The Iraq war, the fall of Saddam, the rise of Isis and their aftermath – eyewitness accounts (original) (raw)
It’s almost 20 years since British and American troops invaded Iraq to topple Saddam Hussein’s regime. What happened changed the country, leaving, according to some estimates, more than one million Iraqis dead. The war unleased years of chaos and terror, the effects of which, it can be argued, are still being felt today. The migration crisis, instability in Middle East politics, the rise of Islamic State – and more – can be traced back to that one decision.
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We were in hospital for three months. His kidney was gone, his hip, his leg
Back in 2003, nobody understood the extraordinary gamble taken by the Allies. After the Iraqi army was defeated and Saddam Hussein, who had murdered an estimated 75,000 citizens in his 20-year rule, was found in an underground hole, many Iraqis hoped this would be a new start. Instead, terror unfolded across the nation. Once the army was disbanded, one million former soldiers were instantly unemployed – trained fighters looking for a purpose. Civilian order was put into the hands of American contractors, armed and often dangerous.
Into this power vacuum swept terrorist groups vying for power, attacking innocent civilians, the occupying allied army and the contractors, who reacted with an often unchecked brutality. Meanwhile, the economy was in tatters.
The allied soldiers struggled to comprehend their orders or understand their enemy – the Iraqis they were supposed to have liberated. By 2008, there had been more than 4,600 allied deaths.
US Marine Rudy Reyes
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At night, if you see five males, smoke ’em all
Now, an award-winning British documentary- maker, James Bluemel, has embedded himself in Baghdad. Over hundreds of hours he’s interviewed everyone from remote Iraqi villagers to western journalists, from local translators to American commanders, to hear the story of the conflict from people who were on the ground. Starting with the American invasion and ending with the arrival of Isis, this is the story of the conflict through human voices. Here is the human cost – the working-class Iraqis watching their country erupt into civil war and the families on all sides dealing with the grief of losing a son or daughter.
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Their stories come together in the TV series and book Once Upon a Time in Iraq to create the most in-depth, multifaceted portrait of the Iraq war to date. As this exclusive extract reveals, they paint a sometimes brutal, sometimes pitiful and occasionally tender picture of what really happened during those years of war and unrest. It’s a riveting oral history of a conflict that continues to shape our world.
March 2003: Operation Iraqi Freedom begins
Nick Popaditch, US Marine Corps tank crew
Our first mission was to take an airfield and then go towards Basra. At that part we met very few people. They were mostly farmers, and they were mostly just waving: “Hi, how are you doing?” The first military we saw was at an airfield, and they had a couple of tanks. They had two choices: surrender or die.
US tank commander Nick Popaditch
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The first military we saw was at an airfield. They had a couple of tanks. They had two choices: surrender or die
This was my gunner’s first combat, and by the time we got to our first defensive he’s already got a few kills under his belt. I remember asking him, “Doesn’t even seem fair, does it?” And he said, “No, staff sergeant, it doesn’t.” And I said, “Well, you just keep pulling the trigger. You’ll figure out how to deal with that later.” Everywhere we went, everything was already broken. Anything that would have been active, 90 per cent of it was already hit by the air.
Dexter Filkins, journalist. Pulitzer prize-winning author of The Forever War
We saw guys in their underwear; they were taking their uniforms off, throwing down their guns and just taking off. So the American armies just rolled on through it, just on to Baghdad.
Um Qusay, a woman whose village plotted to assassinate Saddam Hussein
At the beginning we were very happy. Because they came to free us. But it became an occupation. Any person, when a stranger comes to their area to occupy it, they wouldn’t like it.
Staff Sergeant Rudy Reyes, recon Marine
I was spearheading a division, 60 men. Seeing chemlights on all the armour and tanks and the US army and the Marine Corps, it was really like a Star Wars movie on the ground. It was immense; it was pandemonium in the ring. It was gorgeous to look at, seeing the impact of the artillery.
Waleed Nesyif, translator
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People did whatever they could to protect their neighbourhoods. It was like the Wild West
Waleed Nesyif, translator
As if war was not ominous enough, there was a sandstorm. You’re locked inside the house and sand basically makes it in, and then the temperature drops. So imagine this. Bombs falling, kids crying, people coughing, sneezing and all that, and then you look outside, you can’t see across from you because it’s like a very thick fog.
