The war in Iraq is about to complete its fourth full year and there is still no end in sight. Folleh Shar Tamba saw countless human lives being lost and this country’s media struggling more than ever to address the war head-on.
Tamba chose to address these deficiencies very personally. Tamba is close to finishing his first feature-length documentary film, Triangle of Death, that he shot in Iraq as a member of the U.S. Marines. He believes the film will reinvigorate the efforts to advocate for a peaceful end to the war.
Tamba, a 25-year-old graduate of the Film School of Columbia College, and is now pursuing a second degree at NEIU in Justice Studies.
Tamba was almost instantly skeptical about the way the war was being covered by the both the government and the press, especially after getting reports from his brother and sisters, all serving in different branches of the armed forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. They told him about many things that were going on in the region that was not being shown by the American media.
Tamba felt that the only way to see for what was going on for himself, and to document it for the American public was to enlist and go to Iraq as a soldier.
Tamba arrived in Kuwait with the 2nd Battalion 24th in the middle of September 2004, his ultimate destination was to be the area widely-known as the most dangerous, the “Triangle of Death.”
This moniker given to a rural area south of Baghdad is marked by the cities Yusufiyah, Latifiyah and Mahmudiyah. Tamba was in all three cities, establishing the military presence, training the new Iraqi military and helping to facilitate the elections for Iraq’s interim government on Jan 30, 2005.
Was there a moment he thought this might have been a mistake? “When I saw an Iraqi police officer hanging from a tree… with a sign saying ‘This is what happens when you help U.S. Forces,'” said Tamba about his first day entering Yusufiyah.
The film Triangle of Death was shot mostly with a HI-8 camera mounted on Tamba’s helmet. The film is blistering and relentless, sometimes sharp and sometimes crude but wholly unforgettable in its depictions of a land submerged in chaos.
The general arc of Tamba’s mission is followed in the film, beginning with an intense sequence from his first hours in Yusufiyah when a suicide bomber with a car bomb attacked his unit.
Tamba was hit with shrapnel but did not seek treatment for two days, giving his place on the gurnee up for other troops and civilians who were hurt much worse.
In another striking scene, video footage obtained from a captured insurgent setting off a roadside bomb and blowing away an Army vehicle. “The biggest killer, number one, is the roadside bomb,” Tamba reports, “and then the car bomb.”
Tamba came back home in April 2005 with sixty hours of footage and eight to nine thousand still photographs. He shot an additional forty hours’ worth of interviews with troops that he served with.
Speaking about the staged violence in fictional films that is socially acceptable versus real violence in documentaries he says, “(If) we make movies that are graphic, then how come we can’t show human misery that graphic so people can learn from it so we can change our way of behaving?”
Tamba had full cooperation of the military to shoot the film. He was never instructed to turn the camera off at any time, though sometimes Iraqi soldiers would block him from filming if they were roughing somebody up. These instances, Tamba said, were mainly situations of sectarian violence (Shiite vs. Sunni).
Tamba said he was shocked that the only problem he had was with CNN over the use of their news reports on the infamous and ultimately retracted Newsweek story from May of 2005 that stated that pages of the Qur’an were being flushed down the toilet at Guantanamo Bay. This misinformation sparked global riots and seriously threatened the U.S. Military’s credibility at the time.
Since Tamba’s time in country, soldiers have been prevented from filming while on duty. Tamba’s extremely up-close-and-personal film may end up to be a one of a kind experience.
He survived his tenure in the Triangle of Death and came back being probably the only person to have more than ample footage of the region that many journalists would risk their lives to enter. “For the media it’s too dangerous to go and stick your neck on the line for a month, or two or three months, for a story when you might get killed. We have a lot of journalists getting killed… Soldiers are trained for that kind of danger, not journalists.”
Tamba easily understands the political implications of his film, which is why he leaves the narration and commentary strictly to his fellow soldiers that appear in the documentary. “The way I look at it, the minute you say Iraq- boom- there’s politics already the name Iraq, itself, is political… I want to know what the 20 or 19-year-old boy felt like when he was out there… I want to know (from him)- was it all worth it?”
When asked how long he thinks the war will continue, Tamba answers without thinking twice, “It’s going to go on for a long time because of all the ammunition caches that we are finding… As long as they have the means to resist they will keep resisting… and our casualties are going to mount because the way they fight is not conventional warfare.”
He also points to a fundamental difference between Americans and Iraqis and insensitivity to that socio-cultural difference will continue to drive Iraqi resistance: “It’s a collectivism, not individualism like in America… For the Iraqi it’s all about culture. You’ve got to understand the culture that you are going into. If you understand it and treat it the way it is hopefully we’ll have a different outcome than what’s happening now. In the first place, we would not have been there if we understood the culture.”
“In a sense the victims caught in the middle of it because, every way you look at it, war, or a fistfight, is a lack of civilization… We are more brutal than the animals in the wild jungle.” Tamba is quick to point out that “most Iraqis in Iraq are not trying to kill us.”
Triangle of Death has been submitted to the Tribeca Film Festival in New York and Tamba is waiting to see if the film will be included. Locally, he will attempt both the Chicago International Film Festival and the Chicago Underground Film Festival. “These are the films I want to do… If I can change something, just a little bit, in my lifetime then I will go to my grave happy.”
Information on the film can be found at www.triangleofdeath.netfs20