Live From Iraq

By Nina Berman, AlterNet. Posted December 15, 2005.

Two and a half years into the war in Iraq and we still know so little about the Iraqis on the ground and how they survive and die each day.

News reports are dominated by coverage of American fighters. Our visual understanding of the war is almost exclusively American: our soldiers atop tanks racing to liberate Baghdad, suffering heat and sandstorms, their faces bathed in an orange glow; American Marines in full battle mode charging across the Diwanya Bridge; and the shock and awe over Baghdad, almost like Grucci fireworks -- as long as you don't see what happens when they hit their targets.

And that's the whole problem. We rarely see who is at the receiving end of a hellfire missile, or a 50-caliber rifle, or a 500-pound bomb. The politics of that destruction and the anger and desperation it fuels, remains hidden.

So it brings great relief to finally get a glimpse into the Iraqi experience, from four intrepid independent photojournalists who have compiled their images into the new book, Unembedded (Chelsea Green). Kael Alford, Thorne Anderson, Rita Leistner and Ghaith Abdul-Ahad decided to forsake the bubble of the American military and cross front lines to see what life is like from the Iraqi side.

The collection of 149 photographs and dispatches from the photographers begins with the American invasion in March 2003, moves through the rise of the insurgency in Falluja and Sadr City and culminates with the siege of Najaf and the Mahdi Army in August 2004.

Along the way we visit hospitals in Fallujah and Baghdad where relatives wash their dead and care for the wounded. We see a mosque in Baghdad where women mourn more than 50 killed by a U.S. bomb. We see an Iraqi boy triumphantly celebrating the explosion of an American vehicle. And from the courageous Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, the lone Iraqi photographer in the group, (Alford and Anderson are Americans, Leistner is Canadian) we see an extraordinary sequence of photographs of civilians running from a U.S. helicopter attack on Harif Street in Baghdad in September 2004.

Zafrania, April 26, 2003 -- Angry residents of Zafrania confront U.S. soldiers guarding an ammunition stockpile after an accident launched a missile that killed people in nearby houses. Photo by Kael Alford.

Amid the violence, there are many welcome images of daily life with Iraqis enjoying small pleasures: family members swimming in the Euphrates river, men dancing at a wedding in Ramadi, women squeezed into a car on their way to a henna party in Sadr City, and men playing dominoes at sunset on the banks of the Tigris River. In a book about war, the images of Iraqis at peace, done artfully and unsentimentally, humanize the conflict and remind us that before the American invasion and even after, Iraq is still a country of individuals who feel and dream and celebrate and socialize, like people everywhere. They are not just Sunnis, or Shiites or Kurds, or in soldier parlance, Hajjis.

The photographers do not discriminate when it comes to the purveyors of violence. It is not just the Americans blowing up civilians. There are plenty of victims here from Iraqi car bombers and saboteurs. Yet the origin of the madness is leveled squarely at Americans as demonstrated by a strong image by Alford which appears early in the book, of angry Zafrania residents in April 2003 confronting American soldiers after a missile accidentally killed several people in a nearby house. The Iraqis, of all ages, are furious, demanding an explanation. We never see the American soldiers in the picture. The way Alford shot it, we -- the viewers -- are the soldiers, the occupiers, and we are the ones who have some explaining to do.

Baghdad, April 15, 2004 -- A patient at Rashad Psychiatric Hospital sits by a television broadcasting one of the Coalition Provisional Authority's daily live broadcasts. Photo by Rita Leistner.

Nina Berman is a photographer and the author of "Purple Hearts: Back From Iraq."

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