Rudy Reyes
Al Muwaffaqiyah came after the sandstorm. I had an idea that something bad was going to happen. And that’s when we got the order to clear the city.
We put up signs in Arabic: “This is a roadblock, turn around or else we will engage you.” We didn’t know that many of them can’t read, so they came pouring through in their vehicles and we killed every one of them. I feel sad for them. Actually, I don’t feel too sad. I mean, we are 60 men in open Humvees. Do I have a chance to interview every single person? No, I do not. Do I have a chance to set up some little car park? No, I do not. We have a mission: get to Baghdad, cut off the head of the snake, kill the regime, and that’s what we did.
April 9, 2003: Saddam’s statue falls
Nick Popaditch
We pulled into Firdos Square and set a defence. A man walked up to our perimeter, and one of the guys on the ground shook his hand. Other people saw that and before long, we had a couple of hundred people in that square.
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The statue of Saddam Hussein in the centre of Baghdad is pulled down by US Marines, April 9, 2003
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I remember talking to a guy about his family, and we were pulling out our pictures and showing each other pictures of our kids. Just think about it. They’re in a city with no power, no water, garbage piling up every day, but that was a joyous event. It was life-changing for me.
Waleed Nesyif
I was like, “Finally, it’s over.”
There was this uncertainty as well. Like, is Saddam going to come back? Because he wasn’t captured. The Iraqi army disbanded, but it’s not that they disappeared. There are a million-plus soldiers in Iraq.
Nick Popaditch
Some kid walked up to the M88 and asked the guy to help him tear down the statue. The M88 is like a tow truck for the tanks. Corporal Eddie Chin, a tank mechanic, goes up there, he nooses up Saddam, then Gunner Lambert’s pulling the vehicle back and all these civilians are on top of that vehicle. It wasn’t an “us and them” thing; it was an “us” thing.
Omar Mohammed, history professor, University of Mosul
I came back from the school. I saw all my family watching people hitting the picture of Saddam on TV.
But Mosul was still under the control of Saddam. The next day was Friday. The preacher said – this was the last time in my whole life I heard it – “May God protect the president and the region.” After a few minutes, a Humvee – with three soldiers, and a tribal man in the front seat – stopped by the mosque. The preacher started shouting, “Allahu akbar, this is the freedom day!” And he started crying. I was shocked. What just happened?
Journalist Dexter Filkins
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We saw guys in their underwear; they were throwing down their guns and just taking off
Waleed Nesyif
Right after the war, you started seeing all these knock-off brands of restaurants. You know, it’s not McDonald’s, it’s MaDonalds; it’s not Burger King, it’s Burger Queen. You had this massive surge of everything that is western. People flooded to all these places because, you know, we can try these things now. Who cares if it’s MaDonalds? It has still got the golden arches, right?
May 2003: Paul Bremer appointed presidential envoy to Iraq by George Bush
Paul Bremer, a former diplomat in the US Foreign Service, was by now chairman and CEO of Marsh Crisis Consulting, a risk management company
About two weeks after the fall of Saddam, I got a call from Secretary [of Defence Donald] Rumsfeld’s office, asking me to come to a meeting with him the next day. He basically said, “We’re trying to decide how the civilian side of the project is gonna go.” He asked me was I interested; I said, “Yeah, it sounds like a challenge, to put it mildly.” And then his office called back that evening at 7.30pm and said, “You’re going to see the president tomorrow at 10.” It moved rather quickly.
Waleed Nesyif
After the invasion, Baghdad is a ghost town, destroyed either by bombs, looting, or just abandoned. I drive by the Iraqi National Library and it’s burnt. The Iraqi Central Bank, gates are open and it’s burnt. The telecommunications tower, burnt.
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Each neighbourhood formed a taskforce where the men made blockades and took turns in guarding it. Everybody had a gun. There was an altercation in my neighbourhood between some American soldiers and some of these guys. The Americans didn’t have a translator. I was trying to explain to an American guy, and he was like, “My orders are to disarm.” So I asked him, “Are you going to protect us?” And he pushed me with the barrel of his gun. “Get back home before you get hurt.”
The immense poverty that people suffered during the sanctions had changed morality. Sadr City, a suburb in Baghdad, was one of the places where they were in squalor: no food, no jobs. All of a sudden, you have no law and order. So, I ask myself, if my son is starving, nobody is giving me a helping hand, what would I do? I would loot.
