Safa Al Ahmad travelled to Yemen to investigate the escalation of US strikes against Al Qaeda. This is a campaign that has largely been fought in secret, but in January 2017 it briefly became headline news when US Special Forces raided the village of Yakla.

President Trump quoted the then Secretary of Defense, James Mattis, describing a ‘highly successful’ raid which ‘generated large amounts of vital intelligence’. Safa Al Ahmad travelled to Yemen to find out what really happened at Yakla. In the film she finds evidence of misidentified targets, civilian deaths and terrorised communities.

With unique access and tireless research, Al Ahmad shows that Al Qaeda recruitment in this region of Yemen is not necessarily driven by a desire for global jihad but by local factors, and is often a simple fight for survival.

The film finds evidence that significant numbers of Yemeni civilians have been killed. Exactly two years since the first strike on Yakla, Targeting Yemen suggests that contradictions in America’s policy towards Yemen are sabotaging its strategic aims – and have been since the start.

Chair:

Christopher Mitchell became Documentaries Editor at BBC Arabic in April 2018, after two years working for the BBC as a freelance executive producer. He is an award-winning writer, director and executive producer, having made many films for networks including BBC TV, ITV, Channel 4, ARTE, WDR Germany and Al Jazeera English. He was managing director of the independent production company OR Media from 2005 until 2014.

Speakers:

Safa Al Ahmad is journalist and filmmaker who has directed documentaries for PBS and the BBC focusing on uprisings in the Middle East.  Her  film “Yemen Under Siege” won two Emmy Awards in 2017.  She is the winner of the 2015 Index on Censorship Freedom of Expression Award for Journalism, the El Mundo award for journalism for her body of work in 2015, Canadian Journalists for Free Expression  (CJFE) in 2015 and the Association of International Broadcasting (AIB) Best International Investigation for her film ‘Saudi’s Secret Uprising’ in 2014. Her writing on the Arab uprisings was published in an anthology ‘Writing Revolutions’ published by Penguin and won an English Pen award.

Farea Al-Muslimi is chairman and co-founder of Sanaa Center for Strategic Studies. He is also an Associate Fellow at Chatham House. He previously worked for the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut and Middle East  Institute in Washington, D.C. as a visiting scholar where he covered Yemen and Gulf.

In August 2016, UN Secretary General Ban-Ki Moon appointed Al-Muslimi to the Advisory Group of Experts for Progress Study on Youth, Peace and Security, a study mandated by Security Council resolution 2250 to examine the positive contribution of youth to peace processes and conflict resolution and effective responses at local, national, regional and international levels.

Al-Muslimi’s writings and analysis on Yemen and the wider region have been published in Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, New York Times, The National, The Independent, The Guardian, Al-Hayyat, Assafir Arabi, Al-Monitor, and many other publications.

A new ICRC, report called ‘I Saw My City Die’ found that between 2010 and 2015, nearly half of all civilian war deaths worldwide occurred in Syria, Iraq and Yemen. The majority of these deaths have taken place in cities: Mosul, Aleppo and Taiz. Join our panel to discuss the emerging trend of War in Cities, with comparative studies of different cities and nations, over recent years.

“Over the past three years, our research shows that wars in cities accounted for a shocking 70% of all civilian deaths in Iraq and Syria”, said the ICRC’s Regional Director for the Middle East, Robert Mardini. “This illustrates just how deadly these battles have become. This is all the more alarming as offensives get underway in cities like Raqqa in Syria, or intensify in Mosul, Iraq. A new scale of urban suffering is emerging, where no one and nothing is spared by the violence.”

The conflicts in these countries have resulted in internal displacement and migration levels unprecedented since WWII. More than 17 million Iraqis, Syrians and Yemenis have fled their homes. And these battles risk becoming even more protracted if real political solutions are not found soon. Wars in cities are so devastating because of the way in which they are being fought. Armed parties are failing to distinguish between military objectives and civilian infrastructure – or worse, they are using or directly targeting them.

