Steve Connors and Molly Bingham were journalists working in Iraq when the American army arrived in Baghdad and, within days, toppled the regime (and, famously, arranged for the fall of a statue of Saddam Hussein as well). Within days, attacks against Coalition forces begin.
Connors and Bingham decide to record the stories of those who decide to fight the Coalition. For the next ten months, they follow Iraqi resistance members in Adhamiya, a town just south of the Coalition Green Zone.
The result is their fascinating film, a rare combination of compelling story and important document.
Resistance Begins
"Meeting resistance" takes place wholly from within the viewpoint of the resistance and its sympathizers The stage for this viewpoint is set from the opening scenes of daily life on Baghdad streets; people haggle over the price of goods in a market, slurp tea in a café. When a military tank suddenly rolls through the streets, nothing could seem more foreign or more menacing.
The issue of whether the crimes of Saddam Hussein against his people would lead Iraqis to greet these tanks, and the Americans inside, as liberators is put to rest swiftly. As one fighter, identified as "The Teacher," explains:
The American bombardment began with airplanes. Seeing the black smoke, the fumes, the destruction … ignited …passionate aggressions.... Before these events I didn't have any love for the Baath party, or Saddam or the government because they took away our freedom and our lives."
The Teacher's feelings of being under attack and later, the televised images of Saddam Hussein's capture, bring out new feelings of national solidarity which and sympathy for the despised—but publicly humiliated—former dictator. For the teacher, these feelings are expressed in an Islamic idiom, but that's hardly because he is a committed jihadi. Indeed, it's the opposite for this mild-spoken, middle class man who before the American invasion "didn't know his way to a mosque."
A Transforming Experience
For others, the experience of the initial attacks is equally transformative. A former career officer in Hussein's army, labeled "The Warrior," (fighters are not identified) explains that he was tortured by the Baathist state he served. Despite having good reasons to despise Hussein, he too, feels sorry for Hussein "as a Muslim and as an Iraqi" when the Americans find him in December 2003.
(You may remember the frequently recast television image of a disheveled Hussein, subject to an oral swab by his capturers. The image of forcing open the former dictator's mouth—a subliminally sexual image—clearly suggested the humiliation and subjugation of Hussein, and by extension, Iraq.)
When the Warrior sees the Americans arrive, he identifies so wholly with Iraq that he feels personally "occupied." "When I saw [the Americans], I didn't see them as an army that I would fight. I began to see just one thing, that we'd become an occupied country. When they occupied Iraq, they occupied me, they occupied my sister, my mother, my honor, my country." The distinction, for this career soldier, between dispassionate service and an emotionally motivated militarism, is striking.
Others have different motivations: A young Syrian man arrives in Iraq with his parents blessing to fight a "jihad on behalf of God"; a wife and mother's patriotism moves her to wish for "martyrdom to serve God, serve my homeland and satisfy my conscience"; a laborer who spent two decades fighting with Palestinians sees the Iraqi resistance as a renewed opportunity to achieve Arab unity.
The Mechanics of Resistance
Along the way to telling their personal stories, the fighters describe the mechanics of a movement whose organization evolves slowly over the course of 2003 and 2004. Those with military experience develop not only military training modules for volunteers without military background, but also an escalating series of steps designed to inure the recruits to fear of their possible death.
Different participants explain how they acquire weapons and which they use; how they are funded (from within Iraq, but also beyond it by sources "associated with Islam"); how they have learned to organize themselves into cells, in part by taking lessons from the Irish and Hamas ; how they understand and try to ameliorate civilian casualties; and how they deal with those they find collaborating with Americans (ruthlessly). Although they self-identify as Sunnis and Shi'ites, they seem disinclined to fight on behalf of a particularly Shi'ite or Sunni cause. Indeed, there is much suspicion among the film's speakers that violent sectarianism is an American (or Zionist) plot designed to divide and thus conquer more swiftly.
American Misunderstanding
If there is anyone still harboring the idea that Americans could reasonably have expected to be greeted with flowers on their arrival, "Meeting Resistance" should put it to rest. The Iraqis in this film, to a man and woman, see the Americans as members of an occupying force.
Not only did the Americans miscalculate the response to the invasion, but they also misunderstood the degree to which occupation actually provided a unifying banner under which those with different motivations and end-goals could fight together. The depth of that misunderstanding is presented in a variety of ways throughout the film.
A subtle one comes when, during discussion of collaborators, the filmmakers slowly pan over a large billboard promising Iraqis rewards of up to $2,500 (in dollars) if they provide information on the activities of "terrorists." The billboard is in Arabic, but the ultimate authors of the message are unmistakable: there was, at least in 2003, no one in Iraq who would have understood what Iraqis who took up arms against the American-led coalition as "terrorists" even if they disapproved of their violent actions or the consequences (such as provoking further civilian casualties).
"Meeting Resistance" is an exceptional film whose careful weave of script and image offers a bracingly clear explanation of how armed resistance against the American coalition began. The people speaking do not necessarily have all the facts about events right, but they have their truth, one worth listening to and understanding if resolution in Iraq is to be reached .