Paul Bremer
Torture was legal under Saddam’s rule. It was an almost unspeakably brutal regime. So, before the war, the State Department said there can be no place for the Baath Party in post-Saddam Iraq.
It’s also important to take disbanding the army in context. Saddam’s army was the military and security arm of his dictatorship. I went to visit a town south of Baghdad where our Marines had uncovered the first of the mass graves from the Shia uprising. I went to a field that was twice the size of a football pitch where there were, by our counts, something like 30,000 bodies. During the next 14 months, we found over 100 mass graves. This was a monster. The lowest estimate I have seen is that he killed 75,000 Iraqis.
Sally Mars, who was six and living with her family in Baghdad when the invasion began
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A car exploded opposite our front door. My father cried tears of terror. Our neighbour’s leg was severed
Waleed Nesyif
Right after the war, Paul Bremer disbanded the army. Now you have a million-plus individuals jobless, with no prospects, no salary whatsoever. And weapons were readily available. Everywhere. And our borders were open. The people did whatever they could in order to protect their neighbourhoods. It became kind of like the Wild West.
Sally Mars lived with her family in Baghdad and was six when the invasion began
Fear was everywhere. It was scary, being in a situation where someone can lose a brother, a father, because they’re not allied with a certain sect, or go out to get something for the house and don’t return. There were people carrying guns with silencers, and killing at random.
Colonel Nate Sassaman, Combined Arms Infantry Battalion commander
I’m in Iraq for maybe a week or two when I roll into Al Duloiya, which is right off the Tigris river. It is lined with unemployed young men. There’s a lot of young, bearded, robed folks who were not happy.
I put a lieutenant and his section on the top of the police station, thinking that we’re with the police on this, trying to restore order. And I go, “This is hostile, and it’s just a matter of time before it’s going to get worse.” No, they hated us, man. “The infidels are in our country, and we got to get them the hell out.” I never thought the war was won, bro.
Um Qusay
Someone went and told the Americans we had weapons in our house. So they came at night.
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Issam Al Rawi was in charge of security on the Iraq-Jordanian border and remained loyal to Saddam Hussein
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How could we who worked with Saddam leave? That was how we felt
We had one gun. It was old and rusty. We told them you can take it if you want. After they broke all the things and messed up the whole house, they said, “Sorry.” What is the use of “sorry” after it destroyed my life? If I’m honest, if I had had a gun, or a bomb, I would have killed them all.
Nate Sassaman
We started averaging seven or eight attacks a day on our forces.
There was going to be absolutely no allowing of Iraqi people to humiliate or embarrass the Americans. If there was a bunch of kids and they threw rocks at us, we threw rocks right back at them, and if there were cells that wanted to engage us with mortars or IEDs or direct fire, it was going to be their last day on earth. It’s a warring area and, hey, we’re here to bring you democracy. No, they would sneer and laugh at that. But if you eliminated some of the insurgents that were terrorising some of those communities, they totally respected it.
Sally Mars
A car exploded opposite our front door. I was reaching forwards to get a glass of water. The front door flew off and hit the big window in front of the sink, and the whole window fell on me, but I wasn’t hurt.
My dad was panic-stricken, shouting, “Where’s your mother?” He was running between the rooms hysterically, looking for her. When he found her he grabbed her, saying, “Where’s your mother?” She was saying, “This is her! It’s me!”
It was the first time I ever saw my father cry. They were tears of terror.
Our neighbour’s leg was severed. That was the most horrifying thing I ever saw. The only thing still linking it was a small thread of flesh. He was trying to pick it up. There was a cat on our wall that got torn apart, so I didn’t know if this flesh on our doorstep was the cat’s or the man’s. His face was bleeding. I found my mom sobbing hard with her eyes shut, as if she was the one who was injured.
March 31, 2004: four Blackwater contractors are killed in Fallujah April 4, 2004: first Battle of Fallujah begins November 7, 2004: second Battle of Fallujah begins
Waleed Nesyif
Four civilian contractors were captured in Fallujah: killed, dragged, burnt, and they made effigies of them. Civilian contractors are anything but civilian or contractors. They don’t fall under martial law. Nor do they fall under civilian law. And the Americans used them very heavily to do the dirty work that the army couldn’t really do. There are all of these videos of how the civilian contractors had fun: as they were driving in the streets, they would randomly shoot at cars, killing people left, right and centre. So the four people who died were not innocent people.