Chair

Nawal Al-Maghafi is an award-winning film journalist specialising on the Middle East. She has worked for BBC Newsnight, BBC World, Middle East Eye and Reuters amongst others. She has reported extensively from Yemen, focusing on the humanitarian situation and the West’s involvement in the conflict. Al-Maghafi was nominated for a Frontline Club Award 2017 for her film covering the human cost of the war in Yemen.

Speakers

Pawel Krzysiek has been working in communications in Syria for much of the war for the ICRC, much of his work has been to cross the frontline of war zones, into besieged towns. He is a primary contributor to this report covering the section on Syria.

Joshua Baker is a documentary filmmaker and a journalist and a contributor to the ICRC Report focusing on the section of ‘Mosul’. Baker was on the frontline with Iraqi special forces as they pushed into civilian neighbourhoods during the battle for Mosul. He witnessed first-hand how civilians were being caught up in the fighting, particularly when a suicide bomb detonated right in front of him. He began his career in print working for The Times as Foreign News Night Editor. More recently Baker completed Africa’s Billion Pound Migrant Trail with Benjamin Zand for BBC.  Earlier this year he was an Investigative Producer on two films for BBC Panorama following the terror attacks in Manchester and London, where he secured access to a friend of the Manchester bomber. His film The Battle For Mosul (US title Battle for Iraq) for PBS Frontline and The Guardian was shortlisted for best TV Documentary category at the One World Media Awards and listed for a Grierson Award.

Roland Oliphant  is a Senior Foreign correspondent to the Telegraph and until recently covered Russia and the former Soviet Union from the Moscow bureau. He has reported on the Ukrainian revolution and civil war from Kiev, Crimea, and Eastern Ukraine.

Iona Craig  is an independent Irish-British journalist. Her work currently focuses on Yemen and the Arabian Peninsula. Iona lived in Sana’a from 2010 to 2015 as The Times (of London) Yemen correspondent. She continues to travel back and forth from the country to report on the conflict and deteriorating humanitarian crisis. In June 2014 she won the UK’s most prestigious investigative journalism award, The Martha Gellhorn Prize. Her reporting on an American drone strike that hit a wedding convoy in Yemen was awarded the Frontline Club print award for 2014.

Albina Kovalyova is Television correspondent and producer covering Russia, Ukraine, CIS for FSN and Channel 4 News. Kovalyova has just returned from East Ukraine after doing a report on the impact of fighting on civilian life in front line towns in the country.

Photo Credits: ICRC

Credits

Directed and reported by: Nawal Al-Maghafi
Filmed by: Mohammed Al-Mikhlafi
Produced by: Darius Bazargan

• Disclaimer: this film contains graphic content. Please enquire if you are booking tickets for adolescents or children.

Chair

Dr Gabriele vom Bruck is a Senior Lecturer on Social Anthropology of the Middle East at SOAS university.  She has conducted extensive research in Yemen and published on elites, religious movements, consumption, gender and photography.  She is the author of Islam, Memory and Morality in Yemen (Palgrave 2005) and co-editor of The Anthropology of Names and Naming (Cambridge UP 2006).  She is currently completing a biography of a Yemeni woman.

Speakers 

Nawal Almaghafi is a BBC Correspondent/ filmmaker   specialised on the Middle East. She has reported extensively from Yemen, focusing on the humanitarian situation and the West’s involvement in the conflict. In her latest investigation, The Funeral Bombing, she crossed the frontline in Yemen from areas under rebel control to areas under government control to find out who was responsible for the deadliest attack in Yemen’s 21 month conflict. She was also amongst the BBC team that revealed BAE’s sales of sophisticated mass surveillance technology to repressive states in the Middle East for the BBC production: Weapons of Mass Surveillance.

Rasha Mohamed is Amnesty International’s Yemen researcher. She has gone on numerous research missions to Yemen since the armed conflict erupted in March 2015. Her focus has been primarily the range of human rights violations and international humanitarian law (“laws of war”) by all sides to the conflict. For the Saudi Arabia-led coalition, this has included documenting numerous unlawful airstrikes which have killed and injured civilians, and the use of internationally banned weapons like cluster bombs. For the Huthi armed group, it has included recruitment of child soldiers, arbitrary detentions and impeding the flow of humanitarian aid.
Outside Yemen, she has also been very active in pushing for more rigorous arms control policies to be adhered to by governments who fuel the conflict by transferring arms to Saudi Arabia and its allies. In particular, she has been involved in work to lobby the Brazilian, US and UK governments over their arms supplies to the coalition, and her research formed the basis of Amnesty International’s intervention in a current UK High Court Judicial Review of the UK government’s arms transfers to Saudi Arabia.

