Life after conflict Adventure
Sir Michael Palin explores war-ravaged Iraq…
Sir Michael Palin visits one of the mostdangerous countries in the world for his latest Channel 5 series, Michael Palin: Into Iraq.
Now 79, Sir Michael fell in love with Iraq after his father gave him a copy of The Arabian Nights when he was a child. But the magical place he read about then has in recent decades been defined by war and conflict.
‘It doesn’t seem right that a country should have a bad name just because of the awful things that have happened there,’ says Sir Michael. ‘People are living there, bringing up their families there and their futures are there. It also has an extraordinary history – 6,000 years ago, it was the birthplace of civilisation.’
In the three-part series, Sir Michael covers 1,000 miles in three weeks as he follows the course of the Tigris
River from Mosul through Baghdad and Basra to the Persian Gulf.
After long delays at the Turkish/iraq border, Sir Michael arrives in Mosul – a city captured by ISIS in 2014 and held by the extremists until 2016 when they were driven out by a massive military campaign launched by the Iraqi Army and international forces that left the city shattered.
The city still resembles a war zone. As Sir Michael walks among the ruins, he meets a group of children playing with a catapult and they ask him to join in.
‘You just see this devastation and they are smiling,’ he says. ‘It’s quite something in the middle of all this. I was very moved.’