WAR TOURIST SCRIPT

You want to go to a war zone…

You want to feel the rush of bullets whizzing by,

You want to see combat. Destruction. Death.

You want to understand the darkness that lives in the hearts of evil men.

If you can understand that, then maybe it will all make sense…

That’s me, the one in the grey shirt

I’m a filmmaker and a rookie war journalist.

I was drawn to Mosul for the same reason you are,
To get a grip on this war...and to peer into this side of human nature.

Throughout this journey

 I will be embedded with several Iraqi military units 

as I snake my way into the combat zone 

before ending up face to face with The Dark Army…

known as ISIS...

 This is the east. 

Whole neighborhoods burnt, wrecked, and covered in bullet holes.

Mortars still land on these streets and yesterday

a suicide bomber blew up a restaurant.

The floors are scattered with brass and the smell of burning cars still lingers in the dusty air.

But it’s quiet… and even the children are measured.

This landscape is more than the aftermath of battle.

Every inch of it is tattooed with black memories...

And though this place doesn’t talk to you or me, 

I can see the haunted look survivors walk with.

There are checkpoints everywhere.

Trust, is not a common currency anymore…

And everyone's a suspect. 

These buildings were a hospital. Its destroyed. And booby-trapped.

It hides an underground network of tunnels the Dark army used to smuggle weapons, women and children.

It’s only been a month since ISIS fighters were here. 

They used human slaves to dig the tunnels.   

The whole city has been carved from the inside out like some carcass scavenged by vultures, 

with its bones laid bare.

Family men were forced to work and die in this inferno, digging their own graves. 

Those who didn’t die from exhaustion were shot on the spot and made an example of.

You can STILL smell the sweat. The urine. You can feel the anguish of those who toiled here….

This is East Mosul’s most dangerous neighborhood. Its called Sumar. These soldiers patrol it everyday. 

Walking through here as a foreigner could land you in a room somewhere kidnapped with a black sack over your head.

The dark army walks invisibly among the crowds.

Sometimes the secret police arrest suspects.

Some neighbors have turned on each other.

Sometimes the soldiers will get an anonymous tip. 

No one forgets a sympathizer...

Raids are routinely carried out and ISIS cells

Are busted in unlikely households.

This place was hell on earth a month ago

…a trimmed beard and the wrong haircut could have landed you public lashings.

Women were beaten for not covering their hands.

Anything that helped people relax or escape the horror was banned.

 No booze, no sex, no smokes...

No escape.

This was once a house of learning….it was perverted, and turned into a bomb making site. 

It's hard to be here. 

Tens of thousands of students left without a place to learn.

Whatever ISIS didn’t torch or dynamite the coalition forces bombed.

The is professor Firas. A PHD in Forestry and agriculture. He grew up here, went to school here and taught at the university. He comes every day to clean up.

A big part of me wants to leave at this point. It's not my war. 

The professor’s story has made the human cost of this conflict all too real for me.

But I feel like I have to get closer to the enemy. 

Without that, I walk among ghosts.

Though mortars and suicide bombers make it to the east...the ISIS is now in the west.  

If you follow these roads far enough, I've been told, you end up in the heart of darkness.

Over the next three days, Gharib, my translator and local producer, will take me there. 

We will start on the outskirts and work our way into the thick of it.

As you get closer to the combat zone, you come across hanging corpses like these. 

This was an ISIS militant and moments ago a grandmother and a group of children stopped by to throw rocks at him. This is the first time i’ve seen a corpse...and the first time i’ve seen an ISIS soldier. 

When villages are cleared by Iraqi forces, the soldiers occupy them.

They turn old homes into bases and wait.

If you want to get into the bowels of the city, they are your only ticket in. 

This is it: the WILD WEST. The frontlines. Beyond this point the city is like a maze. Its boobytrapped and unpredictable. The buildings are packed with civilians,

the rooftops are littered with snipers. It smells like burnt plastic, gunpowder and smoke. 

This is where the world ends and these are my guides to the underworld.

 These are the feds, their media department takes journalists in and out of some of the most dangerous spots. They have promised to take me on a raid of an enemy building meters from no man’s land. 

You are now in the line of fire. Across those curtains to your right is a sniper pointing straight through you. The curtains hide you, but it's a game of chance...and any movement can be a dead giveaway.

The feds are taking us alongside a group of local journalists on a tour of a recently cleared building. They clear these buildings one by one and replace ISIS snipers with their own. 

