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🗓️ 23 March 2023
⏱️ 28 minutes
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0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts |
0:05.1 | Today the Iraqi city of Fallujah became the site of some of the bloodiest battles during |
0:10.8 | the US-led invasion 20 years ago. We speak to those who lived through it. We're in Brazil, |
0:18.0 | where our correspondent discovers that despite recent measures there to protect the overweight, |
0:24.0 | a culture of discrimination remains. And we take a ferry up the Magdalena River in Colombia, |
0:31.1 | where the ripple effects of history are felt in the present day. First, this week marks the |
0:37.4 | 20th anniversary of the US-led invasion of Iraq. In March 2003, a coalition, including the UK, |
0:46.0 | began a full-scale air and ground invasion under the pretext that Saddam Hussein was developing |
0:52.1 | weapons of mass destruction, a premise that later proved to be false. The prime objective of |
0:58.8 | the coalition's shock and awe strategy, as it came to be known, was regime change in Baghdad. |
1:06.2 | The swift and decisive first months of the war were followed by a fierce counterinsurgency, |
1:11.7 | which led to the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives. This gave way to sectarian violence, |
1:18.0 | and then the rise of ISIS. But the seeds of this conflict were so long before the invasion in |
1:24.3 | 2003, says Jeremy Bone, who's been reporting from Iraq since the 1990s and returned this week. |
1:32.4 | The first time I came here to Iraq was for me very exciting. It was November 1990, about three |
1:39.5 | months after President Saddam Hussein sent his army into Kuwait. That rash decision changed |
1:45.9 | everything for the Iraqis and for Saddam. After he was captured at the end of 2003, Saddam was |
1:52.5 | questioned for months by the CIA. His interrogator wrote later that the former president put his head |
2:00.2 | in his hands and groaned when asked why he'd invaded Kuwait. No wonder, Kuwait put Iraq on a |
2:08.8 | road to hell. War, sanctions, invasion, and then more war. Saddam's journey ended at the gallows |
2:16.8 | for the people of Iraq. It continued. Saddam Hussein's crimes towards his own people were well known |
2:24.7 | by the time he invaded Kuwait. He was a tyrant. But for the US and Britain and their Arab friends, |
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