I just watched an Australian documentary about Mullah Krekar (whose real name is Najmuddin Faraj Ahmad), one of the founders of the militant, Kurdish, Islamist organization Ansar al Islam, and an asylum seeker in Norway. The guy whom the Americans tried to use to link Saddam Hussein to Osama bin Laden a couple of years back, and all that.

All in all, Krekar seems like a fairly uncomfortable fellow. He claims to support and utilize rather brutal methods, he’s hardly very progressive, and generally speaking, he reminds me a bit of your average stereotype extremist.

But somehow, the form of this presentation, and indeed the whole documentary, actually — inadvertedly, I’m sure — were of such a nature that he came out of it relatively well, compared to the documentarists themselves.

First of all, they made some unsourced claims about Krekar’s followers — and throught them Krekar himself — being responsible for the deaths of hundreds of men, women and children, and that he was an unrepenting terrorrist. And yet as good as the only act of “terrorism” they focused on was a suicide attack on a Kurdish military post in April 2003, in which an Australian cameraman (who “coincidentally” worked for the same TV station as the journalists who made this documentary, the ABC) was killed when he for some mysterious reason ran towards a couple of fleeing Kurdish soldiers. Because unluckily for said cameraman, they were fleeing from a suicide bomber in a car…

Now, as far as I was able to understand, the cameraman and his accompaning journalist were travelling alongside a troop of Kurdish soldiers, in a warzone. They had also closely followed these same soldiers during an attack on an Ansar al Islam base, and seemed like a couple of servile army-journalists, judging from the clips from their reports shown in this documentary. I’m not sure whether or not it was during this attack on the Ansar al Islam base that the suicide bomber appeared, but the fact remains: This person voluntarily went into a warzone in the company of soldiers, and then he was killed by a suicide bomber.

I have to admit, I don’t really see what all the fuss is about. First of all, making a documentary based on this seems like nothing so much as a lack of something constructive to do. And I feel I’m being generous when I say this, as the journalist who made the documentary started crying when he talked about the cameraman, relied heavily on editing appealing to the emotions rather than rationality, and interviewed only four people: Krekar himself; an American something who worked for some foundation or other (it had the name of what I believe to be a Washingtonian suburb in its name, but I can’t remember which), and didn’t seem entirely objective; a Norwegian bureaucrat; and the journalist who was with the aforementioned cameraman when he was killed. Only one of these was not hostile towards Krekar, namely Krekar himself. Hardly a fair and balanced selection of sources, if you ask me.

Then there was the angling of it all. Krekar seemed to belong to a school of war theorists and warriors who believe in the concept of total war. In this view, everyone who contributes to the war efforts are legitimate targets, and everyone does, in some way or other. I believe it was the German Clausewitz who came up with these theories after the Napoleonic wars, but it seems to have been rather widespread ideas long before this. It has also been one of the foundation of the warfare of most “civilized” states since the end of the 19th century. (Far longer, of course, in reality.) Compare, for example, this to the allied bombings of German civilian areas during the Second World War.

But back to Krekar. This view of his implies that he sees civilians as completely legitimate targets of violence during a conflict, and a lot of evidence I’ve seen elsewhere has pointed towards him and his followers pretty much practicing what they preach in this regard. That is, they don’t shirk from killing civilians, if that’s what they think is necessary. (Here I might have pointed out that in this, they are not so dissimilar from our Western generals and politicians, but it seems redundant. So I won’t bother.) However, that is something which the Australian documentary hardly emphasized at all. Granted, they spent perhaps a minute on a situation where Ansar al Islam had kidnapped two employees of the Iraqi administration, but in comparison they spent perhaps ten to fifteen minutes on the Australian cameraman. And as he was killed in a suicide attack, the still living Australian journalists asked Krekar if he supported suicide attacks.

To which Krekar responded in an affirmative manner.

From which the Australians drew the conclusion that Mullah Krekar supports terrorism.

And I and the people I was watching this was, all though, “WHAT?!” How on the Gods’ Green Earth do you draw that line?

Sure, suicide attacks are a favourite method of terrorists, but when Ansar al Islam places a man in a car along with a bunch of explosives, and sends him at a freakin’ military installation, it doesn’t fall under any kind of definition of terrorist attack that I’ve heard of.

Obviously, I don’t think Krekar and his cronies aren’t terrorists. But when civilians deliberately seek out soldiers in a warzone, and then get killed as a direct result of this, they are not the victims of terrorism, any less than the soldiers are. Neither is Krekar and Ansar al Islam terrorists when they attack American and Australian troops in Iraq, in spite of the Australians’ claims.

Hell, normally I’d probably even support their attack on Krekar, depite it being what one could call unilateral. Or biased, if one was to use straight language. But when the journalists display such a blatant lack of objectivity, and of reflection on their own role in it all, while they at the same time have an ugly tendency to use emotional means rather than reasoned arguments backed by facts, they lose me fairly quickly.

Had they gone about this in a more reasonable fashion, I might have liked it. For example, if they’d focused on Krekar’s alledged terrorist activities, and presented evidence of his fund-raising for Ansar al Islam — something I’ve missed for a long time, as the Norwegian government isn’t too forthcoming in this, citing “national security issues” as reasons for withholding information. Instead of trying to portray his at least semi-legitimate attacks on the armed forces of the United States, of Asutralia and of Kurdish North Iraq, why not get some real, hard proofs of Krekar’s, again, alledged continued leadership of Ansar al Islam?

This would have been immensely more constructive than this kind of rubbish “documentary”, where they presented mostly credential-less facts in a package of suggestive music and speculative editing.

This probably goes straight home with uneducated islamophobes and their ilk, but to pass this off as a documentary and try to convince the general population of the validity of the documentary’s claims?

Simply ludicrous.

Or maybe it was just my expectations that let me down again. After all, it’s not the first time that I’ve sat down to watch a documentary only to be disappointed by it’s utter inability to document anything but the documentarists’ own incompetence… :(