Paul Bremer
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Paul Bremer, left, at Mosul airport, northern Iraq, May 2003
REUTERS
Eventually, President Bush ordered our army to go in and get control of Fallujah. We had to react, and it felt a bit overwhelming frankly because – quite apart from the problem of security – we also had the problem of trying to keep the political crisis on track. All of a sudden this stuff hit us and it raised questions of whether the political process could survive.
Waleed Nesyif
I think Paul Bremer single-handedly started the path of Iraq’s destruction.
I was going to work at that time, and there was a kid, couldn’t be more than 10, 11 years old. Selling gasoline. An American patrol passed by. There were two Humvees and an armoured carrier. One of the soldiers came back, hopped off the Humvee, took one of the canisters and ripped it with his knife, and started pouring it down the street. Now the kid was screaming, “My dad is going to kill me,” and trying to stop the soldier from pouring it. And the soldier slapped the kid so hard that he flew a couple of metres back and fainted. And the soldier turned around and waited for his friends to take a photo of him… I cannot describe the rage.
I think it participated heavily in creating the resistance. Had America done something very simple, like brought us power, water, some semblance of security, things wouldn’t have taken that turn. But they weren’t interested in that, were they?
Dexter Filkins
By the time I got to Fallujah for the second battle, I thought I’d seen it all. But no. God, no. That was a whole different level of violence.
One of the bogus justifications for the war was that Saddam and al-Qaeda were kind of breaking bread together, and it was nonsense, basically. But after the war started, al-Qaeda had very fertile grounds. The leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, was Jordanian. He was a lunatic. He was a bloodthirsty, murderous psychopath. But, man, the guy must have been really smart, because the operation that he set up in Iraq was basically this kind of unkillable killing machine. They cut off a piece of it and the rest of it would just keep going. It was incredible.
Brandon Barfield, one of the military policemen who guarded the captured Saddam Hussein
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Saddam said to me, ‘You aren’t going to get information if you are nice to people. That is why we torture’
Sally Mars
When al-Qaeda first appeared, people saw them as saviours. They were the owners of the real jihad. They would free us from the Americans and get the Americans out of the country. But then al-Qaeda’s attention became not just turned towards the Americans. They would bomb anything. They recruited teenagers and young people. They only wanted power – power and weapons.
Fallujah resident Abu Mohamed, who joined the local resistance against the Amercans in the first battle
The occupation came, and they ruined everything. The factions came along and started making trouble. This person kills that one and that one kills this one. This discrimination started – this one is Shia and this one is Sunni, this one is Kurdish and this one is Christian… None of them were serving the country. They were serving themselves.
Dexter Filkins
The Marines are ordered to move into the city, kill every insurgent they find, occupy the city and establish authority. Kill who? Because they’re in the population, but you don’t know who they are. It was bloody. American gunships are over the city, they’re firing rockets at buildings. They’re killing civilians. No doubt they’re killing insurgents, but it’s hideous.
Rudy Reyes
My mission in the first battle was to stabilise that area. And nobody’s gonna stop me and my people. We did everything and anything. Undercover operations. Direct action, covert action. We shut down the IED threat by killing anybody digging holes. Anybody. If you’re a little kid and you’re paid $5 to go dig a hole, we drop you. You can’t put an IED if there’s no hole to put it in. And at night if we saw three vehicles together, we’d smoke ’em all. At night, if you see five males, smoke ’em all. I didn’t even need to see weapons or explosives.
Same area where Blackwater contractors were hung up, we killed 35 enemy, let them know this is who you are f***ing with now. Those men were strung up on the vehicles, like meat, like deer, and driven like a promenade through the centre of Fallujah, to let ’em know that there’s a new sheriff in town.
Abu Mustafa, Fallujah resident
During Ramadan in 2004, my son Mustafa was ill, so I took him to the general hospital. The doctor said we had to give him the injections. Then I took him to his grandparents’ house, where we were visiting. I told his mum, “This is the medicine. We need to give him half a shot a day.”
