyah quickly became a damned tough urban fight, said then Army Lt. Gen. David McKiernan, who commanded all U.S. and coalition ground forces during the invasion.

A total of 18 Marines were killed that day, including eight who died when Air Force A-10 Warthogs mistakenly attacked Marines.

Also on March 23, 2003, the Armys 507th Maintenance Company was ambushed in Nasiriyah. Eleven soldiers were killed and six taken prisoner including Pfc. Lori Piestewa, who later died. Of the remaining prisoners of war: Army Pfc. Jessica Lynch was rescued by special operations forces on April 1, 2003, and the other soldiers were liberated by Marines on April 13, 2003.

The Marine Corps Regimental Combat Team 1 had to pass through Nasiriyah on March 24 and 25, 2003. The units commander, Col. Joe Dowdy, was later relieved by then Maj. Gen. James Mattis, commander of the 1st Marine Division at the time, for not moving quickly enough.

Marine veteran John Hoellwarth said he remembers how Dowdy told his unit bluntly the night before it passed through Nasiriyah that they would take casualties in the coming battle for the city.

I remember being terrified that shit just got real, said Hoellwarth, who was a corporal with Regimental Combat Team 1 at the time.

The following day, Hoellworth was in the back of a Humvee with canvas doors as his unit pushed through Nasiriyah. He saw the bodies of enemy fighters in the citys streets as well as defensive positions that had been abandoned.

I remember the sound of bullets flying around as we made our way through the city, Hoellwarth told Task & Purpose. You can tell because they sound like popcorn. I dont know if you know this, but when someone is shooting at you, you can hear a little click in the air its like a miniature sound barrier being broken and thats the sound of bullets flying past you.

Donald Rumsfeld, who was defense secretary at the time, had not expected that U.S. troops would have to engage in so much close combat on the way to Baghdad, said Stephen Biddle, a professor of international and public affairs at Columbia University.

Rumsfeld and others who pushed the U.S. military to invest in transformational technology had expected that standoff weapons such as cruise missiles along with precision-guided munitions would be able to destroy the Iraqi militarys armored vehicles, artillery, and infantry formations, Biddle told Task & Purpose.

Instead, U.S. forces fought a series of intense pitched battles, including in Baghdad itself, showing the limits of what standoff weapons can accomplish, he said.

And so, the era of close combat clearly had not ended in 2003; and the experience in Ukraine is demonstrating that it hasnt ended as of 2023, Biddle said. That means that skills, equipment, and organizations you need to do close combat right remained important in 2003 and they remain important today.

While the conventional phase of the Iraq war in 2003 holds tactical and operational lessons that still apply today, the biggest lesson from the war is arguably that capturing an adversarys capital is not the same as victory, Biddle said.

Within weeks of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, Baghdad had fallen and Iraqi forces were more destroyed than the German army at the end of World War II, he said. But instead of ending, the war morphed into an insurgency that lasted for years.

Yet the U.S. military seems to still believe that the way to win wars is by destroying an enemys military, and that has shaped the U.S. governments approach toward Ukraine, Biddle said.

The war doesnt end until both sides decide to stop shooting, Biddle said. If one side decides to keep shooting, even if their conventional military has been driven from the field, the war doesnt end and it isnt yet clear whos going to win and whos going to lose. Thats just as true for Ukraine as it was for Afghanistan in 2001 and it was for Iraq in 2003.

Originally posted here:
How the Battle of Nasiriyah foreshadowed the long slog of the Iraq War - Task & Purpose

As I absorbed the strident commentary on just how gross a violation this was with which I agreed I couldnt outrun an obvious question: didnt we do that, too?

Russian President Vladimir Putin. AP

I dont mean to say these invasions are the same, as so many Putin apologists do. You could point to any number of differences, and Id agree with most of them. Iraq was a brutal dictatorship; Ukraine is a democracy, albeit a flawed one. A reasonable number of Iraqs majority Shiite population would have welcomed an invasion to remove Saddam Hussein, whereas even if you believe the claim Ukraines Russian-speaking citizens would rather be part of Russia, that doesnt explain why Putin started pounding Kyiv.

