Chameleon's Shadow

THE CONVOY OF armoured trucks, led by a Scimitar reconnaissance vehicle, had been visible for some time to the four Iraqis who crouched in what remained of the upper storey of an abandoned roadside building. The road – part of the highway that linked Basra to Baghdad – cut a straight path across the flat desert landscape, and the group’s elevated position and long-range binoculars had allowed them to track the convoy from the moment the lead vehicle breasted the distant horizon.

The heat was intense. Shimmering mirages produced trompe-l’oeil reflections in the tarmac, and one of the insurgents captured the effect on a DVD camera before zooming in on the turret of the Scimitar. He could make out the helmeted heads of the two soldiers on either side of the 30mm cannon, and of the driver below it, but the vehicle was still too far away to identify their faces. Another insurgent pointed to a telegraph pole in the long line that marched beside the road and said there would be two good minutes between the Scimitar passing the pole and the explosion. Time enough to capture British soldiers on film before the home-made culvert bombs on either side of the highway obliterated them forever.

The cameraman expected to see complacency, even arrogance, on the faces of the coalition oppressors, but the close-up footage of the three men showed only concentration. There was even a suggestion, in the way the commander, a twenty-six-year-old lieutenant, suddenly shouted an order, that he had spotted something amiss in the dust beside the highway. It was too late.

The roadside bombs, a collection of anti-tank mines rigged to produce a blast that was powerful enough to rip the guts out of a Bradley tank, detonated simultaneously as the vehicle passed between them.

The film clip of a British Scimitar rising into the air before turning over in flames received considerable airtime across the Muslim world. In the Iraq bazaars, it became a ‘must-have’ DVD for anyone whose electricity supply was intermittent or whose satellite dish had been pushed out of alignment by coalition bombing. The propaganda coup of a small Iraqi cell taking out a coalition vehicle with home-made bombs was irresistible, particularly as viewers and experts alike claimed to see fear, not concentration, on the faces of the three Western soldiers. It was taken as an indication that morale in the coalition forces was crumbling and that an end to the occupation was near.

With a different set of ethics governing the coverage of war in Britain, news editors decided against screening the close-up footage for fear of generating complaints about insensitivity. Only one of the men had survived, albeit with disfiguring injuries, and in such circumstances even the most hardened broadcasters felt the line between reportage and exploitation was here too thin to be tested.