Nidhal Mustafa, Abu Mustafa’s wife
After I’d given Mustafa the shot, I was carrying him home. The next thing I know, Mustafa is next to me with his guts in the dirt. I couldn’t feel my side, and my arm was torn open. Mustafa was on the ground and shouting, “Mama!” I was alone in the street.
I had no idea what was happening. An American missile had landed next to us. There was no al-Qaeda. Just families. All I could feel was my clothes torn and my side. All the flesh was in ribbons. I went over to Mustafa and scooped him up and crawled away. I couldn’t stand up.
Abu Mustafa
In the hospital, we went to the emergency room. A doctor came out to us and said, “I can’t guarantee if Mustafa will live or die. We did what we can and the rest is up to Allah.”
US Marines conducting a house-to-house search in Fallujah, November 2004
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Nidhal Mustafa
I didn’t even know that Mustafa lost his leg. I kept asking them, “Have you sewn his guts back in?” That’s all I knew about. Then they told me it wasn’t just his guts; it’s his leg, his testicles, his rear. Mustafa had tubes in his nose and throat. Tubes all over.
We were in hospital for three months. Mustafa – what was left of him? His kidney was gone, his hip, his leg – he can’t even go to the toilet like normal people.
December 13, 2003: Saddam identified
John Nixon, CIA analyst
It was about 4 o’clock when I heard that the military’s picked up someone. They’re not sure who it is – “How would you identify him if you were asked to?” I said, “Saddam has tribal tattoos on his wrist and on his hand. That’s the best way we can identify him without doing a blood examination or DNA tests.”
It takes a couple of days and then we find out that we’re going to be the ones in charge of debriefing him.
Military policeman Brandon Barfield
The main place we kept him was in a blown-up palace. We walked in, he was in his rec area outside smoking a cigar, listening to his radio.
I was sitting there, and he flat asked me, “How come you don’t like me?” I told him, “If you had us right now, you would be torturing us to get information.” He held his hand up and said, “That’s war. That’s what you do in war.” I said, “Yeah, but we don’t do that. We follow the rules of the Geneva conventions.” He said, “You ain’t going to get no information if you are nice to people. That is why we torture.”
Mowaffak al-Rubaie, known as Dr Mow, returned to Iraq from exile in 2003 and joined the Iraqi Governing Council before becoming national security adviser, which put him in charge of dealing with the captured Saddam.
We wanted Saddam Hussein to be tried in Iraq, because this was a healing process for the Iraqis. I wanted to give him the right he denied me and he denied hundreds of thousands of Iraqis before they were executed – defending himself live on television.
John Nixon
When I was talking with Saddam he said, “Do you think that I care who is Sunni and who is Shia? As long as they are Iraqi, that is what I care about. But now that you’ve removed Saddam Hussein from power, Iraq will become a playground for these forces that are looking to unleash terrorism on Iraq and on the region.” He knew more about his country than we did. He was under no illusions as to what was going on.
2005: al-Qaeda taking over the country
Tahany Saleh, Mosul student
In 2005, 2006, Mosul fell into the hands of al-Qaeda. They controlled all aspects of the city. Iraqi soldiers lived in complete horror, because they could be targeted at any moment. Citizens were also targeted by explosives. I remember one time, we got up in the morning, and in front of our house there was a body. Not a day would pass without a car bomb. Not a day would pass without an explosive belt or a suicide bomber. Not a day would pass without death in Mosul.
Omar Mohammed
The Awakening movement, which was supported directly by Bush, was mainly in Anbar. They call them Sahwa – tribal fighters. They were armed and given money by the US army. They asked them to kill the jihadists. Nothing else. The American army thought that the only way to stop the jihadists from growing was to have the tribes take down their own people.
Instead of supporting civil society, they used the tribes just the way Saddam used them. And this is also how Isis used the tribes after 2014. It’s the same circle of violence.
December 30, 2006: Saddam executed
Rauf Rahman, who was the chief judge at Saddam Hussein’s trial by the Supreme Iraqi Criminal Tribunal
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Judge Rauf Rahman, chief judge on the Supreme Iraqi Criminal Tribunal
It is difficult for a judge to sentence someone to death, but this is duty, law – a lawyer can’t ignore these obligations. Taking a person’s life is very, very difficult. I felt like I applied the law I was meant to apply.
Mowaffak al-Rubaie
The Americans handed over Saddam Hussein before the sunrise of Eid.