Dark concrete rooms like these are  where many soldiers lose their lives...

That was a bullet from an ISIS sniper. Keep your eye on the hole in front of him...

If he had been shot, this would have been a different story, 

Our cameras would have been confiscated, and the show would have been over.

Seeing the contact from enemy fire, brings that other side to life.

If we were to trace the bullet back to where it came,

we would come face to face with a man.

BUT

Everyone involved in this war has media departments...the Iraqis, the Americans, the coalition forces...ISIS… 

And this is how they control what stories come out of Mosul.
They take journalists into areas where they will be completely insulated,
where their experiences can be guided and their questions answered in a way that tows the company line. 

This is the part of war we are supposed to see. 

But this tour isn’t the truth. This is a movie version.

Its meant to keep you focused on the weapons,

Not what’s on the other side.

I’m supposed to go back home and talk about the cowardice of a dark and brutal army…
i’ve learned to hate men who I don’t know, who I haven’t met or understood.

It's hard for me to look past the horror stories, 

I know they behead journalists and rape women.

But after watching how tightly journalists are controlled,

I have the sense that the Federal Police were performing for the cameras,

That this experience was a simulation sold as the real thing,

And that real combat lives in a much grayer moral world.

It was supposed to be over… this tour.

The media squad escorted us to a checkpoint on the outskirts of town so we could pick up our cars and go home.

But before we could leave, 

Something went wrong

I knew they had lost control.

There is some talk that ISIS has infiltrated liberated territory by sneaking past a checkpoint. 

They might be hiding somewhere in the field, but no one is exactly sure where.

LOOK BEHIND YOU. That’s RUDAW, a local news station.  The older man in the black vest is a photographer from the french associated press and that's us, following behind.

 A suicide bomber. Later we would hear that several ISIS militants had murdered Iraqi soldiers at a checkpoint and snuck in with stolen uniforms. This was one of those men.

We were twenty feet back.

The explosion resonates deep inside your chest. Time slows down. You feel violated...connected. I can’t explain what I felt about him at that moment…

I know he was there to kill us yet

He communicated his desperation in a very primal way,

By painting his enemies with his own blood. 

I try to imagine his family, how they received the news.

The personal belongings he might have left behind,

His last thought.

What could have driven a man to do this?

 There will be many narratives about this incident in the coming days…

Though we kept a copy,

The media squad will show up, confiscate our footage and use it for their own propaganda.

The Daily Mail and the Independent will repost that footage. ISIS will later do the same…

This image will help make soldiers and martyrs out of boys,

Age old human narratives of courage, cowardice, AND  sacrifice...will be spun from both sides.

This is the way war is sold, copied, and reprinted.

 This is how consciousness is infiltrated.

This is how people become HYPNOTIZED.. And militarized.

These images are weapons too. 

But if you focus on the weapon, you can’t understand what’s on the other side…

Locals will tell you that the battle for Mosul is over.

But they will also say that this war, has no end in sight.

Cities turned to rubble, sacred places desecrated, whole generations displaced. 

There are many types of victims here...

many types soldiers. 

But you and me, we’re tourists. War tourists.

You want to go to a war zone

You want to feel the rush of bullets whizzing by,

You want to see combat. Destruction. Death.

You want to understand the darkness that lives in the hearts of evil men.

If you can understand that, then maybe it will all make sense…

maybe...

LAST DAYS IN MOSUL

 The sun was rising and the skies were blood red as intermittent clouds of smoke sailed across its face. Flies spun around my saccharine tea as Ghareeb, our twenty eight year old fixer, planned out a route into enemy territory with the driver. Less than three months ago the marketplace where we sat had been under ISIS control, and though some had supported the regime of terror, places like these would have held public lashings and executions. Now Mosul was a city with two faces. Newspapers across the world announced that the city had been liberated, but locals still suffered improvised suicide bombers, sleeper cells and nightly terror raids. Minutes ago the secret police had chased an ISIS soldier past our table and through the labyrinthine tunnels of the market after uncovering a sleeper cell behind a spice bazaar. 

The plan was simple. After crossing the last checkpoint, we would drive through the back streets past a half dozen liberated villages to reach the frontlines. Alex, my long time friend and camera operator,  would film as I interviewed high ranking members of Iraq’s Golden Dawn squad and with enough daylight to return safely, we would rush back to the city’s western side, where a few buildings had been cleared for members of the media to spend the night. Unfortunately, we wouldn’t make it back that night. 

