Original subtitles

DISCO MUSIC PLAYS

I'm an Iraqi, I was born and raised in Iraq.

It is a big-time culture shock.

Different lifestyle.

Completely different lifestyle.

Life in America, man, it just...it's beautiful.

When they started the war, 2003,

they want people to be a translator with the special forces.

I was like, "I'm in."

We go kick doors,

looking for anything that lead us

to the capture of Saddam.

I hated him, I hated the regime.

This man destroyed the country.

This man hurt me and hurt my family.

A lot of people ask me, like, "How come you?"

"How come you the one?"

I just...was there in the right time

with the right people in the right place.

In this series, the story of the Iraq War

is told by civilians, journalists and soldiers...

..who lived through the 2003 invasion

and the years of chaos that continue to this day.

We set up the perfect conditions,

it's the perfect storm for an insurgency.

The invasion basically radicalised the whole society.

It forced people to religious extremes.

That, to me, was always one of the great ironies.

TRANSLATION:

How are you doing?

This one, we're asking 2,500 down and total price 6,900.

Samir grew up in southern Iraq,

but he was forced to leave when he was 22 years old,

because he'd taken part in a huge uprising

by Shia Muslims against the regime.

CHANTING

The rebellion ended

when Saddam used his army

to massacre over 80,000 of his own people.

And hundreds of thousands more had to flee their homes.

This is in Nasiriyah, my city.

That's the reason we left, quick.

You rather to die than get captured by these guys.

I have a lot of friends that are missing.

They didn't find their bodies.

ECHOING GUNFIRE, SHOUTING

Hmm.

HE SIGHS HEAVILY

Sometimes it feels like yesterday it happened, you know, just...

Yeah.

We were hoping one day a miracle was going to happen

that take Saddam away from power.

And I just want to be part of the operation,

to go and fight, to help free my own people.

I just want...

..revenge.

Here, I'm going to show you this appreciation letter

that I got from the military.

This is back in 2004, I met President Bush.

People, when they see these pictures,

they get so excited.

They always like to...

..hear the story.

They like what I did.

I wanted to be part of history in some way,

and I thought that working at the CIA would, uh, enable me to do that.

A-And I was right.

John Nixon was a senior analyst for the CIA

during the Bush administration.

He'd studied Saddam for years

and volunteered to go to Iraq soon after the war began.

In your own time, John.

Oh, I'm sorry, oh!

I thought you were mulling over what you were going to say. Oh, no.

From my experience working as a CIA analyst,

I've come to the conclusion

that all the best analysts have a bit of the obsessive in them.

MUSIC: Friend Of The Devil by The Grateful Dead

This is Apollo-Saturn launch control.

When I was young, I became fascinated by space exploration.

I knew all the names, I knew all the dates.

I even knew the Russian missions.

I wanted to be an astronaut.

It's very pretty out here!

After astronauts, it then became sporting teams,

like hockey and baseball and football.

And then after that, I became kind of obsessed

with popular music, like the Grateful Dead.

And then, when Saddam invaded Kuwait...

..I had kind of an obsession with him.

Colourful stories about his family.

There are all sorts of petty jealousies and hatreds.

It's like The Simpsons with guns.

# A friend of the devil is a friend of mine

# If I get home before daylight

# I just might get some sleep tonight... #

He was such a big part of my life.

We would spend hours every day talking about what he was up to -

for years and years and years.

He was becoming my new Neil Armstrong, you know?

We used to watch videotape of him all the time.

Oh, this is a GREAT clip!

One of the turning points in his rule

is the famous Ba'ath Party conference.

He basically assumes the presidency,

and there are a lot of people who don't like that,

and so he held this party conference to kind of get everybody in one room

under the pretext of having a very important statement.

He says, "There's been a plot," and he starts reading out

names of people he deems disloyal.

And, suddenly, everybody gets very nervous.

TRANSLATION:

APPLAUSE

And at one point he even gets to a name,

and he says, "Mohammed..."