And the history is also incomparable. Russias invasion follows an era of Soviet dominance, in which most of Ukraine was forcibly incorporated into the Soviet empire, which then sought to crush Ukrainian nationalism and inflicted atrocities upon the Ukrainian people.

The nadir was surely Stalins Holodomor of 1932-33, in which the Soviets drastically cut back food rations to the very Ukrainians who had been growing that food. The result was a man-made famine that killed at least 3.5 million Ukrainians, and which the European Parliament officially recognises (with pro-Soviet objections) as a genocide deliberately targeting the Ukrainian people. Against that background, Putins invasion is especially chilling.

But the commonalities bear contemplation, too. Both invasions relied on a similar melange of dubious justifications. For Iraq, the claim that Saddams regime had weapons of mass destruction, as well as connections with terrorist organisations which made it a terrorist threat to the West all of which was quite predictably untrue.

Illustration by Andrew Dyson

For Ukraine, that it was seeking NATO membership, thereby continuing NATOs onward march to surround Russia, placing American forces on the Russian border and leaving Russia seriously under threat. Both, then, followed the logic of pre-emptive strike, in which a grave threat need only be asserted to justify invasion.

Then there were the human rights justifications. In Iraq, Saddams persecution of non-Sunnis, and especially the Shiites which was true. In Ukraine, an alleged genocide of ethnic Russians which was not. In both cases, though, these were never primary reasons for war. They were convenient narratives, invoked to add a veneer of legitimacy to illegitimate invasions.

Its 20 years ago this week that we embarked on our share of that illegitimacy. To our peoples credit, the Iraq war was never popular outside the United States, and youll no doubt remember the enormous rallies against it. Today, even most Americans think it was the wrong decision. But if were honest, while we might have this general sense the Iraq war was a blunder of sorts, we dont seem to regard it as an especially grave moment, if we pay any regard to it at all. If I had to summarise our attitude towards this invasion two decades on, it wouldnt be how could we? It would be whoops!

But its not a whoopsie to precipitate that many civilian deaths (estimates range from about 180,000 to a million, but we dont know because we never tried to count them). Its not a whoopsie to have handed Iraq over to Iranian influence, especially when you regard Iran as a serious foe. Its not a whoopsie to have promised a democratic utopia, but instead left behind a traumatised country, racked with corruption and sectarian bloodshed, and power blackouts with a third of the countrys people living in poverty. These are major failures, none of which could possibly have come as a surprise to anyone familiar with the tectonic plates on which Iraqi society is built.

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping speak of their great friendship and deepening political ties.

All this has thrown up some galling ironies. We went to war to disrupt a fictional association between Saddams Baathist regime and terrorist groups. Then those vanquished Baathists wound up in prison with terrorists, where they actually did forge an alliance we came to know as Islamic State. And so, our fictional threat became a real one.

But perhaps the most current irony is that the Iraq invasion took an axe to the rules-based order Western nations so frequently like to trumpet. So when Putin decided to nick Crimea and then finally invade Ukraine, there was little left of the rules we might have invoked to restrain him. Putin even facetiously referred to weapons of mass destruction in Ukraine.

Would Putin have invaded in any case? Quite possibly. But its a counterfactual scenario in which our objections couldnt so easily be dismissed as hypocrisy. And its also a scenario in which the threat of American power might have been more real. The disaster in Iraq has made America uncharacteristically gun-shy: a fact which showed up most starkly when Barack Obama declared Syrias Assad regime had crossed a red line in using chemical weapons, then promptly proceeded to do nothing about it. If it will sit idle over that, Putin could be sure it would have no real response to him taking Crimea.

Thats the final commonality these invasions share. They began as demonstrations of the invaders military might, but instead exposed the limits of their power. Both assumed victory would be swift, then found themselves ensnared.

Putin apparently figured hed take Kyiv in a few days, has manifestly failed, and may never win the war. George W. Bush famously stood before a Mission Accomplished banner a mere six weeks after he unleashed Shock and Awe, only to see American troops stuck in Iraq for another eight years, sustaining 97 per cent of their casualties after this moment.