As we left the city limits concrete roads turned to dirt paths that snaked through the desert past abandoned villages. The landscape was eerily quiet, and every village had some sign of life, though no one dared venture outside their crumbling homes. We stopped a few hours into our voyage in a ravine. The driver looked past the sand dunes nervously as we urinated and explored the ruins of a make-shift ISIS petroleum refinery. “This is how they funded a lot of the war,” Ghareeb told me, as we walked past giant containers stained with the black substance. Hiding in plain sight, this was the perfect scheme- self sufficiency in a desert wasteland. 

As soon as we had begun to take photos a shepherd appeared atop one of the hills overlooking the site, and he began to work his way towards us, his sheep leading the charge. “Time to go,” Ghareeb rushed us into the car after exchanging a few niceties across the vast expanse. As we sped off, he told us we had to be careful- ISIS was using shepherds and their sheep to carry IED’s which they could detonate at any time. It was an efficient means to get a bomb past a checkpoint or to kill an unsuspecting target. 

The military base was on top of a hill and as we got closer the screams from soldiers still tiny in the distance caused our driver to screech our tires to a halt. When the dust settled, two abrams tanks stood next to a few scattered houses on a hilltop village with their canons pointing directly at us. Ghareeb screamed out the window that we were american media, but didn’t get out of the car, and after a prolonged wait they waved us up the dirt road into their temporary fortress. 

After the customary tea and cigarettes we sat for lunch with some of the military’s top brass- and feasted on lamb soup, rice, chickpeas and bread. Captain Raheem, a voluminous man with a great mustache and a hearty laugh was too busy for an interview so he set up a tour of the grounds with some of his trusted men. The abandoned village was occupied by federal military and some special ops from australia. South, east and west the desert stretched as far as the eye could see and to the north, a few hundred meters away in the distance, was an Isis stronghold, another village- this was the frontline. 

On our tour, we sipped coca cola as we were shown around. A dead ISIS soldier, its corpse mangled like a dead spider,  was draped below a bloodstained execution wall, Mortars in rows were all pointing to the ISIS village, and dozens of puppies kept the soldiers company. As the sun went down, I photographed the “Dogs of War” while Ghareeb and Alex smoked hookah with the troops.

The call to prayer could be heard across no man’s land. Some soldiers prayed, others brandished their weapons. This was a moment of peace shared between enemies. No weapons were ever fired during this moment, and anyone crossing no man’s land would be assured safety. It was the only time where the absurdities of this relentless war gave way to some sense of shared humanity. However, the call to prayer was a prelude to battle. I would later earn that ISIS militants would find strength and conviction during these moments, and believed that they were basking in some sort of supernatural energy, whereby they gained invincibility and protection from their enemies after their contact with god. This meant that as soon as the call to prayer was over, their desperate attacks would haunt the frontlines with reckless abandon. And they did. 

The fireworks began as the sun gave way to a starry sky. Fireballs rocked the atmosphere across no man’s land as we sat inside with a few soldiers swapping stories, sharing pictures on our phones and smoking. At some point, everything went dark. The generators had gone out and there was no more gas to be found. The soldiers lit a few candles and asked us if we knew how to handle a weapon as it was possible we could be ambushed by ISIS in the darkness. I looked around the room as a dozen or so soldiers, their faces flickering in the dim candlelight, many in their early twenties, looked at Alex, Ghareeb and me. Some were genuinely concerned, some found amusement in outsiders sharing this nightmare with them, and others were stoic, knowing full well, that this could be their last night on earth.

As night deepened, we sat in silence. I was terrified. I knew that if ISIS militants were successful in ambushing us, I would end up in front of a camera while a sword slit my throat. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine peaceful places. Each time a mortar was launched I’d imagine it getting stuck in the milky way and becoming another glittering star. The lights turned on and men in black masks started shooting up the place. They grabbed me and pointed a gun at my temple. I was going to be tortured.

I opened my eyes. Rosy fingered dawn shone through the window and complete silence surrounded me. Alex, Ghareeb and the soldiers were asleep. It was just a nightmare. Over tea we would learn that, several men lost their lives on both sides during overnight skirmishes and mortar rounds. This was my first night- an introduction to the war and a small but powerful experience that would open a pandora’s box of questions as we journeyed further into the conflict, before finding our way into the heart of darkness.