Dr Glen Rangwala is a lecturer at Trinity College, Cambridge. Trained in political theory and international law, he completed a doctorate on political and legal rhetoric in the Arab Middle East. His focus on the politics of the modern Middle East, especially the Levant (including Lebanon, Syria, Israel, Palestine) and the northern Gulf region are on the forms of political debate in these regions; and the character of the state and state-building processes. He work also includes theories of contemporary conflict, particularly the political economy of modern war.

Saudi Arabia remains the UK’s most important arms client, and the government has granted export licences for more than £3.3bn of aircraft, munitions and other equipment. The British government has stated the Saudis must conduct an investigation into allegations of humanitarian crimes. But many are urging that Saudi Arabia’s investigation of its own alleged humanitarian violations is not an adequate inquiry.

At the same time, the US has become more involved in the conflict, including a failed commando raid that caused the deaths of multiple civilians and a U.S. service member.

Is enough consideration of humanitarian contexts being taken in arms export licensing and counter-terrorism? With a judicial review aiming to halt UK arms sales to Saudi Arabia beginning in February, we will discuss the role of foreign powers in Yemen’s civil conflict.

Chaired by Yemeni/ British journalist and filmmaker Nawal al-Maghafi. Nawal’s work has featured on Channel 4, BBC Newsnight, BBC World and BBC Arabic, amongst others.

Speakers (full panel announced soon)

David Wearing has just completed his doctoral thesis on Britain’s relationship with the Gulf Arab monarchies. He teaches international relations and Middle East politics at SOAS, and has contributed articles for The Guardian, CNN and the New Statesman. He sits on the steering committee of Campaign Against Arms Trade, and is the author of their recent report: “A Shameful Relationship: UK Complicity in Saudi State Violence”.

Iona Craig is a British-Irish independent journalist and Orwell Fellow. She was previously based in Sana’a from 2010 to 2015 as Yemen correspondent for The Times. Since Yemen’s civil war began Iona has been the only international journalist to repeatedly cross the front lines to report on both sides of the conflict, travelling over 3,000 miles across the country since March 2015 to file reports for TV, radio and print. During her time in Yemen Iona has reported for over 30 publications and broadcasters worldwide including most recently The Intercept, Harper’s, IRIN and RTÉ radio.

Rasha Mohamed is Amnesty International’s Yemen researcher. She has gone on numerous research missions to Yemen since the armed conflict erupted in March 2015. Her focus has been primarily the range of human rights violations and international humanitarian law (“laws of war”) by all sides to the conflict. For the Saudi Arabia-led coalition, this has included documenting numerous unlawful airstrikes which have killed and injured civilians, and the use of internationally banned weapons. Her research formed the basis of Amnesty International’s intervention in a current UK High Court Judicial Review of the UK government’s arms transfers to Saudi Arabia.

This screening will be followed by a Q&A with director Nawal al-Maghafi and others.

Since March 2015, a coalition of the Middle East’s richest countries, led by Saudi Arabia, and armed by the UK and US has been bombing the region’s poorest state, Yemen.

While the bombing campaign has been receiving intermittent coverage in the international media, the enormous scale of the humanitarian catastrophe unfolding in Yemen as a result continues to be overlooked.

Today, more than twenty million Yemenis are relying on aid to survive. The coalition’s blockade of the country has previously cut off the food and aid imports on which the population depends, and while trade has now resumed they maintain complete control over all imports and exports to and from Yemen.

We meet Shuaib, he was rushed in to hospital suffering from fever and diarrhoea. Hodeida’s main hospital is already struggling to cope, working under airstrikes, electricity cuts and lack of supplies. Shuaib’s antibiotic is completely out of stock, and doctors do the best they can to save him with the little supplies that they have.