And then he pauses, and he says, "No, no,"

and he crosses that out, so everybody in the auditorium

who's named Mohammed is like, "Oh, thank God!" You know?

But he subsequently has these people arrested,

imprisoned and then executed.

It's political theatre, and that wasn't lost on him.

He sees a name, and he wipes tears away.

He's showing that he is doing this

not because he's bloodthirsty or ruthless,

but he has to do this for the good of the country.

I mean, he was making a point, that "I have the power now,

"and you're all going to sit here until I let you go.

"And some of you are not going to survive,

"and it's me making that decision."

And I have to be honest with you,

I thought that maybe if we do remove him from power,

we can create a better situation for Iraqis and we can help them.

And, you know, I look back

on those ideas that I had, and I think they're incredibly naive.

But, at the time, I supported what George Bush was doing.

I still had hopes that we could turn this thing around,

and catching Saddam was a very important part of that hope.

We acted quickly on the intelligence,

but it looks like we probably missed him by about 24 hours.

We were getting a lot of pressure from Washington

to find Saddam Hussein.

And hundreds of people are involved in this.

But it was just very difficult,

because the Iraqis know that the CIA is in Baghdad,

and they also know that they're paying money for information.

I am today announcing a $25 million reward

for information leading to the capture of Saddam Hussein.

And so there's a lot of reporting coming in, and most of it's...

most of it's garbage.

The one that I always thought was the funniest

was that he was dressed as a woman and hiding in a Baghdad bus station.

It's the hardest place

I've ever tried to cover

as a journalist, because it was so complicated.

It was changing so fast.

But I thought,

partly for that reason,

because it was a place that was constantly changing,

that...

..the thing could work. I felt that way for a long time.

Dexter Filkins covered the Iraq War

for the New York Times from 2003 until 2010.

HELICOPTER OVERHEAD

You may NEED that helicopter sound!

HELICOPTER APPROACHES

CAR ALARM BLARES

There was this whole theory at the time

that Saddam had always planned it this way.

That he knew that his army would not be able to resist the Americans,

and so he had essentially... planned for a guerrilla campaign.

And...that he is, in fact, actually,

not just the inspiration for the insurgency,

but he's actually running it.

And so the idea was, if we could capture Saddam,

then the insurgency would die.

ARCHIVE: US soldiers taking part in another predawn raid.

Their target - one of Saddam Hussein's bodyguards,

a man the US hopes could lead them to Saddam himself.

We killed his son in a firefight

right down here and around the corner.

They had launched RPGs - they were heavily armed.

We raided so many places.

Every time we get there, it's going to be a little bit late.

These guys are moving around.

We bring people in, they give us more information,

and we move to the next.

Ultimately, special forces were looking for a guy

named Mohammed Ibrahim Omar al-Muslit.

He was the chief bodyguard protecting Saddam.

This is the bodyguard, he's supposed to know where Saddam is.

The forces, at this moment, they're raiding the farm,

they're breaking doors, kicking doors.

All that screaming, guys screaming, yelling, all that.

They searched the farm - nothing.

I was like, "Mohammed, right now, where is Saddam?"

He was like, "It's OK, it's OK, he's inside the bunker."

I was like, "Where is the bunker?"

He's like, "The bunker you guys stand on."

We start looking, it was like, "Really?"

"How do you get to the bunker?"

And he started doing this with his feet.

Then he just...

He was like, "You got a shovel?"

Wow!

We didn't know it was a bunker, because it is hard to see it.

It was covered with dirt.

It looks like a sewer.

I saw a hand coming out of that hole.

And we all pulled him out and...

..when we pulled this man...

..it was like, "It's an old man."

And then I was like...

"It's him!"

Ladies and gentlemen,

we got him.

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

Iraq's future has never been more full of hope.

There is a new opportunity for the members of the former regime

to end their bitter opposition.

What we will see next

is a picture of Saddam Hussein at the time he was captured.