Power, it seems, can be blinding. If its possible Putin took the opportunity Iraq opened for him, its certainly true he never fully learnt its lessons. Meanwhile, we seem to have forgotten just how much weve taught him.

The Opinion newsletter is a weekly wrap of views that will challenge, champion and inform your own. .

Here is the original post:
Putins war has uncomfortable parallels with our invasion of Iraq - Sydney Morning Herald

By Dominic Waghorn, International Affairs Editor @DominicWaghorn

Monday 20 March 2023 10:03, UK

At the turn of the century, America had emerged victorious from the Cold War and stood unchallenged.

It had greater power and influence than any other nation in history. It could have wielded that power judiciously to protect the American-led post-war world order and inspire other countries to follow its values of freedom and democracy.

Instead, it squandered that supremacy embarking on a calamitous misadventure in Iraq that was ill-advised and disastrously executed. It would be the beginning of the end of the pax Americana.

A direct line can be drawn between that debacle, which began on 20 March 2003 and others that followed, right up to the perilous state of the world today.

The war in Ukraine, the unchecked ascendancy of China, the growing power of Iran, and even the rise of Trump and the politics of populism all have roots that can be traced back to America's folly in Iraq.

The falsehoods and delusions that led to war

America went to war led by ideologues who believed they could refashion the Middle East in their own likeness and bring democracy and a more pro-Western outlook to the region.

The failure of that neoconservative project has done lasting damage to Americans' claims of exceptionalism, and their belief that their form of governance is an example to the rest of the world. And that has by extension done enduring harm to the American-led world order.

The failings of that project in Iraq are well documented. The false premise of non-existent weapons of mass destruction, the delusion that invaders would be welcomed as liberators, the absence of any plan for the day after. The damage to America's standing in the world has been incalculable.

Equally, human rights violations, violations of democratic norms, targeted killings, and the atrocities of Abu Ghraib prison, from where photographs showing abuse of inmates by US soldiers emerged, tarnished America's image as the standard-bearer of democracy and human rights.

Iraq fell apart under occupation. The US disbanded the Ba'ath party and sents its army home. In the vacuum sectarian extremists thrived. The war had been fought to neutralise the threat posed by Al Qaeda in the wake of 9/11.

The opposite happened and even more extreme groups were spawned launching unprecedented campaigns of terror against occupiers and civilians alike. From the failed states of Iraq and Syria, Islamic State was born - an organisation that for years wrenched swathes of territory from both countries and plumbed new depths of terror and depravity.

For America, the enduring impact of the war and occupation has been a weakening of Washington's influence in the world. When India and other countries in the global south sit on the fence in UN resolutions on Ukraine, their ambivalence can in part be traced back to America's record in Iraq.

Read more on Sky News:Unfazed by arrest warrant, Putin's Ukraine trip is all for camerasPolice file terrorism charges against Imran Khan and supporters

A lasting impact on US foreign policy

The failure undermined America's own self-confidence. The spectre of Iraq made Barack Obama reluctant to be drawn into the Syria conflict and punish its leader's diabolical use of chemical weapons.

That reluctance was seen in Moscow as an American weakness, and arguably emboldened it to defy the West and seize Crimea with relative impunity a few years later. And that in turn encouraged Vladimir Putin to invade Ukraine in earnest last year.

The distraction of Iraq led to failure in Afghanistan, a protracted two decades of occupation and a disastrous withdrawal.

This is a limited version of the story so unfortunately this content is not available. Open the full version

Iraq sucked up what policymakers in Washington call bandwidth year after year, while in the east a far greater challenge was rising. The West would take years to wake up to the threat posed by China.

Closer to Iraq, Iran was strengthened. Before the invasion, its regional influence was limited to a militia in southern Lebanon, Hezbollah. Today it has clout in capitals from Beirut to Damascus to Baghdad to Yemen.

The war in Iraq has done damage to America's belief in itself. The conflict cost a trillion dollars and thousands of American lives. It has fuelled opposition to any more military adventures abroad.

