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Sunday, May 15, 2011

"Valley of the Wolves: Iraq" - Turkish Movie showing the real face of American war in Iraq

Valley of the Wolves: Iraq

Official Website for the Movie

"Valley of the Wolves: Iraq" at the IMDB (Internet Movie DataBase)

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Photos and Wallpapers of the Movie

Movie Intro
Valley of the Wolves: Iraq (Turkish: Kurtlar Vadisi: Irak) is a 2006 Turkish action film, directed by Serdar Akar, about a A Turkish commando team which goes to Iraq to track down the US military commander responsible for the Hood event. The film is set during the Occupation of Iraq and includes references to other real events such as the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and the container shipping incident where prisoners were suffocated and shot. The film, which went on nationwide general release across Turkey on February 3, 2006, was the highest grossing Turkish films of 2006 and is one of the most expensive Turkish films ever made. It is part of the Valley of the Wolves media franchise, based on the Turkish television series of the same name, and was followed by Valley of the Wolves: Gladio (2008) and Valley of the Wolves: Palestine (2010).
Filmed with a budget of $14 million, Valley of the Wolves : Iraq was the most expensive Turkish film ever made at the time of its release before being surpassed by A.R.O.G..The film grossed $27.9 million at the box office – $25.1 million in Turkey and $2.8 million in Europe.
Opinions of the film greatly varied. While the Wall Street Journal characterized it as "a cross between 'American Psycho' in uniform and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion", Turkey's parliamentary speaker Bulent Arinc described it as "absolutely magnificent".

Cast

  • Actor   --  Character
  • Necati Şaşmaz – Polat Alemdar
  • Billy Zane – Sam William Marshall
  • Ghassan Massoud – Şeyh Abdurrahman Halis Karkuki
  • Bergüzar Korel – Leyla
  • Gürkan Uygun – Memati
  • Diego Serrano – Dante
  • Kenan Çoban – Abdülhey
  • Erhan Ufak – Erhan
  • Spencer Garrett – George Baltimore
  • Gary Busey – Doctor
  • Nusret Şenay – Turkish commander
  • Tayfun Eraslan – Lieutenant Süleyman Aslan (a suicide at the start of the film)
  • Tito Ortiz – Major U.S. official
  • İsmet Hürmüzlü – Arab leader
  • Jihad Abdou – Kurdish leader
  • Yavuz İmsel – Turkmen leader
  • Mauro Martino – Mr. Fender, hotel manager