Through the eyes of Ashwaq Muharram, a medical doctor living and practicing in Hodeida, viewers will see the silent killer of this ongoing conflict: the blockade currently imposed by the Saudi-led coalition and the widespread bombing of infrastructure which is drastically disrupting civilians’ access to aid.

This critical film provides an insight into what is happening in Yemen beyond the bombs and the bullets. It will introduce the audience to Yemenis whose coping strategies have collapsed, and who are in desperate need of the world’s attention as a humanitarian catastrophe unfolds in their land.

Directed and Reported by: Nawal Al-Maghafi
Edit Producer: Karolina Mottram
Edited by: Shayma Alissi
Filmed by: Mohammed Al-Mikhlafi
Runtime: 25′

Speakers:

Kavita Puri – Editor, BBC Our World

Nawal Al-Maghafi – BBC Reporter

Andre Heller Perache – head of the Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) programmes unit and former head of mission in Yemen

Peter Oborne – Associate editor of The Spectator and chief political commentator at The Daily Telegraph

We will explore the disproportionate lack of media coverage – as well as the extent to which the US, the UK and France may be complicit in fuelling the conflict as they sell billions of dollars worth of arms to the Saudi-led coalition. We will map out the players involved, and discuss the toll of the conflict on one of the poorest countries in the Middle East, as well as the potential for reconciliation and a lasting peace process.

Chair: Nawal Al-Maghafi is an independent journalist and filmmaker, and was the first journalist to enter Sadah and gain an exclusive interview with one of the key leaders of the Houthi movement. She has reported across the border in Saudi Arabia on the conditions facing the Shi’a population there, and recently produced a BBC World film on Abdu Aljanadi and his family, interviewing the former President Ali Abdullah Saleh and his close associates. She has documented the journey of Ethiopian migrants traveling to Saudi Arabia for work and the stories of those who were kidnapped and tortured in Yemen, including at the hands of members of the Yemeni military. Most recently she worked on two films with BBC Newsnight investigating the UK and US role in the war in Yemen and is a frequent writer on The Telegraph, Middle East Eye amongst other publications.

The panel:

Iona Craig is an award-winning independent journalist who was based in Sana’a, Yemen for over four years until December 2014. Former Yemen correspondent for The Times, she has also written for The Irish Times, The Intercept and The Los Angeles Times – and regularly contributes to Al Jazeera America, Index on Censorship, the BBC and others. When civil war broke out in Yemen in March 2015, she was the only international journalist to repeatedly cross the front lines to report on both sides of the conflict. She crossed the Bab el Mandeb by boat between Djibouti and Aden three times to file reports for TV, radio and print from inside the two besieged cities of Aden and Taiz, and spent more than five months travelling over 2,000 miles across the country from Saada to Seiyun to cover the conflict. In early 2016 she met with Al-Qaeda officials while reporting from the AQAP-controlled city of Mukalla.

Sarah Leah Whitson is the executive director of Human Rights Watch‘s Middle East and North Africa Division and oversees the work of the division in 19 countries. She has led dozens of advocacy and investigative missions throughout the region, focusing on issues of armed conflict, accountability, legal reform, migrant workers, and political rights. She has published widely on human rights issues in the Middle East in international and regional media, including The New York Times, Foreign Policy, The Los Angeles Times, and CNN, and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Awssan Kamal has worked with diaspora groups in the UK to mobilise and campaign on humanitarian issues since the Arab Uprising in 2011. He co-founded the Yemen Relief and Development Forum, and on the ground in Yemen he has worked with a collective of country activists called #SupportYemen to advocate for the rights of marginalised communities, youth and women. He previously worked in Yemen for Oxfam’s governance programme, and is currently the humanitarian campaigns coordinator for Oxfam Yemen.

This event will be moderated by Max Houghton, senior lecturer in photography at London College of Communication, University of the Arts London. She previously ran the documentary photography MA at the University of Westminster, and edited the photography biannual 8 magazine for six years. She writes regularly on the arts for publications including FOAM, Photoworks, 1000 Words and The Daily Telegraph.

