Hello and welcome to the History Hour podcast from the BBC World Service with me Max Pearson

the past brought to life by those who were there. This week Liberia's former

President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf on the debt relief deal she struck in 2010.

Now we can breathe. We can begin to see our country rise again.

Also how the hanging chads in Florida did for Al Gore in the U.S. presidential election 2000.

The lawyers were all on the phone and I remember Gore saying, it's over, right?

Is there anything we can do and they said no it's over.

Plus Mandela in America and getting the Galileo probe off the ground.

You've got the fantastic success of getting the approval and the budget and you know the launch

vehicle scheduled and all this kind of thing but then you've got to actually do it.

That's all coming up later in the podcast but we begin in Iraq a country which is hardly having the best of times right now

Confronted as it is with the almost perfect storm of insurgency corruption and the coronavirus pandemic

And sadly for the Iraqi people this comes after several decades of turbulence

which has seen Iraq at war with its neighbors, infiltrated by ISIS and occupied by foreign forces.

And it's an incident from that period of foreign occupation that we're highlighting.

On September the 16th, 2007, 14 unarmed Iraqi civilians were killed in Central Baghdad by American security guards

employed by the US private security company Blackwater.

The shooting led to a surge in anger against the ongoing US occupation.

Among the dead was a nine-year-old boy, Ali Kanani.

Mike Lanchen has been speaking to the boy's father, Muhammad, about the terrible events of that day.

Tell me a little bit about Ali, what was he like?

My son Ali like every kid, like nine years old,

...