BEHIND THE LENS
Ali Arkady, the photographer who exposed the Iraqi “heroes,” recounts the horrors and the lessons of his mission,
When Iraqi photographer Ali Arkady was a little boy, it seemed war was everywhere.
His earliest memories include the sights and sounds of Saddam Hussein’s war with Iran — rockets, artillery, tanks and soldiers were for years unremarkably normal in his hometown of Khanaqin, just seven kilometres from the eastern border. That was his reality until a ceasefire took hold in the summer of 1988, when he was 6.
That same year saw Saddam’s ruthless al-Anfal campaign pound Iraq’s Kurdish minority with the combined weight of his military and intelligence services. Arkady remembers seeing the worst one day on a trip with his mother to the vegetable market.
“I saw a body near the mosque. There was a dog eating it but nobody was doing anything, just pretending it wasn’t there,” remembers Arkady.
“I screamed and my mother told me, ‘Hush, say nothing — the walls have ears.’ ”
The body was that of a Peshmerga rebel — likely killed by Hussein’s mukhabarat intelligence agents. And just as likely, the body was being watched. Anyone who dared claim and bury the corpse would be in line for arrest and a world of suspicion. So nobody did.
Soon enough the fear arrived directly on Arkady’s doorstep, when Hussein’s intelligence agents came knocking with an ultimatum for his father: spy for us, they demanded, seeking to cultivate a steady flow of information on one of Arkady’s uncles, a prominent Peshmerga officer. Rather than collaborate, the Arkady family fled, moving north into Iraqi Kurdistan, resettling near Sulaymaniyah.
They left everything behind: home, jobs, friends, family. Exile meant poverty — Arkady’s father, an artist and teacher, had earned a comfortable salary as a regional school superintendent. He found new work teaching at pauper’s wages — about $3 (U.S.) a day, not enough to feed and shelter Arkady and his four sisters.
“I wanted to be an artist like my father. I wanted to stay in school. But the family needed me to work. I helped my mom sew clothing by hand. I rode my bike to sell the clothes at the market,” he says. “Later, I worked doing car upholstery with one of my uncles.”
During his first year in exile, Arkady remembers turning to his father in bewilderment, wondering about the “black rain.” The acrid, sooty precipitation, he learned, was fallout from Saddam’s scorched-earth response to the U.S.-led Persian Gulf War. As the coalition moved into Kuwait, Iraqi forces set ablaze 600 oil wells, filling the skies with fire and smoke. Some of it fell upon 9-year-old Arkady’s world.
Twelve years later, George W. Bush finished the job his father began. The arrival of U.S. troops alongside Kurdish Peshmerga fighters was, for Arkady, like the throwing of a switch. Life went from off to on. Finally.
At 21, he led the family’s return to newly liberated Khanaqin in 2003 and worked to regain the family’s solvency. Arkady and a friend opened an internet café to cater to his generation’s burning desire to connect. He rebuilt the family home and, once his parents and siblings were safely ensconced, set about rebuilding his life. The postwar boom brought new hope to Iraqi Kurdistan and school was no exception. Arkady was thrilled to enrol in the inaugural class of Khanaqin’s Institute of Fine Art in 2005. A five-year program; a clear runway to becoming a painter like his father.
Art was his calling — until he got his hands on a digital camera in 2006. He spent the next four years torn between two passions. The camera ultimately won.
“There was nobody to teach me so I went online. I sought out other photographers in the Arab world. I learned. I got better,” he says.
Upon graduation in 2010, Arkady turned pro, with the backing of Sulaymaniyah-based Metrography, an Iraqi photo agency dedicated to developing “a thriving photojournalism industry that breaks down ethnic, cultural and religious barriers.”
Arkady’s work gained notice, showing in more than a dozen exhibits in Iraq, Dubai, Georgia and Germany. He was selected for a coveted NoorNikon Masterclass. Assignments ranged from media work to projects for NGOs, including the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, Mercy Corps, IREX and International Relief Development.
As his career blossomed, Arkady married. His new wife — the Star is not publishing the names of his family for security reasons — shared his deeply personal understanding of war. At age 1, she and her family were swept up with the refugees fleeing the infamous massacre at Halabja, the Hussein regime’s targeting of the Iraqi Kurdish city with chemical weapons in the waning days of the Iran-Iraq War.
Arkady built a home, finishing an apartment by hand from a concrete shell. His photography — in the gaps between agency assignments — moved into long-form work. Among the projects, a photo essay on Iraqis injured and disabled by war.
