Dugma: The Button is an extraordinary sixty minutes of filmmaking. Following on from his 2010 doc Taliban: Behind The Masks and with over three decades in war journalism, Norwegian director Paul Refsdel demonstrates an innate gift for instinctively embedding himself in historically hostile groups – from Chechen rebels in the Russian Republic to the Mujahideen in Afghanistan. In Dugma, Refsdel follows four would-be Jihadists from one of Syria’s biggest jihadi groups, Jabhat al-Nusra (recently renamed Jabhat Fateh al-Sham) as they plan attacks against Assad’s Ba’ath party. In a similar manner to Behind The Masks, Dugma is an utterly disarming piece of work, unmasking the ‘enemy’ to reveal a collective of humorous, conflicted, isolated, troubled and, perhaps most crucially, incredibly normal men who are prepared to die for a cause they believe in. Available now on iTunes, Dugma, shot over seven weeks in Syria, directly addresses the terror associated with terrorism, forcing the viewer to really consider the film, its characters and their intentions. An essential watch that raises far more questions than it answers, i-D meets Dugma’s intrepid director to discover his thoughts on the way the media is reporting on war in 2016…
What’s your history in documentary-making and reporting on war?
Well, Dugma is only my second film, but I’ve been working as a freelance journalist since 1984, a long time! I have the worst excuse ever to become a journalist; I had been in the army for a couple of years and, at that time, I wanted to do something for the Afghans. So I talked with someone in the Solidarity Committee and they said I could either go as a doctor and perform amputations, or I could go as a journalist and take photos… so I became a journalist (laughs). I went to the Afghan Mujahideen – at the time the Afghanistan was occupied by the Soviet Union – and covered that period. So I’ve been working in war zones ever since, and mostly with insurgent groups.
I imagine it takes a certain person to be able to embed themselves with groups like the Mujahideen, Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and Jabhat al-Nusra.
Well I’m used to getting access to insurgent groups; very often they are suspicious. Most of the time I don’t have a translator, so you learn how to deal with people in a special way. In the beginning, I was interested in the fighting, the ‘boom boom’, but growing older and becoming more experienced, I became interested in the psychological aspect of the fighters and that’s probably why I’m doing these kinds of films now. I don’t care about the explosions; I care about the people making those explosions.
You’re one of the few filmmakers to actually humanise these jihadis, to portray a sense of a personality which gives way to a sense of empathy with these characters. Given recent escalated attacks throughout Europe and the US, that seems quite an extraordinary thing to be able to do.
Well I think it’s very strange that people haven’t done that before. I think the media itself is very backwards when it comes to its coverage of war. When it talks about our state of enemy, we’re not supposed to say one positive word. You can’t even be neutral; you can only be, more or less, judgmental. What I wanted to do in the film, which you understood, I didn’t want to tell people what to think, I just let the camera roll and the scenes play out and let people draw their own conclusions. If they think the characters in the film are strange or weird, so be it. It’s a little bit demanding watching Dugma, if you compare it to other mass-released documentaries. They tend to be over-edited, over-explained and they’re telling you exactly what you should be thinking. Dugma is demanding to watch, I think. People have to think. This is not junk food, you have to choose, you have to think a little bit when you see the film, you have to make some opinions. This is not a film you passively watch and then you go and watch another film and you forget about it. You do have a kind of sympathy for the people, you get to know them, and it’s hard to watch because afterwards you can’t consider these people as ‘savages’ or ‘animals’ anymore.
The British convert, Abu Basir al-Britani, presents a really interesting proposition, particularly given the journey he goes through.
I was very lucky with the timing because I got that development while I was there. The first time I met him, he had this whole bravado thing going on, his biggest dream was to make this martyrdom operation, he was a ‘typical’ convert turned jihadi. On my second trip, he got married and he started to have second thoughts about his plan and he believes his wife is pregnant, just before I left before the last time. And then in February of this year, he had a daughter.
This is the film that young would-be jihadis should watch – a young man who has felt like an outsider, searching for something, trying to find an answer in extremism.
Yes absolutely. I’ve had some people asking me if this is a propaganda film, if it might make some people want to join Al-Qaeda – I think no, absolutely not. The young angry man, the second-generation Pakistani for example, sitting in London or some other place, he wants to be a jihadi. He doesn’t want to see people having second thoughts. He wants to see the Islamic State, glossy war film, that’s what turns him on, so to say.
One thing that’s interesting about the film is that you don’t explain very much; Jhabat al-Nusra’s cause, who they are, who they’re fighting and so on. They are fighting against Assad, presumably?
It’s very important that people know the difference between how Jhabat al-Nusra are conducting the war in Syria and how IS are conducting the war. If it comes to bombings, IS didn’t have any problems sending a truck into a market or a crowded street. They often hit civilian targets. Al-Nusra, they don’t do that and yes they are against Assad, they are fighting the regime and they are also in war against IS. The people I met during filming, they didn’t have any respect for IS. The Islamic State, they use a lot of young men, young boys – teenagers really – when they do operations. They will send out up to five bombers for one operation. Al-Nusra, they’re careful with their operations. Sometimes it takes several weeks between each of their bombings. They also say if the bomber can drive a truck into the front line, park the truck and run back and detonate it with a remote control, then he should do that. They have a very different approach to IS’s cannon fodder approach.