And it has undermined Americans' faith in both government and the political and media elites meant to hold it to account. That only in part helps explain the rise of populism that ultimately brought Trump to the White House.

Iraq still recovering from journey to hell and back

In Iraq, people are now no longer living under tyranny. There is reportedly some sense of hope and renewal, but only recently. And the country has literally been to hell and back to get there.

Hundreds of thousands have died in the war and the waves of sectarian violence that followed. The country has been broken, its institutions destroyed and its economy ravaged.

It is only just beginning to recover from all that trauma. But perhaps it can now look forward cautiously to a slightly better future. That is more than might have been said had Saddam Hussein remained in power or any of his impulsive, venal sons.

Ten years ago, George W Bush said the final verdict on his actions in Iraq would come long after his death.

That may be true, and it may take more time to judge whether the removal of one of the worst tyrants in history in any way justified the enormous cost and pain that then ensued.

Twenty years on, though, we can say the invasion and occupation have had a lasting legacy on the region and the world, and much of that has not been for the better.

Read more:
Iraq War 20 years on: How Ukraine conflict, growing power of Iran and rise of Trump can be traced back to 2003 invasion - Sky News

Berlin, Germany It was snowing and the roads were empty on an early Saturday. The dread was, is it really him? Will he agree to speak?

We arrived at his apartment and were greeted by a friend who took us up. He introduces himself in smart attire. Meet Ali Shallal al-Qaysi, the man under the hood of the torture photos from the infamous Abu Ghraib prison.

He takes me to the kitchen and whispers as we set up for the TV interview in the other room some details are too gruesome and painful to recount. I assure him, it is his story and I will listen to what he has to tell us. What ensues in the next couple of hours is not for the faint-hearted. His stories paint a horrific picture of inhumane abuse, humiliation, torture and sadistic behaviour.

I was standing on the box. It is so strong, not breakable. They tied wires and started electrical shocks. I remember biting my tongue, my eyes felt they were about to pop out. I started bleeding from under the mask and I fell down, says Ali.

Despite his hand losing complete function because of the torture, Ali likes to paint in his spare time. His apartment is full of canvases. One stands out a hood, orange jumpsuit, and handcuffs with 151716 painted on it, Alis prisoner number. He says they wrote Big Fish with a marker on his forehead, a common practice of marking high-profile prisoners.

Without prison records, we cannot verify he is the man under the hood. But with testimony from two decades ago, his deformed hand that earned him the nickname the claw, his photos, court cases, and interviews with former prison officials and lawyers, it is clear Ali was among the victims at Abu Ghraib.

Ali was kept for months, between 2003 and 2004, at the prison. At one point after his torture, he says, he lost track of time for weeks as he was left in the tents where prisoners were held.

Abu Ghraib was feared from the time of Saddam Hussein, who built torture chambers there. After the 2003 US-led invasion, US contractors built more cells equipped with deadbolts.

Now-demoted, General Janis Karpinski was commander of Abu Ghraib prison when the abuse scandal erupted. She told Al Jazeera she was unaware of the torture between May and September 2003 when she was in charge of the prison.

There was a central wing which served as the cafeteria. On the left were cell blocks 1A and B, 2A and B and on the right, the last building which was not damaged in the [air] strikes. This became a top-secret place. The last cell block was where Pappas [Colonel Thomas Pappas, who was in charge of Abu Ghraib prisons intelligence unit] had his satellites and his men were stationed. They had a direct line to [Defense Secretary Donald] Rumsfeld there. They did interrogations there. Females were kept over at the airport facility. There may have been a few in Abu Ghraib, says Karpinski.

Ali wells up when he describes the screams of women kept on the other side of his cell block. Women were put on the sector to our left on the second floor. We heard their cries. The guards used to get a male detainee to serve them food but on one condition, he should serve them food while he is fully naked. We were all kept naked by the way. We used to hear their screams, there was a guy called Fredrik who used to harm them.