David Birkin is a British-born artist based in New York. He studied anthropology at Oxford University and fine art at the Slade, and was a fellow on the Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum of American Art. His past projects have included a collaboration with the courtroom sketch artist at Guantanamo, a visual rendering of identification numbers from the Iraqi civilian casualty database, and skywriting an extract of CIA legalese above Manhattan. He has exhibited internationally, most recently at The Mosaic Rooms in London, FotoFest in Houston, and the Whitney ISP in New York, and has written for publications including Creative Time Reports, Cabinet Magazine, Ibraaz and the Harvard Advocate.

The greatest peril comes not from a lack of analysis but from a lack of imagination.”
– Sir William Patey, British Ambassador to Saudi Arabia (2007-10)

Is Saudi Arabia a kingdom in peril? This was the key question under discussion at a packed event held at the Frontline Club on Monday 27 April. Following the accession of King Salman and the ongoing conflict in Yemen, a panel, chaired by journalist Owen Bennett-Jones, discussed the potential destabilisation of the regime and the possibility for change within the country.

Robert Lacey, an author who has covered Saudi Arabia for almost 40 years, said that although talk of its imminent demise and the collapse of the House of Saud had been repeatedly anticipated, these predictions failed to take into account “the Saudis very sophisticated system” that operates extremely effectively within the country.

Carool Kersten, senior lecturer in the study of Islam and the Muslim world at King’s College London, agreed that while in the past the Saudi states have been threatened, the dynasty has always demonstrated an “elasticity” which has “enabled it to bounce back.”

For former ambassador to Saudi Arabia Sir William Patey (2007-10), it boiled down to a question of external perception versus a very different internal reality.

“From Whitehall it was almost a dialectical argument, that [Saudi Arabia] would collapse under its own internal contradictions. But Saudi Arabia is different [from regimes and systems like the Soviet Union]; namely that it is run by the Al Saud who have survival in their DNA. It’s a very cautious, a very slow moving system operating by consensus. But the times when they move quickly are when they are in peril.”

From dealing with the threat of Nasserism in the 1960s to the assassination of King Faisal and the siege of the Grand Mosque in the 1980s, which saw the regime develop a more Islamist approach, the Al Sauds have “a history of doing just enough, just in time,” said Kersten.

On whether there was the potential for regime change in the kingdom, Patey described his experience of the Iranian revolution. From a diplomatic view, the failure to anticipate the overthrow of the Shah “was not a failure of analysis but rather a failure of imagination. We failed to imagine what the Middle East would be like without him.”

In relation to the current context, Patey offered a note of caution: “just because we don’t like the look of the Middle East (and especially the Gulf) without the Al Saud, let us not close off our imagination to the possibility.”

Safa Al Ahmad, a Saudi freelance journalist, said that it is not a question of collapse but a question of peril. Saudi Arabia is entering a new phase of existence and will need to deal with the changing geopolitical and regional realities.

“Saudi Arabia at the moment is too big to fail,” said Kersten. “This is even the view of the population who have too much to lose to really rise up. I think the Al Saud are masters, and have been for 250 years, of playing to this fear and doing the right thing just in time.”

This is represented not only in the often contradictory suppression of opposition and internal dissent – be it of the Shia minority, liberals or online activists (Saudi Arabia has the highest number of Twitter users per capita in the world) – but also through the co-opting of Saudi citizens by the government who play on the turmoil of the Arab spring, which has seen Saudis less willing to take a risk with regime change.

For Kersten, the difference with many of the surrounding countries is that Saudi Arabia is not ruled by a single dictator but by “a dynasty with 3000 potential pretenders to the throne.”

“The country’s not called Saudi Arabia for nothing. It’s a Saudi State, there is no Saudi nation – rather five countries with regional and ethnic differences internally. The Al Saud have capitalised on that to present themselves as the only people who could hold it together.”

On the question of where and how change could originate, the panel were divided. Kersten suggested that it could come from the economic elite who have the means and influence but cannot develop under the Al Saud as they would in other countries, while Al Ahmad reasserted that “the worst case scenario is to have that change come from the outside.”