ARCHIVE: Nobody expected to see Saddam Hussein

so battered, so broken, so humiliated.

He looks a little beat up there.

SAMIR CHUCKLES

He started calling me a traitor and a spy,

and I started punching him in the face.

It felt so good.

And then he tried to bit my hand.

He was going to bite me.

So I grabbed from his beard, shaked him like crazy, hard as I could.

"You coward, you are nothing, you're a pussy.

"I'm going to kill you today. You're going to be my bitch today."

He did not like that at all!

I told him about who I am, told him about I was part of the uprising,

and I started kicking him, kicking and kicking...

Like let me take my chance, let me take my revenge.

And then, finally, my boss came and said,

"Enough, you can't do this any more."

I was like, you know, "Please, please, please."

And he said, "No, Samir, you can't do that."

Boom!

Yeah.

BBC NEWS THEME TUNE

Well, within the last hour, President Bush has said

Saddam would see the justice he had denied millions.

Good afternoon.

I have a message for the Iraqi people.

The goals of our coalition are the same as your goals -

sovereignty for your country,

dignity for your great culture,

and for every Iraqi citizen,

the opportunity for a better life.

And that's the hole.

I think it points to the fact

that Saddam wasn't pulling the levers of the resistance,

because it's not the kind of place

that you could direct an insurgency from.

Interestingly, he had quite a penchant

for Bounty bars and for Mars bars.

Now, what about the weather for the week ahead?

Here is Rob McElwee. Rob. Good evening.

So when he was captured like that,

like, "Ah, no, it's his double, it's not him.

"Impossible to be the same guy, he's invincible.

"He's like Hercules."

But then, no, it's him.

He is Saddam, but he's a person.

He's not a god.

16 members of Um Ibrahim's family were executed

because one of her brothers had been accused of plotting against Saddam.

Like the vast majority of Iraqis, Um Ibrahim is a Shia Muslim.

After years of oppression,

most Shi'ites celebrated the end of the regime.

But it was the minority Sunnis,

who made up less than 20% of the population,

who had always ruled in Iraq.

Some Sunnis saw Saddam's capture

as the end of centuries of their power.

Lots of explosions that day.

And the shooting kept happening for three, four nights.

And it was very dangerous to go out.

Because people were very angry,

especially, I mean, the supporter for Saddam.

But then it settled down.

GUNFIRE

Washington is caught by surprise.

They have a live Saddam Hussein on their hands

and now has to figure out, "What are we going to do with him?"

And so it takes a couple of days,

and then eventually we find out

that we're going to be the ones in charge of debriefing him.

At the end of 2003,

John Nixon started a five-week interrogation

of Saddam Hussein for the CIA.

We get to a door,

and then the door opens.

And-And there he is.

The first thought that came to my mind was,

"Holy shit, it's Saddam, it's actually him!"

Even in his reduced state as a prisoner,

he had a sort of...

I don't want to sound crazy or anything,

but he had a certain aura around him

that was... You felt it.

And I mean, it took my breath away.

You know, I just said to him, you know,

"We're here to ask you some questions,

"and we want you to answer these truthfully and..."

And he listened, and then he just sort of leaned forward,

and he had this mean laugh, he just like...

HE CACKLES

"Let me ask you something.

"Who are you guys?

"What are your names? Where do you come from?

"Identify yourselves to me."

And he's acting like we are his guests, you know?

This is still his country.

He just had this demeanour that said,

"Well, I come here every Saturday night,

"and I always greet my guests this way, so..."

In any event, surprisingly,

we get very little guidance from Washington.

In early 2004, George Bush thinks that Iraq is a solved problem.

Mr Speaker...

Since we last met in this chamber,

the people of Iraq are free.

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

Having broken the Ba'athist regime,

we face a remnant of violent Saddam supporters.

We are dealing with these thugs in Iraq

just as surely as we dealt with Saddam Hussein's evil regime.