Ali broke down at this point, sobbing. We could not help them, we could not do anything for them. Some of us were banging heads against the wall, we do not want this to happen again and again. Occupation is the worst shape of terrorism, crushes the dignity of people and destroys countries. It was not easy to hear these women cry. They did nothing, they were brought as hostages. When [the Americans] carry out a raid against a former regime official or a nuclear scientist and fail to detain the wanted man, they brought women as hostages.

We heard them crying and screaming what they have been going through. I have witnessed a horrible scene a man had his wife raped before his eyes.

Human rights groups have documented beatings, prolonged sleep and sensory depravation, and detainees being held naked and tortured.

The images taken and released by an American soldier shocked the world with their sheer brutality. The most explicit photographs depict nudity, degradation, simulated sex acts, and American guards posing with decaying corpses. After an international outcry, 11 US soldiers were convicted, but others were reprimanded without any charges.

Abu Ghraib, Camp Bucca and other torture sites lowered the bar for adherence to the Geneva Conventions and other international obligations to treat prisoners humanely, says Letta Tayler from Human Rights Watch.

Ironically, one of the many flimsy justifications made by President George W Bush to invade Iraq was that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein would aid terrorists.Yet it was the US-led invasion that created a security vacuum and fueled grievances that enabled the rise of al-Qaeda in Iraq, which morphed into ISIS [ISIL], prompting yet more cycles of violence.

All US presidents since George W Bush, who started the Iraq war, have refused to prosecute any of the architects of the war crimes committed during the Iraq war. For example, no ranking official has been prosecuted for the horrors inflicted on detainees at Abu Ghraib, only lower-level military personnel who in most cases received negligible sentences. Most civilians never received any funding or other amends for deaths, injuries, or property damage by US forces, much less apologies.

Ali says the pictures only reflect a fraction of the abuse that took place after the invasion.

Abu Ghraib prison was one out of 75 other sites used as detention centres with these violations. What kind of human being can do such things? To force people to be naked, sexually humiliated, inserting broken wood sticks in sensitive parts until they bleed, electric shock to genitals. I remember one man he died before our eyes while he was tortured. They were sadists.

Ali says he has dedicated his life to seeking justice from the architects of the abuse. His lawyer Andreas Schller works for the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR).

Its a very clear-cut case of torture in prison under the military occupation by the US, but on the other hand you can also show the chain of command in setting up the prison system, the mistreatment of prisoners in Iraq by the US military. And this goes all up to Donald Rumsfeld, Schller says.

Alis lawyers say German authorities should have done much more since the case was filed in 2015. ECCHR requested the prosecutor to secure evidence and take testimonies of survivors and experts. Schller says German federal prosecutors have not pursued Alis case as they did previous ones.

There are political reasons not to do that, to go against an ally against the United States. Even 20 years after the invasion of Iraq, its a constant topic. You saw it in 2003 with the US-UK-led invasion of Iraq and now see it with Russia in Ukraine. And as long as its not punished, the risk is that we see it again in different constellations, says Schller.

Back in Alis apartment, I asked, Why did they call you the claw at Abu Ghraib?

This happened when they hanged me on the wall. Because of the weight of my body, the handcuff was piercing my hand. The wound was almost rotten, he says.

So were the hangings and electrocutions the worst of the torture?

Another way of torture was music. It is worse than physical torture. They force you [to] lie on your stomach on the ground, all tied up. And they bring big speakers thumping with an unbearably loud noise placed on either side of your head. I remember the song they played called Babylon, Babylon, even when they turned off the speakers, it kept ringing in my ears.

Alis ordeal ended when he was taken in a truck and released on a highway away from Abu Ghraib with dozens of other prisoners. He was never charged with a crime.

As he waits for justice, Ali refuses to let the world forget his story. He says his worst nightmare is if people do not remember and it happens again to others in another war.

Although his lawyer is not hopeful that Ali will see justice in his lifetime, he is adamant to carry on.

I think even after 1,000 years, our great grandsons will receive our rights. The world is changing and people who were tortured in Vietnam and other places, they are getting their rights Even for those who were tortured by the Nazis or by Stalin, Hitler and others, now they are getting their rights, says Ali.

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Abu Ghraib survivor: Taking the hood off 20 years after Iraq war - Al Jazeera English