Citing post-Gaddafi Libya, Al Ahmad said that within Saudi Arabia “everybody wants reform but not to the extent of removing the royal family… the idea of the House of Saud not being there is the scariest option of all.”

For Patey there is no single thing that would bring Saudi Arabia down, but rather a combination of factors.

“There would have to be a perfect storm. A threat from political Islam, a regional crisis, and economic crisis, crucially a division within the Al Saud… all of those things could potentially produce Saudi Arabia in peril, but any one of them on their own is not enough.”

From left to right: Agnes Odhiambo, Gauri van Gulik, Liz Ford, Liesl Gerntholtz, Rothna Begum and Samer Muscati.

The Women’s Rights Division at Human Rights Watch joined The Guardian’s Liz Ford on Tuesday 13 May to discuss the highs and lows of the challenges faced in improving the lives of women and girls around the world.

The event took place as the world’s attention focuses on Nigeria’s kidnapped schoolgirls and subsequent failure to free the more than 200 victims from militant group Boko Haram.

Shining a spotlight on this specific issue is important, but everyday, harrowing realities are being lived by 39,000 girls subjected to forced marriages globally, said Agnes Odhiambo, researcher for women’s rights in Africa.

“You see it happening so much every day that actually you don’t stop to ask yourself what kind of suffering, what kind of abuses do these girls go through? In South Sudan, some girls actually think that death is better than a forced marriage. There are many cases of girls committing suicide.”

In the African context, she added, children being born into the family are of course celebrated but behind the scenes there may be a far more disturbing story, particularly around the issues of sexual violence and maternal health.

The panel was also keen however to point out successes in the fight for women’s rights, highlighting international treaties and conventions moving forward in earnest as well as grass roots initiatives that aim to tackle abuses against women and girls.

Director of HRW’s Women’s Rights Division Liesl Gerntholtz explained that the work her team is doing by collecting accurate information and evidence across some 90 countries is about “the long game” in making positive change.

“We believe, perhaps naively, that if you can just get the information in front of the right people that of course they will want to stop what is going on on the ground, and sometimes they do and sometimes not so much,” she said. “Particularly in human rights, those of us who work have to be willing to play the long game because change is always incremental.”

The fantastic @hrw women's rights division talk at @frontlineclub "It's all about the long game." pic.twitter.com/Xazvauj17c

— Alex Glynn (@alexglynn1) May 13, 2014

In some instances, the significant advances made grow out of local anger at terrible abuses, which HRW is able to take to the policy makers. In Yemen, marriages were happening at extremely young ages and both local and international outrage were ignited when an eight-year-old girl, Rawan, died of internal bleeding after being married to a man five-times her age.

The incident came in the aftermath of the Arab uprisings and after a transitional government took hold. HRW recognised an opportunity to bring gender issues to the negotiating table in the midst of a national constitutional dialogue.

Yemen now has a Child Rights Act, which includes setting a minimum age of marriage at 18 and criminalising those who take part in child marriage. Additionally, FGM [female genital mutilation] has been criminalised. The Act is going to cabinet, and HRW is pressuring them to pass it and send to Parliament along with other constitutional guarantees, said Rothna Begum, researcher for women’s rights in Middle East and North Africa region.

Still, hard and long fought for rights can be very fragile and quickly rolled back, particularly in post-conflict environments, said researcher for women’s rights in emergencies Samer Muscati, pointing to Iraq as an example where the space for women has shrunk considerably despite constitutional guarantees of parliamentary representation set at 25 per cent.

In Somalia’s Mogadishu, Muscati describes a conflict in which sexual violence is an every day fact of life for women and girls with a backdrop of stigma and lack of services to help them.

“They are on their own. One of the positives is that the international community has worked with Somalia to develop joint commitments. The challenge is trying to ensure that those commitments are met,” he said.

Pressure from developed countries could go far in changing the lives of millions of girls and women around the world, however, the UK is cited as playing a negative role – specifically in the recent initiative to tackle issues of forced labour that includes such categories as domestic workers as well as trafficked sex workers, said Gauri van Gulik, global advocate in the Women’s Rights Division at HRW.

