(2007; Arabic) In April 2003, journalists/filmmakers Steve Connors and Molly Bingham witnessed and reported on the initial hostile resistance to the American/coalition occupation of Iraq from Adhamiya. Along with courageous Iraqi colleagues, they spent ten months interviewing Shi'ites, Sunnis, and Arab foreigners participating in the resistance.

Using indirect camera angles, silhouettes, and blurred images to protect the identities of those speaking, the documentarians (without offering counterpoint) present the views of a teacher (shamed at seeing foreigners rather than Iraqis fighting occupiers), a warrior (suicide officer), a traveler (previously fought with PLO), a local (motivated by religion), a professor (studying the resistance's motivations), a fedayeen lieutenant (formed a group from former battalion), a Republican Guard (suspicious of Shias), a Syrian (on Jihad), a fugitive (trained to fire RPG), a wife (women can hide messages and weapons inside their abayas), and an imam (for martyrs the sting of death is no more than that of a mosquito, rewarded with 72 virgins in paradise).

They speak of the US soldiers as occupiers who have subjugated the people of Iraq. Anyone who has honor, they say, cannot allow others to occupy their nation. To struggle is God's will: "God is our inspiration."

They claim to be self-funded, though admitting that outsiders also make contributions to their cause. Lessons have been learned from studying Hamas's resistance against the Israelis and the Irish against the British. The defenders of the homeland attack Americans and then run away; afterward the Americans indiscriminately shoot at civilians. Martyrs desire death more than anything else because a martyr's "heart is dead." The bomb makers with taped fingertips constructed IEDs. Scouts seek targets: US military occupiers and their collaborators, including informers, translators, and police.

The purpose of the imam in the mosque is to gather Muslims together and provide them with moral support. Jihad may be passive or aggressive, but when one's homeland has been invaded, one has a personal obligation to fight back, because the homeland is more precious than one's family or even one's soul. From individual acts the resistance has grown into a vital, viral force, developing bigger ambitions with better organization, including strategic command: "our playground … our own terms."

When the Americans captured Saddam Hussein ("Ladies and gentlemen, we got him," announced Paul Bremer in December 2003), humiliating him by showing a video of him with long hair and beard, this angered Sunnis, followed by the despicable photographs from Abu Ghraib, making claims of torture (e.g., a man inside an electric cage attacked by dogs) sound credible.

The professor says that 85% of the resistance is a popular, nationalistic reaction to the US occupation; those motivated by religious fervor are a much smaller faction. A serious mistake on the part of the Americans, says the academic, was listening to the Iraqi exiles before and after the invasion.

At least some of what they say is obviously self-serving, propagandistic, and outright false, especially the attempts to deny that Sunni Muslims would set off a bomb to kill Shia Muslims at a shrine on a holy festival in March 2004. Several argue that because Sunnis have long lived amongst Shias in the same neighborhoods and have intermarried, civil war is not possible among Iraqis.

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Copyright © 2008 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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