The White House wants to know,

where is the weapons of mass destruction?

And it's really all they want to know.

And he'd say, "You found a traitor to turn in Saddam Hussein.

"Why don't you go find another traitor to turn in this WMD?"

And then he launched into this whole thing

about how he didn't have WMD, and then he just said, you know,

"You're being misled by your leaders,

"your leaders are terrible, you know,

"they are people who don't know what they're doing,

"and they don't know the trouble that they're causing,

"and they don't know the problems

"that they're creating for themselves.

"Your leaders are terrible.

"You people don't understand what you've done."

He said, "Because of what you've done,

"you remove Saddam Hussein from power,

"you know, Iraq is going to become

"the playing field for international terrorism.

"You've created the conditions for more terrorism, not less."

Though Iraq was still governed by the coalition,

the intention was to hold democratic elections as soon as possible.

But the end of Saddam's police state meant that people

were already enjoying new freedoms they'd been denied for decades.

Under the old regime,

Saddam had banned religious festivals like Ashura,

where Shia Muslims mourn the death

of the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad.

2003 was the first time

the Shia had been able to celebrate Ashura in years.

And it was beautiful, it was amazing - and peaceful.

2004,

it just went...terribly bad.

HE SIGHS

EXPLOSION ECHOES

SCREAMING

They were attacked by nine bombs.

Just a horrific attack.

175 people dead, hundreds wounded, bodies everywhere.

Bombings like that became more common later on,

but that was one of the...

..the really, really big ones that showed

just how bloody and heartless

this thing was going to become.

I mean, that's when it all really fell apart.

EXPLOSION, SCREAMING

The Ashura bombings confirmed that the insurgency had evolved.

What had started as uncoordinated attacks

by people loyal to the old regime

had grown into a complex terrorist network.

By the end of 2004, it was known as Al-Qaeda In Iraq.

Al-Qaeda In Iraq, which was founded by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi,

was basically this kind of unkillable...

..killing machine.

I mean, they couldn't stop it, you know? They could not stop it.

He was like the evil genius. Yeah.

Zarqawi was a Sunni extremist.

He had decided that because they were a minority

and couldn't win the elections,

the only way for Sunnis to regain control of Iraq

was to win a civil war.

SIRENS AND SHOUTING

SHE SOBS

Americans got ahold of this letter

that Zarqawi had written to Bin Laden,

and it was Zarqawi saying, "We're going to start bombing

"mosques and hospitals and schools until we can provoke a backlash."

They wanted the Shi'ite to start killing Sunnis,

cos that would bring the civil war.

So, it was an incredibly dark vision, absolutely insane.

What wasn't clear was, you know, whether they could pull it off,

weather Al-Qaeda, in its insanity, could do this.

But the anger was building,

and it was building and building and building.

You know, if you go out into the streets,

people would say, "We want to strike back."

The Shi'ites, by and large, wanted revenge.

SIRENS ECHO

BEEP

SHE LAUGHS

ELECTRICAL SYSTEM BEEPS

BEEP

BEEP

BEEP

JOHN NIXON: Periodically, we lose electricity and the room goes dark.

And all of a sudden we're like... "What happened? What happened?

"What's going on?"

And meanwhile, like, Saddam never flinched.

It just, it didn't faze him one bit.

The other thing is that, when we'd be talking,

you could hear explosions in the background,

and he was fully aware that things aren't going well,

and he said, "You have to understand Iraqis, they're always plotting,

"and you have to keep your eyes on them 24 hours a day."

Saddam had his hand on the lid, basically,

and had these people suppressed...

..and when we removed Saddam, we removed his hand from the lid -

and once the lid came off,

out of the sewer came Zarqawi and Al-Qaeda In Iraq.

Some people called it the republic of fear.

I think Saddam would have called it good government.

The year 2005 will be recorded as a turning point

in the history of Iraq,

the history of the Middle East, and the history of freedom.

The country's buzzing with sights and sounds of democracy in action.

