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Breaking Windows from Baghdad: Insurgent Video and the Case of Juba
Josh Guilford
Department of Modern CUlture and Media - Brown University
Abstract
In a November 2004 article for New York Times Magazine, Michael Ignatieff wrote of a “new kind of home video” that had been occupying news programs at the time, wherein grainy images of Iraqi terrorists reading from scripted statements and decapitating victims found an international venue in the homes of awestruck television audiences, demonstrating the digital camera’s power as a weapon for transmitting terror on a global scale. By the following summer, however, a transition became visible in the creation of this kind of video, one evocative of Ayman al-Zawahiri’s call – in an intercepted letter dated from July 2005 – for a new strategy in al-Qaeda’s approach to “the battlefield of the media.” Criticizing the “Scenes of slaughter” deplored by Ignatieff, Zawahiri insists on a use of media that is more conducive to public opinion, and which the Muslim populace will find “palatable.” In the majority of video practices that have followed, the earlier, confrontational style of direct address has been abandoned in favor of a covert method of filmmaking conducive to quick strikes on coalition soldiers – most often involving roadside bombs or sniper attacks. What results is a sort of guerilla-verité aesthetic: a detached, voyeuristic presentation of often-unverifiable images of violence, utilizing handheld cameras and recording from the viewpoint of those carrying out the attacks.
Perhaps the most revealing example of this newer, more “palatable” genre can be found in the series of videos surrounding an insurgent sniper nicknamed “Juba,” who, in his unusual practice of targeting only coalition soldiers and leaving civilians unharmed, is revered by supporters of the insurgency. Viewed as a hero and underground celebrity among jihadi and conspiracy-minded blogs and forums, Juba has assisted in the creation of visible anti-occupation communities in both cyberspace and the physical space of Baghdad cafés, where CDs of his shootings are burned, sold, and viewed in group formats. But for most viewers, the images depicted are still as terrorizing as those discussed by Ignatieff.
In a recent lecture given at Brown University, Thomas Keenan considered how this new genre of video may constitute an effort on the part of the insurgency to use violence as a means of “transform[ing] the boundaries and definition of the political or public space,” in an attempt “not simply to speak, exchange, communicate, but first of all to be understood as speaking at all.” For my paper, I will extend this suggestion to Juba’s videos by analyzing how the camera’s role in his method of recording destabilizes established concepts of spectatorial self-possession, by forcing an assumption of the insurgency’s perspective. In the process, I will examine how the unifying effect Juba’s videos have had may be seen as literalizing the metaphorical violence and loss of selfhood that both Keenan and Paul Virilio consider necessary for understandings of publicity and communication. While Virilio associates the public gaze and visual media with the dispossessing immobility of a Gorgon – what he refers to as “the Medusa Syndrome” – Keenan describes the public as being constituted by an unavoidable “intrusion” that “disturbs the masterable surroundings of the subject,” and in turn makes possible all forms of intersubjectivity. Juba’s own communication of violence, I will suggest, establishes a foundation by ridding all those who do not identify with his cause of their own stability.
Biography
Josh Guilford is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University.
*Still from Baghdad Sniper, released by the Islamic Army in Iraq in Nov 2005