Once Upon a Time in Iraq, review: Anger and sadness as Iraqis tell the story of their nation

Think of Iraq and stand-up comedy doesn’t immediately spring to mind. Although, really, how many of us think of Iraq at all these days? In 2003 there was the war, the shock and awe, the weapons of mass destruction that never were. Saddam Hussein was the bogeyman – no complaints about the toppling of that particular statue – and then he was gone, with President Bush promising the Iraqis: “A long era of fear and cruelty is ending.” He did not add: to be replaced with another era of misery and chaos.

Once Upon a Time in Iraq (BBC Two) told the story of the war and its aftermath through the people who were there. That’s where the comedian came in. In all the news coverage of foreign conflicts, civilians are the wretched backdrop, wailing as their homes are destroyed or their children buried. But here, Iraqis were given time and space to speak. They were smart, articulate, given to moments of dry humour. Film-maker James Bluemel chose his subjects wisely; they were people just like you and I, was his message, with the misfortune to be born there and not here.

Ahmed Albasheer, now a famous comic, grew up playing Backstreet Boys songs on his cassette player. Another contributor, Waleed Neysif, was in Iraq’s only heavy metal band in 2003 and laughed as he recalled Baghdad opening a knock-off McDonald’s. He scoffed at the West’s wrong-headed view of Iraqis: “‘They hate our freedom and our democracy.’ No, we actually love it. We frickin’ love it. That’s all we wanted.”

But while Baghdad was liberal in many ways, it was ruled by terror. As a young child, Albasheer saw the smiling face of Saddam plastered everywhere and thought he was some kindly grandfather figure. “And then at 11 or 12 I realised that, no, he’s the president of the country and I have to never say anything bad about him or I’ll be killed.” Neysif’s band had to include a grovellingly pro-Saddam song in their set in case the secret police were in the audience. “Everything was pro-Saddam. There was no such thing as not pro-Saddam.”

Neysif welcomed the war. “I was excited. It’s almost the end. Let’s push through, get this thing done and better things will come. The land of dreams.” He went on to work as a translator for the media after the Americans rolled into town, and we saw him accompany a Bedouin man to the place in the desert where his home and family had once been, before they were obliterated by the guns of US Apache helicopters. The man scrabbled through the sand for evidence of his family: a shoe, a child’s doll, a 12-year-old boy’s geography book. Deaths meted out by the same force handing out sweets to kids on the streets of Baghdad. “The truth started coming out and the myth that we were sold unravelled itself into this nightmare we all knew now we were stuck in,” Neysif said.

There were other voices: a mustachioed Saddam loyalist, interviewed beneath a portrait of the former leader. “It is the instinct of every proud and patriotic Iraqi to resist all invaders... I miss him every moment of every day. I even see him in my dreams.”

Rudy Reyes, a former US “Recon” Marine, was such a theatrical character that he verged on parody: dressed in sleeveless camouflage gear, swigging from a bottle of tequila, describing his special unit as “the Jedi of the Marine Corps”. (It was no surprise to learn that he is a TV veteran, appearing as himself in HBO drama Generation Kill).

Yet these were the men, who studied ballistics by watching slow-motion videos of heads being blown apart, spearheading the invasion. Reyes had “a hard time remembering” some incidents, but recounted one all the same: killing carloads of grandparents and parents and children who drove through a checkpoint, only later realising that the occupants had been unable to read the sign telling them to turn back. “I feel sad for them but that is the profession,” said Reyes.

This was deceptively simple film-making: sit people down, get them to tell their stories on camera, intercut with archive footage. But it is a feat to distill a war into a handful of voices and produce something as clear as this, to convey the tragedy of a nation released from a tyrant only to find themselves trapped in a new nightmare, with Isil filling the vacuum. Neysif put it succinctly when he explained that Saddam’s tyranny had created a kind of security in Iraq: “From everything else, not from him.” There was anger here, but the film – the first of five – was also suffused with a terrible sadness.