Plot

The movie opens with a depiction of a real-life incident: the arrest on July 4, 2003 of 11 allied Turkish special forces soldiers and 13 civilians. Sam William Marshall (Billy Zane) in the northern Iraqi Kurdistan town of Sulaymaniyah. The Turkish soldiers suppose that this is an ordinary visit from their NATO allies, but this time is different.
This arrest is infamous in Turkey as the so-called "Hood event". The soldiers were led out of their headquarters at gunpoint, with hoods over their heads and subsequently detained for sixty hours before being released. This was the first time such an incident had taken place between the two NATO allies. Donald Rumsfeld later issued a statement of regret for the detention, but many Turks took offense at the incident.
One of the Turkish officers, unable to bear the shame of the hooding, committed suicide. In the film, one of the special forces troops, Suleyman Aslan is so humiliated by the shame of the hooding that he commits suicide after writing a letter to his friend, Polat Alemdar (played by Necati Şaşmaz, shown in large profile on the poster). Alemdar is a former Turkish intelligence agent who has recently severed links to the government agency for which he worked. Determined to avenge his friend's humiliation, Alemdar travels to Iraq along with several of his colleagues to seek vengeance on the American commander whose actions led to Aslan's suicide.
At a checkpoint, Alemdar and his team murder three Iraqi Kurdish paramilitary troops called "Peshmerge". They attach explosives to the foundation of a hotel. They demand commander Sam William Marshall, who was responsible for the hood incident, to come to the hotel. When Marshall arrives, Polat wants him to put a sack over his head and to publicly leave the hotel with him, allowing journalists to take photos, taking the same insult he committed to Polat's dead friend. The group threatens to blow up the hotel unless Marshall and some of his men let themselves be led out of the hotel while hooded. Marshall refuses and brings in a group of Iraqi children as human shields. Alemdar gives in and leaves.
Marshall raids an Arab wedding on the pretext of hunting terrorists. When the usual celebratory gunfire starts, one soldier says: "Now they are shooting, now they are terrorists." They attack a wedding party. A small child named Ali sticks a branch up the barrel of one of their guns. The soldier fires back, shooting the child Ali dead in front of his parents. The movie fails to convey whether it was intentional or a reflex action, though the soldier is well aware that there is child in front of his gun as the little boy sticks the branch in the barrel twice. At first, the soldier just hushes the boy away. The second time, he opens fire and afterward looks astonished as he sees the little child dead. The rest of the soldiers panic and open fire on the wedding guests, beat up the bride, shoot the groom in the head in front of the bride, shoot the guests and children (see controversy, below). The survivors are captured and forced into an airtight container truck and sent to Abu Ghraib prison (the infamous prisoner mistreatment is then depicted later). Enroute an American soldier complains that the prisoners might be suffocating in the truck. One of Marshall's men then fires on the truck, spraying the detainees with bullets. "See, now they won't suffocate to death," he says. When the soldier threatens to report the incident, he is promptly shot.
Meanwhile, in Abu Ghraib, Lynndie England is making naked human pyramids from those arrested in the wedding. The prisoners are washed with high pressure nozzles.
In a later scene, an execution of a Western journalist by Iraqi rebels is about to take place, but an esteemed-by-the-rebels sheikh prevents it and offers the journalist the opportunity to kill the rebel who was about to kill him – the rebel does not resist, but the journalist declines the offer.
The bride Leyla wants revenge by becoming a suicide bomber, but is talked out of it by the Sheikh. Leyla hurries to a market to stop her friend, father of a child killed at the wedding, from blowing himself up where Marshall is having a meeting but is too late. Alemdar and his men, who also happen to be there to assassinate Marshall are led to safety by Leyla.
Alemdar and his team then attempt to kill Marshall again by rigging a bomb in a piano (which once belonged to Saddam Hussein) that's being delivered to Marshall as a gift. The bomb explodes prematurely, and Marshall survives.
Alemdar and Leyla then go to a mosque, to meet the Sheikh. Marshall tracks them down, however, and a big firefight ensues. The entire village and mosque is destroyed by heavy gunfire. Together they manage to kill Marshall, but Leyla is also killed by Marshall.
Controversy The film has been tagged by some as controversial due to its portrayal of U.S. military personnel as well as a character engaging in the harvesting of organs from civilian prisoners.
  • In one sequence, American soldiers raid an Iraqi wedding and massacre a number of civilians, which might allude to allegations of a wedding party massacre in Mukaradeeb on May 19, 2004.
  • U.S. soldiers torture detainees in Abu Ghraib prison, which includes a female soldier making a human pyramid, referring to the Abu Ghraib torture and prisoner abuse. It is the first depiction of actions by American soldiers at the Abu Ghraib prison on film.
  • While captives are transported on a long journey in a container on a truck, one guard says to the other: "They might suffocate in the container because there is no fresh air supply". The truck stops, the (American) guard gets off the truck and fires hundreds of bullet-holes into the container with an automatic weapon "in order to make holes for the air to get in", and as a result many detainees are injured or get killed. A similar event is reported to have occurred in Afghanistan after the battle for Mazar-i-Sharif on November 9, 2001, with Taliban soldiers in the container and soldiers of the Afghan Northern Alliance as their guardians, as described in the documentary film Afghan Massacre: The Convoy of Death by Irish filmmaker Jamie Doran. This event is also reenacted in the film The Road to Guantanamo.
  • The film features a Jewish-American U.S. Army doctor (Gary Busey) who removes organs from injured civilian prisoners to sell to rich people in New York, London and Tel Aviv for transplantation.
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Note: All info is shared here "in good faith" and after all thorough research possible. However, "FATA Awareness Initiative" Team may not be held responsible for any discrepancy in the info that may explicitly and/or implicitly damage anybody's interests. Corrections will, however, be made if any errors in the info are pointed out.
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