For much of the last century, most Americans have taken for granted the belief that their country is a force for good in the world – and, thanks to the immense power of Hollywood, this notion was exported far beyond American borders, becoming one of the crucial pillars of American global hegemony in the decades after the Cold War. Yet on certain occasions, Americans have found themselves confronted with the rest of the world holding quite the opposite view, usually in the wake of unpopular and extremely destructive wars. At times these sentiments have found expression in extreme forms, but few would have imagined a feature film in which Americans are treated in exactly the same way that Hollywood's Second World War propaganda treated Nazi Germans. Twenty years ago, this rarity arrived in the form of Valley of the Wolves: Iraq, a Turkish feature directed by Serdar Akar.
The film is, surprisingly, the product of a country that is formally one of America's traditional allies – and, even more unusually, it is a spin-off of the immensely popular television series Valley of the Wolves, which originally aired between 2002 and 2005 and featured Necati Şaşmaz as Polat Alemdar, a top-secret intelligence operative infiltrating and dismantling a powerful mafia organisation with international connections. The franchise's popularity in Turkey, built on high television ratings and box-office success, provided a solid foundation for its leap to the big screen.
As the title suggests, the plot deals with the Iraq War, which was escalating during production, and is inspired by a real-life incident that occurred on 4 July 2003 in the northern Iraqi city of Sulaymaniyah, shortly after the American invasion and occupation of the country. Soldiers of the US Army's 173rd Airborne Brigade detained a small number of Turkish special forces soldiers, allegedly sent to help and protect the Turkmen minority during the ethnic tensions of post-invasion Iraq. Although the Turkish soldiers were quickly released back to Turkey, the incident – all but ignored in Western media – caused major outrage in Turkey and poisoned relations between the two countries. The film begins with a reconstruction of this so-called "Hood incident", during which the unofficial leader of the Americans turns out to be CIA agent Sam William Marshall,(Billy Zane). Lieutenant Süleyman Aslan (Tayfun Eraslan), the Turkish officer under whose command the Sulaymaniyah force served, feels so humiliated and ashamed that he commits suicide – but not before writing a farewell letter to his friend Polat Alemdar.
Polat, accompanied by a small group of subordinates, crosses the Turkish–Iraqi border and ends up in Erbil, which is under the control of a pro-American Kurdish militia. He soon discovers that Sam Marshall treats the city as his personal fiefdom, cynically exploiting the ethnic and religious differences between the Kurdish, Arab and Turkmen populations. Civilians suffer at the hands of American soldiers and private military contractors, and the most horrific incident is the wedding at which they, using traditional celebratory gunfire in the air as a pretext, arrive and massacre much of the wedding party. It is later revealed that the true purpose of the raid was to provide bodies for a Jewish American doctor (Gary Busey), who harvests organs for rich foreign clients. Leyla (Bergüzar Korel) is a woman whose future husband was one of the victims, and she swears revenge on Sam Marshall; she intends to blow him up as a suicide bomber, but Sheikh Abdurrahman Halis Karkuki (Ghassan Massoud), the spiritual leader of the community, talks her out of it, telling her that such a practice is not allowed under Islam. Instead, she helps Polat and his group hide from Sam and his men after their first attempt to take him out fails.
With an estimated budget of around US$14 million – though some sources put it at $10 million – Valley of the Wolves: Iraq became the most expensive film in the history of Turkish cinema up to that point. This investment was justified by beating all competition at the Turkish box office in 2006 and even making decent business in Germany among the local Turkish population. Yet the film remains relatively obscure in the West, and this can be partly explained by a Western media and public already traumatised by the never-ending carnage in Iraq having little appetite for a film that approached the subject with the subtlety of a sledgehammer.
The authors' attempt to express their outrage at their country's humiliation in the "Hood incident", as well as at the atrocities committed against their Iraqi neighbours, results in a film that takes a simplistic, almost Manichean view that discards almost all subtlety and turns Americans into genocidal monsters. This is compounded by very graphic depictions of violence and gore, which are even more disturbing when they involve children. Some of these scenes are based on real-life events during the first years of the American occupation of Iraq, the most notorious being the Abu Ghraib abuse scandal, which is thoroughly reconstructed on the basis of the infamous photographs – despite the scene having little relation to the rest of the plotting.
As an action film, Valley of the Wolves: Iraq is serviceable, although it is obvious that the scriptwriters – Raci Şaşmaz (the main star's brother and the film's producer) and Bahadır Özdener – had trouble adapting the sprawling structure of a series of almost hundred episodes into a single feature film. There are, however, a couple of interesting action scenes, and the final showdown, which takes place at night and during which a small band of protagonists – despite being outgunned and outnumbered – win, closes the film within the parameters and conventions of the genre, albeit with additional melodrama and tragedy.
Necati Şaşmaz, whose acting career was, ironically, launched thanks to 9/11 and his consequent inability to return to the United States, does a solid job as the old-school "strong, silent type" of hero. Billy Zane and Gary Busey, both criticised in some quarters for taking part in an "anti-American film", also do decent work and even try to add some depth to their one-dimensional roles. Bergüzar Korel, an actress best known as the wife of global Turkish television superstar Halit Ergenç, is good in the tragic role of Leyla.
But it is Ghassan Massoud – the Syrian actor best known as Saladin in Kingdom of Heaven – who almost single-handedly gives the film some sort of moral anchor by playing the saintly Sheikh. The scene in which the Sheikh uses his authority to prevent a Western journalist, played by Spencer Garrett, from being decapitated by masked Islamic militants is one of the rare examples where the film tries to smuggle some nuance and complexity into its narrative. Another is the character of the American soldier who protests against the killing of prisoners, only to be promptly killed by mercenaries. That such moments stand out so sharply is itself a measure of how blunt the surrounding material is.
In the end, Valley of the Wolves: Iraq is a film that could charitably be described as "rough around the edges", and it works better as an extremely rare curio than as a good action film in its own right. Controversy surrounded it from the start – the Bavarian premier Edmund Stoiber called upon German theatre owners to stop showing it, and the Turkish Parliament's chairman praised it as an "extraordinary film that will go into history" – while its director insisted it was intended to promote dialogue between religions. Regardless of these international disputes, its success allowed the franchise to continue in the form of two further television series, three more feature films – including the sequels Valley of the Wolves: Gladio (2008) and Valley of the Wolves: Palestine (2010) – and even a 2008 comedic spin-off titled Muro: Damn the Humanist Inside.
Sadly, in the two decades since its release, the part of the world depicted in this film has hardly become better, and we might conclude that if peace is to come to it in the future, it will require something more than popular propaganda films – on either side of the divide.
RATING: 5/10 (++)
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