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Rageh Omaar's reports from Baghdad during the Iraq War earned him recognition among TV viewers in North America, as well as Europe. Five years after the West invaded Iraq, he told Geoff Ellis about making a very personal film, Rageh Omaar: the Iraq War by Numbers (Monday 17 March, 10:35pm, ITV1).
What's your programme about?
We've all been bombarded with so much information about Iraq that I think the basic questions have got lost. "How has the war changed ordinary people's lives?" "How does the situation now compare to five years ago, before the fall of Saddam?" So I've gone back and made a film which introduces some of the friends and their families I knew before the war.
It can't have been easy talking to friends who've had to endure the war and its aftermath.
It was one of the most difficult assignments I've done because it was so personal. I've been interviewing people I know and love.
What's been their experience of events?
A lot of them have fled. In Iraq, virtually everyone of them has had relatives kidnapped or threatened with kidnapping. The most startling thing is that Iraq's crisis has been a middle-class refugee crisis. Iraq's middle-classes have paid the biggest price - they've fallen from the greatest height. Iraq once had the most secular and the most educated middle-class in the Middle East.
Where have these refugees gone?
There are one-and-a-half million Iraqi refugees in neighbouring Syria. I met a very close and old friend living in exile there. I was overwhelmed when I heard his story. He was kidnapped and forced to watch people being beheaded. Eventually, he was able to flee with his family. His wife has suffered enormously - she's not been able to speak for a number of years. He said to me, "Rageh, I and all the Iraqis have lost everything - it's been taken by the wind."
It's ironic that your reports from Iraq made your name internationally as a TV newsman.
It's another reason why making this film was difficult. I was going back to Baghdad, a city I know and love and a city which also changed my life for the better. It gave me opportunities I'd never dreamed were possible. I was going back to see those friends who helped make that happen. But, in contrast to me, those friends and colleagues have lost everything.
What's the verdict? Were Iraqis better off under Saddam's dictatorship?
I don't think anyone can say that for ordinary Iraqis life is better now. We have been unable to provide Iraqis with security. They can't leave their homes without fearing being blown to pieces, shot in crossfire or kidnapped. They fear their homes being looted, and of being threatened and intimidated because they're the wrong religion or the wrong sect for the neighbourhood. It's worse now and that's the judgement of everyone I spoke to.
Are there any grounds for optimism?
In Syria, what you see when Iraqi refugees are left to their own devices is they've created mixed communities. It's what Baghdad used to be like before the war. They're recreating the mixed neighbourhoods where it doesn't matter if you're Shia or a Sunni Muslim, or Kurdish or whatever. That's very heartening.
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