Polling day has been marred by a wave of suicide bombings

and mortar attacks by insurgents.

It's sometimes it's difficult to reconcile the anger

among so many Sunni people and the sheer joy of Shi'ites.

The mood here is remarkably festive,

many people have come out just to celebrate.

Very, very happy today! Very, very happy!

SIREN WAILS

But, as expected, there were attacks.

The Shias are certain to win the largest slice of power.

The Sunnis, on the other hand, will be the big losers.

The elections in 2005

not only confirmed that the Sunnis had lost control to the Shia,

but, for many Iraqis, the democratic process

highlighted sectarian differences for the first time.

Before 2003, when Saddam was controlling a dictatorship,

you can never find someone

who says that there is a difference between Iraqis.

It was very hard to.

What do you mean, there was a difference between Iraqis?

I mean, there's no difference between Iraqis.

Like, you can't tell who's Sunni, who's Shia, who's Christian.

More like one country, and one people.

This is the good side about that time.

Months of aggressive campaigning by opposing political parties

had helped divide Iraq into its various religious factions.

So they started to feed these ideas to the people.

Who are "they"? Who are you talking about?

I am talking about the politicians.

So, they split Iraq - literally.

A very well dressed, elegant-looking woman

looked at me with just incredible anger,

and she said, um...

"You.

"You Americans.

"You destroyed our country.

"And you called it democracy."

So, one of the things that drove the civil war was the elections.

There was rumours that the Americans asked Saddam,

"How much time do you need to make the situation in Iraq better?"

He said, "I will need one hour.

"45 minutes to shave and to change my clothes,

"and 15 minutes to say my speech on TV.

"And this is how Iraq will settle down. It will be fine." It's not...

He believes that it could have happened.

He could do it.

In October 2005, Saddam and leading members of his regime

began their trial for crimes against humanity.

UM IBRAHIM:

ISSAM AL RAWI:

I sat there and talked to him like you and me are right now.

No joke, I played chess with the guy - and he beat me both times.

He beat me in three moves,

and then I said, "You ain't going to beat me again,"

and I'll be darned if he didn't beat me in five.

I don't know how the heck he did it, to this day.

Brandon Barfield was one of the military police

who guarded Saddam during his trial.

This is the main building that we kept him in.

As you can see, that whole building's basically destroyed.

We did it so nobody would think he was there.

There's a little concrete wall right here,

and that's where he'd sit, outside -

and this is where his plants were.

He'd be out there every day,

talking to them and watering them all the time.

You know, he'd always joke, cos it was a bunch of weeds and stuff.

Basically, we were baby-sitters. Whatever he wanted, he got.

Brandon's unit called themselves the Super 12.

Part of their job was to escort Saddam to court.

I remember, one day, he got right to the door

and he's like "I'm tired, I didn't sleep good,

"I am not going to court."

He said, "I want to smoke a cigar," with his buddies,

with all the rest of them on trial -

and I was like, "I don't know what to tell you, boss man,

"you've to go to court."

So, I opened the door, and he goes, "Watch this."

As soon as I opened that door,

man, he stepped in, he started yelling.

Calling the judge all kinds of names.

THEY SPEAK IN ARABIC

DOOR CLOSES

He was in there maybe three-and-a-half minutes,

and I remember he took a deep breath and...

"I think I will have my cigar now."

And I was like, "Dude, this guy is running the court, man,"

and I couldn't help but laugh,

I said, "Man, you got 'em, boss man, you got 'em."

So, we took him downstairs, got him the cigar,

and he wanted all his buddies to come down there,

so they cancelled court that day

and gave that man his cigars with all his buddies.

I just thought that was the craziest thing, man,

but, yeah, whatever he wanted, he got, man.

He was captured as a coward, man,

but you see him at the court,

he was screaming at the judge, yelling,

and he acted still like a president, and he's not afraid of anything.

He just started making himself look better.

Pissed me off, big time.