We said our dawn prayer, and waited until the Americans brought Saddam to the doorstep. He was bound and holding the Koran in his hands. I signed for him, and I led him to the execution chamber.
He was supposed to wear a hood. He refused to do it. He wanted to show that he was brave, courageous. We asked him to say, “There is no god but Allah, and his messenger is Muhammad.” This is something you do before you die. He did not say this spontaneously. It shows to me that Saddam never believed in Islam. His religion was himself.
With honour and pleasure, I am proud that I have carried the justice of the Iraqi court on this brutal, ruthless beast who has inflicted unbelievable atrocities throughout the years of his war. I pulled the lever. It didn’t go. So we had to ask him a second time to say, “There is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is his messenger.” Before he completed it, this time it went down. And here he is. With his cervical spine cut, and his white shirt stained with blood.
June 30, 2009: US troops pull out of Iraqi cities
John Nixon
I had high expectations of Barack Obama when he became president. I thought his instincts on the war had been correct. He’s coming into office in 2009, the surge has worked, the Anbar Awakening has really paid dividends in terms of putting al-Qaeda on the run and things are looking up. Instead, Obama just ignores Iraq and treats it as though it’s not his problem. He didn’t create it, he didn’t put the troops there, and he doesn’t want anything to do with it.
I used to think that if, as an intelligence analyst, you bring information to those in power, they will use it wisely. And it’s at this point that I realise it almost doesn’t matter what we say, the politicians will do what they want to do.
June 2014: Islamic State enters Mosul
Tahany Saleh, a student in Mosul when Islamic State took control of the city
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On the third or fourth day in Mosul, they declared the caliphate. They’d hang bodies in the streets. The fear we’d lived under from 2003 was nothing in comparison
Tahany Saleh
I remember in 2014 I was taking my MA exams, so I was really focused on how I was going to pass them. A friend of mine called. She said, “Tahany, don’t be scared, but ‘the Group’ have crossed the bridge.”
At dawn, I heard megaphones. “We are the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant. We’re coming according to the prophecy. We’re going to govern you.” All our neighbours tried to escape the area. We stayed because we didn’t understand what was going on.
Omar Mohammed
The rise of Isis happened all of a sudden. We woke up in the morning and, from that morning, we started paying taxes to Isis directly. They came to all shops, businesses and employees, and they would leave a paper with the money you should pay and a phone number of the Islamic State. If you don’t pay they will kill you. There was a new law in town.
The attack happened at 3am on June 6. They took control of a city that was full of almost 60,000 soldiers and police – all of them, all of a sudden, left the city.
A governor appeared at night. He was carrying an AK47. He said, “Don’t worry, everything is OK. Those are our brothers who took back power.” By June 10, everything was open. Streets we never believed we could drive through again were open.
Isis patrol in a commandeered Iraqi army vehicle in Fallujah
AP
On June 13, things changed. Isis distributed a document – the Charter of the City. Once I read this I said, “These guys are here to stay. It’s something dangerous.” It read, “You have tried the republican government, you have tried the rule of the American invasion, now it’s time to live under the rule of the Islamic State.”
Tahany Saleh
On the third or fourth day, on the Mosul University podium they declared the caliphate.
And then they published the “city constitution”. Women couldn’t go out without being accompanied by a man or boy from the family. You were obliged to adhere to Islamic dress codes. There were no salaries. All the services stopped working.
They started entering people’s houses and arrested people. They looted and robbed Christians’ homes: they were sinners. It was rare for Isis to kill two people in the same way. They had to innovate the way of killing, whether it be burning parts of the body, cutting off parts of the body, shooting. All these things that the world watched, we lived. And to scare civilians, they’d hang the bodies in the streets.
All the entrances were closed. Because if Isis opened any exit, then not a single person would have stayed.
After 2014, the fear that we lived under from 2003 till 2014 was nothing at all in comparison.
A car bomb – something normal. An explosive belt – normal. That year was so different that it made us completely forget all the fear of the times that preceded it. So much so that we wished to die. That’s it. We had had enough.
© James Bluemel and Dr Renad Mansour 2020. Extracted from Once Upon a Time in Iraq by James Bluemel and Dr Renad Mansour, to be published by BBC Books on July 16, priced £20. The documentary is broadcast on BBC Two on July 13 at 9pm