Two back-to-back turning points set Arkady’s course toward the photographs published today in the Star. On June 1, 2014, Arkady joined the VII Photo Mentor Program — a rare prize handed to just five shooters among 150 global applicants. Paired with seasoned pro Ed Kashi as his mentor, the jump to VII Photo identified Arkady as one of the world’s brightest new talents.
Three days later, Daesh, also known as ISIS and ISIL, stormed Mosul, shocking the world by seizing Iraq’s second city from a collapsing national army. The country was shredding anew. It was huge news. And for Arkady, a new calling.
“One way or another, war had been in my life from the beginning. And yet I felt I was always avoiding it. I was seeing the effects of war. I had lived the impact. But I had never seen actual fighting,” he says.
“When ISIS came, I decided I would to try and get close to it. Whatever happened, this is where Iraq’s future would be. As an Iraqi photographer, I had to be there, too.”
This infuriated Arkady’s father, sparking a family rift that has yet to heal. “We shared meals together but for the last three years we didn’t speak. He won’t talk to me. Everyone in Iraq expects you to put money into cars and houses to gain wealth and social standing. But I put most of it back into my work because the work is everything. They couldn’t understand.”
For two years, Arkady’s assignments ranged from Peshmerga encampments to a remote location near Halabja, where he joined a Dutch correspondent interviewing the families of Daesh fighters.
It all set the scene for Arkady’s fate- ful journey with Iraqi special forces — and the horrifying images shown here. The risk inherent in the photographs forced him into exile. His wife left home with a single suitcase, his daughter, a single toy. Everything else was left behind. Out of reach, likely forever.
“We left everything. I gave my house to my parents because I may not be able to support them in the future,” he says.
“But even they are angry at me for doing this. They think I am crazy. I realize now, leaving has changed my life. I don’t know where it will go. But I had to let the world see what I saw and what I felt.”
During 18 hours of face-to-face interviews in Europe — and subsequent hours on Skype to verify details of his story — Arkady repeatedly described how emotions play through his camera lenses.
“I feel what they feel as I hold up my camera. I don’t know why. But I do. All of it, fear, agony, anger. I feel it.”
It burns in him still, all that he felt in chronicling the brutal descent of the Emergency Response Division (ERD) unit he followed in 2016. Especially anguishing are two occasions last November, when the steely-eyed ERD commanders coerced him, demanding that he put down his cameras and strike suspects during interrogations.
Any reporter with experience embedding with combat soldiers at war knows the drill: whatever story comes of it — positive, negative or in-between — journalists are expected to fall in line during the newsgathering. Go left, go right, stay there.
But what if the orders are insane? What happens then? For Arkady, that obedience slammed against his senses of morality and sheer survival on Nov. 21 and again Nov. 23, just as his cameras began to capture the unit at its worst. Twice ERD commanders ordered Arkady to participate in the abuse.
Both times, Arkady says, he protested, repeatedly answering, “No, I am photojournalist. I am shooting pictures — not hitting.” Both times the ERD commanders — in the first instance, it was Capt. Haider Ali, who had presented himself as a heroic protagonist when he first met Arkady — loomed over him, eyes ablaze, in a terrifying, silent standoff. Ten seconds, 20, 30. Dead, sadistic silence. Awaiting Arkady’s submission.
Both times, Arkady stepped forward, laying an open-handed slap. He says he made contact on the face of the first, unidentified suspect and, on Nov. 23, slapped a second time against the back of Iraqi shepherd Mahdi Mahmoud’s neck.
“It was very bad. I am scared for my life . . . I had no anger against these men. But I hit them. Not very hard. Not very soft. Like in the middle.”
Like an undercover narcotics cop surrounded by smugglers, having heroin forced into his veins, Arkady’s embed devolved perversely. It became the worst embed. Maybe ever.
If his earlier encounters with the ERD were overladen with benefits of the doubt, Arkady emerged from that November stint with a new and furious determination. He still had the trust of what he now understood was a squad run amok. He still had their trust. He would go back one last time, now intent upon documenting the worst.
“I am going for a different story now,” Arkady says of the final embed in December. “I will include this torture in my film . . . I will include everything.
“When I decided to publish . . . it’s not easy . . . but it is to make them stop. It is not right. And what they did with me . . . It is more honest this way. Total honesty from myself . . . the important thing is for the world to see all of this.”