I mean, how could he get away with that? How?

I mean, he committed so many crimes against the Iraqi people,

killing thousands of innocent civilians.

A person like him,

he should not have no mercy, really.

MAN IN GALLERY:

How did that make you feel, when you saw those images?

I had a relationship at that time, I didn't care anything.

I didn't care about anything!

Tell me about the mood on the street, then.

Do you remember the mood of the country?

His... His popularity grow.

He lost it to zero, and then he started to gain it again -

from the court.

On the streets? On the streets. Yes.

The new Shia-dominated government begged for calm,

but coalition troops had been unable to stop the Al-Qaeda attacks

on Shi'ite civilians...

..and now Sunnis were being targeted in retaliation.

What is it really like

to try to cover this war on the ground in Iraq?

It's dangerous.

All the time, everywhere,

and you just have to think through everything that you do

very carefully before you do it -

but there's no way to do it without taking a lot of risks.

I wake up every morning and there's 15 Sunni males,

bullets in the back of the head,

in one of the Sunni neighbourhoods.

And those were the hardest neighbourhoods to go into,

because the Sunni neighbourhoods

often had the big kind of Al-Qaeda presence.

So, it was difficult for us

to try and figure out, like, what's going on here -

but slowly we kind of pieced it together,

and what was happening was,

the kind of American-built, American-trained,

American-armed Iraqi police force and army,

largely Shi'ite, was, like, moving into the Sunni neighbourhoods

and just killing Sunnis, and they were striking back.

And so they had the uniforms on, but it would be like,

"Tonight, after work, we're going to go into the Sunni neighbourhoods

"out west and we're going to, like, take down some guys.

"We're going to set up some checkpoints,

"we're going to pull everybody over and look at their ID card,

"and if you see a Sunni name, like Omar,

"that's a Sunni...

"..give it to 'em."

We were carrying two IDs - one for the Sunni checkpoint

and the other for the Shia checkpoint.

It's different -

the names, the tribe, the province, everything.

Lots of people got killed, and they are Sunni,

they were killed by Sunni checkpoint,

because they pulled the wrong ID.

And they were like, "No, no, no, we are Sunni,

"but we are faking we are Shia."

Shhh! They were killed.

As the sectarian violence in Baghdad intensified,

millions fled the capital.

I don't want to call it an exodus,

but we have come across quite a few people leaving for good.

Mostly people with money. Er, the poor can't really afford to do it.

I have noticed a lot of doctors and guys like that doing it.

So, I told my family to leave Iraq -

repeatedly told them, "Go to Syria, like everyone else.

Just go to Syria and live there.

They refused. Why?

I don't know, they say, "No, this is our country,

"this is the city that we have to be here..."

All this bullshit.

SALLY MARS:

How's it look on the left side?

And still the civil war didn't start yet.

It was only a chaos before the war.

When would you say the civil war began, then?

The civil war began 2006,

beginning of 2006.

The event that finally pushed Iraq into a civil war

was the bombing of one of the Shia's holiest shrines.

Every hour that passes here brings yet more violence.

We are now hearing about a massacre on the outskirts of Baghdad -

but that's just one of many, many incidents.

And, Jonathan, in terms of the military response,

what are the British and American troops doing?

The Americans have told all of their troops here in Baghdad

and the surrounding regions that they should not travel -

they should stay in their barracks unless absolutely necessary.

And it's the same in the south.

We've had no reports of British troops

trying to calm the situation down.

It was like the worst thing ever happened to Iraq,

because normal civilians fighting normal civilians and for no reason.

They were just like, "Let's go, let's fight."

Just because they are Sunni and they are Shia and that's it.

I was ready to die.

Everyone in Iraq was ready to die.

He knows that he could die any minute -

random bullets, explosion,

American convoy - anything in the street could kill you.

It was like hell in Iraq.

I don't think there is a family... and they didn't lose anyone.

Everyone was losing everyone.

Can you tell me what happened to your brother?