How did you meet your subjects?
It wasn’t difficult really, more time-consuming. I started going to Syria in the summer of 2013 but they were in chaos because of the ongoing conflict with ISIS. So I wasn’t able to start filming until December 2014 – one a half years later. In that time I met several Jihadi groups, and they approved me after I wrote an application. I had to include a CV and references – it looked like a job application – and they approved it after a few weeks. But they told me later that my stay was approved by the Al-Qaeda Central leadership in Pakistan, which was probably because of the Taliban film that I made in 2010. When Osama Bin-Laden was killed by Special Forces, they bought his computer and hard-disk, and they published some of the letters found on his computer. One of the letters was to Bin-Laden, regarding the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. In the letter he’s recommending certain journalists who could put together some kind of package, and it said that in Europe there was a Norwegian journalist who had spent time with the Taliban, and that he showed that they were human beings, laughing, playing, sitting with kids etc. So this was the moment that Al-Qaeda noticed me – and so I guess now I’m on the good list (laughs).
Do you reflect on the fact that your life is kind of crazy?
(laughs) Well in a way, but still I was always a bit different – since childhood. If I didn’t agree with something, I would question it. I was always very critical. What I’m critical of now is our media coverage of our enemies. It’s one of the very few fields where the media hasn’t developed at all. I mean, we have very few boundaries left with media, whether privacy or celebrity or talking about sex or insulting religions, there are absolutely no boundaries. But when it comes to how we portray our enemies, there’s this line that media won’t cross – which is giving a neutral, objective treatment to all sides of war. That seems to be difficult but it’s a natural thing for me to do, to go to the states of our ‘enemies’ and look at how we report and depict them.
We allow the enemy to be this scary unknown, which seems quite a regressive tactic.
It’s always been like that, from the beginning of time. There’s the expressio, “the first casualty in war is truth”, which US Senator Johnson said in 1918 and it’s still true. When it comes to war, we lose our objectivity and we become more patriots than journalists. The things I’m filming, it’s not really giving the enemy their point of view, it’s not a press conference, I don’t ask them to make statements of what they think about the West or anything like that. It’s an observant, fly-on-the-wall documentary showing the everyday situations that they have there. My idea was to make a film that we would make with friendly forces, but apply that principal to the enemy – talking on Skype, hanging around making jokes, eating. That would be normal in a film about British or American troops, so I just wanted to apply that to the enemy.
What do you want people to take away from Dugma?
I’d like people to get more nuances about our enemies and people we call terrorists and see that things aren’t always as black and white as we want them to be. If we think of them as savages, it’s easier, we don’t have to object when our troops are bombing them – if children are killed then it’s the terrorists to blame because they are hiding among children. It makes it more complicated for people, that they have to reflect about our nations going to war and who are leaders are designating as enemies. If I can get someone to think twice, that would be a good achievement. As a filmmaker, I’m hoping Dugma can inspire a lot of filmmakers to do something similar, to seek out the enemy and show their side of the story.
Having spent time in Syria and Afghanistan, can the West win this war or are these prolonged and increasingly intense attacks something that we will see for the rest of our lifetimes?
I think we’re very good at creating new enemies. Jabhat al-Nusra, that was a branch of Al-Qaeda that didn’t have any policy of attacking the West or outside Syria and also took care to not kill civilians. They have been attributed to killing 356 civilians in five years of war – if you compare that with the regime – 183,000 casualties, it’s comparatively very low. So we have this Al-Qaeda branch here in Syria, and if this was the future of Al-Qaeda we should appreciate it. The US started to bomb this group in 2014, they said they were a secret group with an imminent plan of attacking the US or the West and they started to bomb al-Nusra. I don’t think that’s exactly winning hearts and minds, it’s counter-productive, they will create a new generation who have lost comrades to the US strikes and who maybe want to retaliate. So if you’re going to win this ‘war on terror’, so to say – I’m not talking about Islamic State now, this is different to Al-Qaeda – I think the war on terror should be much more sophisticated. Counter-insurgency – the lessons the Americans learnt in Vietnam is that it doesn’t matter how many people you kill if you don’t win the hearts and minds of the locals, you will lose. You need to win hearts and minds, that’s what will eventually make this war go away. It’s not how many Al-Qaeda fighters you manage to kill, because there will always be new ones if you behave like the US – a bull in a china shop. That’s my opinion. About Islamic State, that’s a very different subject now. At this stage you have all these people with psychological problems who want to go out with a bang and who do stupid things like driving a truck through a crowd. It’s on a totally different level.
Would you be interested in exploring IS in your next film?
No, no, no, I don’t want to deal with them because I don’t trust them. I know from my time in Syria, they have a habit of inviting people for conversations and give their word you’re safe and then they arrest you and torture you and kill you. They can’t be trusted. It would be good for a journalist to go there but it’s too dangerous and they would manipulate you – it wouldn’t be like making a film with Al-Qaeda.
Dugma: The Button is available on iTunes now.
Credits
Text Hattie Collins