Long before Saddam Hussein’s brutal 24-year reign over Iraq came to a brutal end with the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, the Iraqi dictator had already established an unusual hold on the country’s cultural output: he operated as a state-backed film producer, crafting on-screen narratives to cement his cult of personality and legitimize his authoritarian rule.
Within months of seizing the Iraqi presidency in 1979, production wrapped on Saddam’s first propaganda project: *The Long Days*, a biographical drama that cast his cousin in the lead role to glorify his participation in a 1959 failed assassination attempt against then-Prime Minister Abdul-Karim Qasim. The film framed Saddam as a fearless nationalist hero, even including a dramatic scene where a young Saddam cuts a bullet out of his own leg using a fire-sterilized razor blade. But this heroic depiction was later exposed as a fabrication: in his 2000 biography of Saddam, journalist Said Aburish—who once served as a consultant to Iraq’s Ministry of Information—dismissed the sequence as a massive exaggeration, citing Saddam’s own personal physician who confirmed the dictator only suffered a superficial wound from the attempt. Aburish also revealed that Saddam personally leveraged his connections through the journalist to hire British director Terence Young, famous for helming early James Bond classics *Dr. No* and *From Russia with Love*, to edit the propaganda production.
Saddam’s second major state-funded film arrived in 1983: *Clash of Loyalties*, a lavish big-budget historical epic centered on the 1920 Iraqi revolt against British colonial rule. The project was explicitly designed to tie Saddam’s ruling Ba’ath Party to the legacy of anti-colonial resistance, boosting his domestic credibility. The high budget attracted well-known British actor Oliver Reed, who took the role of a British intelligence officer. But Reed’s unruly behavior nearly got him deported mid-production: during an outing at a Baghdad restaurant, he sparked a public brawl after urinating into a wine bottle and ordering a waiter to deliver it to another table “with my compliments.” Co-producer Lateif Jorephani famously dubbed Saddam’s ambitious state film project “Bollywood on Tigris,” with plans to build a full state-run film industry that would produce at least six large-scale patriotic blockbusters targeted at international audiences.
This tight control extended far beyond feature films to all forms of domestic media. Before the 2003 invasion that toppled his regime, Iraq’s entire media ecosystem consisted of just five state-controlled newspapers, four radio stations, and three television channels—all of which operated as mouthpieces for Saddam’s government. Many Iraqis who grew up under this system carry vivid, uncomfortable memories of state-mandated propaganda woven into everyday entertainment. Malik, an interpreter who accompanied author Matthew Alford on a recent trip to Iraq, recalled being forced to sit through graphic *Lest We Forget* propaganda segments about the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq War to watch the following half-hour of children’s cartoons, including *Tom and Jerry*.
The fall of Saddam’s regime triggered a seismic shift in Iraq’s media landscape. Within 12 months of the dictator’s ousting, roughly 80 new radio stations, 20 private television channels, and more than 200 independent newspapers and magazines launched across the country. While fewer than half of these early outlets survived their first year of operation, the old state media monopoly never returned. Today, Iraq boasts more than 100 television channels broadcasting in four languages: Arabic, Kurdish, Turkmen, and Syriac. Control of media has dispersed across the country’s fragmented centers of power: major political parties, influential religious institutions including Shia holy shrines, and numerous armed factions all operate their own independent media outlets.
During a visit to the annual Arbaeen pilgrimage in Karbala in August—an event that draws more than 20 million Shia Muslim worshippers annually, making it the world’s largest regular peaceful gathering—Alford gained behind-the-scenes access to the substantial media operations run by major Shia religious institutions. At the Al-Abbas Holy Shrine’s media department, reporters were shown an expansive, free digital archive containing feature films, documentaries, talk shows, and religious programming, including an Iraqi adaptation of the classic university quiz show format centered on Quranic studies. The shrine distributes this content for free online and via live broadcast, with more than 80 domestic and international television channels using its official Arbaeen pilgrimage coverage every year.
This post-2003 era of abundant media choice stands in stark contrast to the limited, state-controlled options of the Saddam era. But greater quantity of media outlets has not translated to greater press freedom or more accurate, independent reporting. As of 2024, Iraq ranks 162nd out of 180 countries on the global Press Freedom Index, placing it between Sudan and Turkey.
The most profound shift has been the dispersal of media power across competing factions, mirroring the broader fragmentation of political and military power in modern Iraq. Today, 10 Iran-aligned armed factions control an estimated 50,000 fighters across the country, and the central Iraqi government in Baghdad has struggled to bring these groups under formal state control—tensions that have escalated into open military action in recent months, with U.S. and Saudi forces striking faction targets inside Iraqi borders. Many of these armed groups now operate their own media outlets: for example, Al-Ahad TV is controlled by Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq, one of the largest Iran-aligned armed factions.
Where Saddam once held an iron-clad monopoly over every narrative and image coming out of Iraq—even if he could not control the unruly behavior of British star Oliver Reed—his authoritarian system of state propaganda is gone for good. In its place, Iraq now hosts a crowded ecosystem of competing voices, from political parties and religious institutions to armed factions and independent journalists fighting for space. Yet even with this unprecedented media abundance, true press freedom remains out of reach for the country. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license, written by Matthew Alford, a lecturer in the Department of Politics, Languages and International Studies at the University of Bath.