Sara Daniel, a reporter for Le Nouvel Observateur, and I went to Iraq in March 2004, a year after “Operation Liberty” by coalition forces, to retrace the steps of the invasion of March 2003. American Soldiers here are considered by the people of Iraq more like invaders than liberators, because, while the dictatorship has fallen and the dictator has been sent to prison, this does not mean that democracy and peace are prevailing in the country. Iraq is in a continuing state of chaos. The conflict has extended from the Sunni triangle to regions where the majority of the population is Shiite and where, every day, American soldiers are ambushed and killed. In these conditions, the transfer of power to a temporary government announced for June 30, 2004, was compromised and, as we discovered early on, religious extremists and their militias held the real power and made the occupiers pay the price for their arrogance and the lack of understanding of the situation on the ground. Our report and photographs show the horror which was reaching a level of such unbelievable cruelty that we rapidly understood that this conflict was seriously getting worse and was not going to get better any time soon, despite what politicians thought and said. You could just feel the climate of hate and death in the air.

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We saw the anger and, in a burst of anti-US rage in March 31 2004, four American security guards were gunned down in Fallujah. An eye-witness named Abdulkader Mohamed, aged 20, told us what he saw that day. “Two jeeps driven by American civilians with bulletproof vests were attacked by the ‘Iraqi Resistance’ armed with an RPG-7 rocket launcher. Two passengers survived the rocket fire and tried to get out of the burning cars, but some citizens of Fallujah pushed them back into the flames, using household tools. The victims were begging for help, but no one came to their defense.” The citizens next dragged the burnt corpses around the city and hung them on a bridge before cutting them down for the people to see them spread out on the ground like cooked butchered meat. As we entered the town of Fallujah, we saw burning vehicles and smoked filled the air; we were confronted with mutilation and devastation; the remains of the two Americans, their charred bodies, were right there by my feet. As I started to take pictures of this spectacle of horror, all I could hear was the crowed chanting “Long live Islam” and “Allah Akbar [God is Great]”. Seeing those dead, burnt bodies really shook me up. Later, back at our hotel, I collapsed and cried; I’d lost something that day and I knew I was never going to get it back. I returned to Iraq again with Sara Daniel in July 2005, this time to cover the war from the American side. We decided to go to Baquba, north of Baghdad, an area where ambushes and bloody skirmishes are the daily lot of the American soldiers. There is also a religious war in the region; Baquba is close to the Iranian border, and the population is half Shiite and half Sunni; they hate each other, and never trust one another. Sara Daniel and I spent two weeks with the soldiers of the notorious “Big Red One”, the division that fought in both World Wars. We went with them on patrols, sharing their fears, their anger and their sense of absurdity about this war that they cannot understand and which just keeps on killing. For most Americans, the meaning of the war in Iraq is not military or even ethical, but psychological. It produces a disquieting awareness of their moral fragility and failure. I feel that the shots I took in Iraq show the moral frailty and failure of this war, as well as the dichotomy between Christian and Islamic dogma. When we look at the picture of the American soldier giving a stiff arm salute at a military church service, it almost looks as if he is giving a “Sieg Heil” salute. And there is the Iraqi insurgent inside a mosque praying with guns, and Fallujah where Sunnis are screaming “Allah is Great”, and followers of Muqtada al-Sadr are burning the American flag while praying to Allah. On one side you have George Bush and his ambition to proselytize in the Middle East and on the side are the fanatics fighting to have Islam dominate the nation, and driving Iraq into a bloody civil war. These photographs are an attempt to direct the pictures away from fast-food throw-away journalism and towards a subjective, intensely human focus. For me, my pictures of Fallujah reveal the beast in all of us. The images from the main body of this work present us, the viewers, with the grief, the pain and the explosions, the accidents of being in the wrong place at the wrong time and, of, course the banality of death and suffering, the horror of war, and not just the horror, but the waste of war. Because war is about loss. There are no winners.

Stanley Greene
Commission from the French Ministry for Culture & Communication (National Center for Visual Arts).

Stanley Greene

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