Shit.

Do I have to?!

Of course you don't have to.

It's, er... I hate that moment.

My brother was, er...he...

He was killed in a very brutal way.

The mortar shell fell right on his head.

And he was... He became pieces. Literally.

I saw the pieces.

And we collected the pieces to make a body,

so my mum thinks that there's a human.

But there wasn't...a human.

I don't want to talk about it, please.

One day, when I was talking to Saddam

he said, "I know where this is headed.

"I know I'm never getting out of here,

"and I know that this is going to lead to my death,"

but he said, "I am at peace with my God,

"and everything that I did, I did for the Iraqi people,"

and, er, basically, "I am OK with that."

Sergeant Coleman called me to the office,

like, "Hey, he's going to be hung now,"

and I was like, "Er, how are we going to tell him that?"

And he said, "Well, I'm just going to go in there,

"you wake him up and I'll tell him."

So me and him were standing next to the cell

when Sergeant Coleman, the only thing he said was, "Sir, it's time."

And so he, literally, he threw the covers off,

and he goes, "I am ready."

And that was it.

That's the Rhino right here.

Is that the vehicle that took Saddam to the gallows?

Yes, the exact same one.

He shook my hand and told me I was a good soldier,

and then he gave me some money with his picture on it.

He gave everybody the same thing.

And then he got to the front of the bus

and he started crying and said bye to everybody -

but he didn't bawl, you know, you could tell he was crying,

he wiped his eyes and he...

..you know held his hand up and waved bye to everybody

and then said bye and got off the bus.

He was upset because he was being hung and being treated as a traitor.

He said that was a coward's way to go out.

He wanted to be killed by a firing squad,

cos that's the way he said soldiers were supposed to die.

And, er, he had his wife's scarf on that she made him.

He refused to take it off,

because that was his way of his wife being with him.

He used to talk about her all the time.

He knew exactly what was going to happen.

He knew exactly, this was how it would be.

It would end with him being surrounded by his enemies

being taunted and, er...

It shouldn't have been like that.

And, to me, when I saw this happen,

I said this is the final justification

for the war that has now been pulled out.

We went there to create a new Iraq.

At least we were going to create rule of law,

and that things would be different -

but instead I saw this hanging in the middle of the night,

and rather than rule of law, it's just mob justice.

And it was at that point in time

that I began to really feel complicit

in a...in an almost criminal action,

um, and I began to come to the belief that we shouldn't be there,

and that we had no reason to be there,

and everything we do makes the situation worse.

This is a country that's been brutalised, you know,

brutalised in every way for decades.

A lot of people were happy the way it was done.

They wanted that.

No dignity, no ceremony - kill him, do it.

CROWD CHANTS

But, for that moment of satisfaction that they all got,

you know, it was self-defeating.

The way that he was executed was so ghastly

that it achieved the kind of remarkable effect

of turning that monster into, in many people's eyes, a martyr.

UM IBRAHIM:

I didn't want to stay in the house where my brother got killed.

I couldn't, because I think my family - it's their fault.

I told them to leave Iraq, and they didn't.

After that they said, "Oh, now we should go to Syria."

No, it's too late.

So, I couldn't, I couldn't see them.

So I left to my uncle's house in Ramadi,

and I lived there for two years. With my uncle.

In Ramadi, Al-Qaeda were controlling the streets.

They control every detail in your life.

Of course, women are not allowed to do anything,

except sitting in the houses.

They make you watch people got killed,

while they're killing,

and they terrify you all the day -

everything you can imagine, they did.

But at least in Anbar, Ramadi, I know I have one enemy -

it's Al-Qaeda.

In Baghdad there is one thousand -

I don't know who's want to kill me and why,

but in Ramadi, there is Al-Qaeda,

I just, I have to hide from them, and that's it.

And then Isis came.

The only choice you have

is either to be a victim or to be the killer.

VIDEO: We have won against Isis.

We've beaten them, and we've beaten them badly.