John Pilger’s film used some highly emotive images of a wounded female Iraqi child I obtained when working as a two member crew with a UK-based independent documentary and news broadcast company in 1991.

John Pilger incorporated these images deriving from the 1991 Kurdish uprising in Iraqi Kurdistan/now the KRG region, when Saddam Hussein’s armed bombed civilians and injured children in the course of seeking to regain control of Kurdistan. The shelling and use of helicopters by Saddam was instrumental in crushing the Kurdish rebellion prior to the creation of the No Fly Zones in 1991.

In Pilger’s film, these same images from this specific timeline (1991) were presented as having been injuries inflicted upon Iraqi civilians by the Americans/British in the course of regime change in 2003 and its aftermath.

These images were therefore misused as the reality behind them was in fact the opposite: in two very clear sequences that I know intimately from having been at the location the victim was that of Saddam Hussein’s forces and not the Americans (or British) at all.

Owing to this misrepresentation, I cannot consider the film reliably researched or annotated and consider that library images were used to tell the story the presenter sought to tell with disregard for the truth behind the images.

The style was that of Mr Pilger as the all-knowing seeker of inner realities that are withheld from the public by Western nations and compliant media organisations, but the images, as well as the structural omissions tell otherwise.

Failing to refer to the reality of Iraqi citizens under Saddam Hussein and the Ba’ath Party’s 30-plus years of tyranny as a prelude, counterpoint, or even anecdotally, the film relies instead on Mr Pilger presenting himself as an Anti-hero charting his knowledge through wars since his youth in journalism, involving, primarily, America.

The structure and content were therefore misrepresentative of Iraq’s broader historical and ongoing realities: the film failed to refer to Iraq’s successive past wars, non-organic state construction as a nation fabricated from diverse sectarian groups, or the long-term fallout upon its civilians since its inception as a nation state.

Accepting that Mr Pilger did not seek to tell the history of Iraq in this film, the images he used and the spin put upon them should at least have been true to the framework of the film as seeking to present the living – and dying – conditions faced by Iraqi civilians since the 2003 US-led war on Iraq.

Yours sincerely

Sheri Laizer (Ms)

Author and Middle East Specialist

PS My details are openly available in any online or library search.