“We hear a lot on one hand from Theresa May and others about how they want to end modern-day slavery. But in these negotiations and at this important moment the United Kingdom is saying we don’t want binding standards we just want a recommendation, or guidelines, which is extremely negative,” she said. “There is actually a lot of work to do in the United Kingdom when it comes to foreign policy.”

The audience was invited to ask questions and issues were raised around gaps in services for elderly women, women living with disabilities, or even highly privileged women bound by strictly patriarchal societies. Also, the audience heard how HRW tries to manage compatibility between the complicated relationships inherent to traditional laws where they may be in conflict with human rights laws.

Ultimately, people questioned how they could get involved apart from sending money to a charity and being directly involved to make a difference.

Gerntholtz replied: “Change is local. The most important thing anyone can do is work in their own communities . . . it creates a community of activists that you are a part of.”

Watch and listen to the full event here:

On Friday 12th April the Frontline Club hosted the first UK screening of Dirty Wars; author and investigative reporter Jeremy Scahill‘s chilling account of his journey from a remote corner of Afghanistan to Yemen, the American Congress and Somalia as he investigated the rise of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC).

Producer Anthony Arnove introduced the film and thanked the director, Richard Rowley, Scahill‘s co-writer David Riker and fellow producer Brenda Coughlin. After the screening he was joined by Scahill via Skype.

“This film started of as a very different story,” Scahill said. “It started off as a more linear documentary and was going to be focussed on Afghanistan and the war within the war – the special operations war. As we started to research who was conducting these raids we realised it was part of a much bigger story…I didn’t realise just exactly how much of a part these forces lay in these expanding US wars.”

Whilst Dirty Wars the book tells many of the stories of the people Scahill encountered in depth the film was much more of a personal journey:

“This was a really transformative experience, I didn’t see us ending up in Yemen and Somalia when we started this project and looking back on it I really think it did change everyone who worked on the film – myself and Rick [Rowley] certainly.”

Dirty Wars, which won the Cinematography Award for US Documentary at Sundance Film Festival 2013, details night raids made by American forces in detail using footage from mobile phones filmed in the aftermath of strikes and first hand accounts from survivors including young children.

“When we premiered… we were overwhelmed by the response from the community of filmmakers and the people that were at the festival… It’s sort of surreal to me but publications that are normally reviewing Hollywood-type movies gave it quite good reviews… It’s going to be interesting to see when it ends up theatrically in theatres in the United States how it plays in middle America.”

“…People have a sense that they were seeing something that isn’t often on the news in the United states and I think that this is a film that is above politics. It’s not a Democratic or Republican or a left or right film. I think it’s really trying to get to the heart of what our world looks like more than 10 years into this world as a battle field mentality.”

The film is accompanied by a haunting original score by David Harrington and performed by the Kronos Quartet. It is collaborations like this that Arnove says led to the Sundance cinematography win and he added that working with Scahill on his previous project Blackwater encouraged them to film this second investigation from the start.

“This time around we really thought it would be interesting to start making the film at the beginning of the investigation which is part of the reason it took unexpected twists and turns in the course of the filmmaking.”

Scahill added that part of the film’s success is that it powerfully resonates with viewers and particularly the story of targeted American citizen and alleged member of al-Qaeda Anwar al-Awlaki.

“One of the reasons that we chose to focus on that story is that it’s a story that should should resonate with folks in this country [the US] who actually have their own moral responsibility to hold their own government accountable.”

As JSOC’s raids are carried out increasingly in the open and are publicly praised – as in the case of the operation which killed Osama Bin Laden – Scahill was asked if feelings of despair come in to play:

“One of the enduring legacies of the Obama administration… is that he’s going to go down in recent history as the president that solidified assassination as a central component of US foreign policy and sold as a popular cause to any liberals who support him…. I am doing what journalists should do which is viewing those in power as a force that needs to be held accountable and confronted for its actions, regardless of whichever party happens to be in power.”

Jeremy Scahill will be in the UK to launch the book Dirty Wars from the 12th May 2013, follow the link to see his tour details and watch the trailer for Dirty Wars the film below.