‘If freedom of speech is under threat in the West, the rest of us will never have it’
Ahmed Albasheer is using the power of comedy to shame Iraq’s corrupt politicians. Colin Freeman finds out what drives him
For Iraqi comedian Ahmed Albasheer, cancel culture means more than just being shamed on Twitter. In nine years as his nation’s top political satirist, he’s been thrown in jail, had his TV broadcasts jammed, and received so many death threats he had to flee the country. For when you poke fun at Islamic State terrorists and Iran-backed militia leaders, the threats may not just be bluster from keyboard warriors.
“I see myself as a kind of soldier in this capacity,” says Albasheer, who now broadcasts his Friday night programme, the Albasheer Show, from neighbouring Jordan. “You can’t fight terrorists with just guns. When we made fun of Isil, for example, Iraqis realised that they weren’t terrifying monsters, but just ordinary people who needed to be put in jail.”
So popular is his programme that its Youtube edition now has nearly four million followers, with Albasheer, 35, hailed as an Iraqi answer to The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart. British TV audiences may recognise him from the acclaimed BBC documentary Once Upon a Time
where he is one of several contributors telling the story of the Us-led invasion and its aftermath.
The documentary’s director, James Bluemel, wanted to avoid the usual “talking heads” line-ups of generals and politicians, and in Albasheer, viewers certainly get an unorthodox slant on life under Saddam’s rule. For example, he reveals that, as a teenager, he was secretly infatuated with the West, dreaming of singing with the Backstreet Boys, and telling people his name was Kevin (after the band’s singer Kevin Richardson). He also observes that the trend among Iraqi men for copying Saddam’s burly moustache made the country look like one vast Freddie Mercury tribute band.
The real market for Albasheer’s sense of the absurd, however, has been among fellow Iraqis, for whom laughs have been thin on the ground since Saddam’s fall. His main targets are his country’s corrupt politicians and its militant sectarian clerics, not generally known for their sense of humour.
In one show, he “interviewed” a puppet dressed as IS leader Abu Bakr al-baghdadi, who told him that IS’S sadistic methods were inspired by watching violent Tom and Jerry cartoons. Much to Albasheer’s delight, IS declared his show an “apostate” programme in cities under its control, and warned that anyone found watching it would be flogged.
In a part of the world where the pen is seldom mightier than the sword, it’s hard to overstate the dangers of cracking such gags. A previous Iraqi TV satirist, Walid Hassan, was shot dead in 2006, and to this day, journalists and government critics are regularly killed or kidnapped. Even in neighbouring Jordan, where Albasheer and his crew first relocated in 2014, one of his staff was stabbed by an IS sympathiser.
So what motivates him to be so outspoken? One answer is that he suffered so many horrors himself in post-war Iraq that he felt he had nothing left to lose. “Life was very bad back then – it got to the point where all you could hope for was to survive each day,” he says.
This is no exaggeration. In 2005, he
‘Life was very bad – it got to the point where all you could hope for was to survive each day’
was kidnapped and tortured for six weeks by a militia unit operating within the Iraqi police, which freed him only after his father paid a ransom. His father was later kidnapped by al-qaeda, and died of kidney failure not long after being released. He has also lost a cousin, uncle and brother to militia violence – the latter blown to pieces in 2006 by a mortar bomb.
All that tragedy, though, also made him aware of the power of comedy.
“At my brother’s funeral, my uncle and cousin – the ones who later got killed themselves – were trying to cheer me up by cracking jokes and making fun of the way we all cried,” Albasheer says. “For me, it was an important moment, because it took me from a grieving level to a level where you say: ‘life goes on’. From then on, I wanted to show other people how life could be normal too, by spreading hope and reminding them how to smile.”
Already a trained TV news journalist, he started experimenting with sketches, drawing on gags he’d come up with to defuse tense situations. Some he’d devised to challenge the prejudices of one of his neighbours in the tough Sunni tribal town of Ramadi, who believed that Shia Muslims ate human flesh. Others he’d cracked with his kidnappers. “If you can bring a smile to people’s faces they’re usually less aggressive,” he says. “One torture they had was to stick a bottle on the floor and make you sit down on it (so that the bottle would penetrate the rear end). I joked that I wasn’t feeling tired and didn’t need to sit down. That made the kidnapper laugh and he let me off.”
The physical dangers aside, Iraqi political satirists certainly benefit from an abundance of material. Although Iraq is now a democracy, many of the country’s politicians are pompous and self-important, throwbacks to the Ba’athist era (between 1968 and 2003 ending with the overthrow of Hussein). In challenging the culture of deference, the Albasheer Show has been as ground-breaking as Britain’s That Was the Week That Was in the Sixties.
Take Qais al-khazali, for example, a Shia cleric who leads the League of the
Righteous, an Iran-backed militia blamed for killing large numbers of Iraqis, as well as British and US troops. For years, Iraqis were scared of him. Now that several million people tune in to laugh at him every week, says Albasheer, much of that aura of invincibility is gone.
Albasheer has even been credited with fuelling the Arab-spring style protests that shook Iraq last year, where the country’s youth took to the streets to demand better government. His show is cult viewing among the demonstrators, who also want to end the crude, electorally driven religious identity politics that labels every Iraqi as either Sunni or Shia.
“It’s a great honour for me that the protesters watch it,” says Albasheer. “I’m hoping that it’s teaching them about sectarianism, and how our politicians use religion to divide people and steal from them.”
Such statements have not endeared him to the Iraqi government, which he believes is responsible for the regular attempts to jam the show’s broadcast. He also spent four days behind bars in Jordan as authorities investigated a complaint about a sketch that offended an Iraqi official.
“There are lots of channels supporting militias that are killing Iraqis and coalition forces, but when we call for them to be shut down or taken to court, it never happens because their supporters control the government,” he says.
All of which gives him a complex perspective on the “cancel culture” debate in the West. On the one hand, he wants TV shows that promote bigotry shut down. On the other hand, he is alarmed at any moves to silence opposing views, as long as they’re expressed peacefully.
“If the West doesn’t have it [freedom of speech], it means the whole world won’t have it,” he says. “Unless it gets to the point of people carrying guns and blood on the streets, I think people should argue and have debates, it is fine.”
There have even been calls for Albasheer to enter politics, following in the footsteps of fellow comedian Volodymyr Zelensky, who became president of Ukraine last year. After all, in countries with chaotic, dysfunctional politics, a sense of the absurd is arguably advantageous.
So when does he think Iraq might be tolerant enough for him to return to do a few stand-up gigs in Baghdad?
“Once they take down the militias in Iraq, once Iran stops interfering in our country, and once we have people who understand each other,” he says, laughing. In other words, don’t try to book any time soon.
Once Upon a Time in Iraq continues tonight on BBC Two Colin Freeman is the author of Kidnapped: Life as a Somali pirate hostage