Movies - Valley of the Wolves Iraq

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	Movies - Valley of the Wolves Iraq

Valley of the Wolves Iraq (Turkish: Kurtlar Vadisi Irak) is a popular and controversial 2006 Turkish film based on a television series of the same name that has been a hit in Turkey for three seasons.

Filmed with a budget of $10 million U.S. dollars and released in 2006, Valley of the Wolves is the most expensive film ever made in Turkey.

Cast

Plot

The movie opens with a real-life incident: the arrest on 2003-07-04, of 11 Turkish special forces soldiers and 13 civilians by U.S. troops in the northern Iraqi town of Sulaymaniyah. 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. Donald Rumsfeld later issued a statement of regret for the detention, but many Turks took great offence at the incident.

In the film one of the special forces troops, Suleyman Aslan, is so humiliated by the event that he takes his own life after writing a letter to his friend, Polat Alemdar (played by Necati Şaşmaz, shown in large profile on the poster).

Alemdar is a 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 kill three Iraqi soldiers. They attach explosives to the foundation of a hotel. They demand commander Sam William Marshall (played by American actor Billy Zane), whom they allege was responsible for the Hood incident, to come to the hotel. He complies. 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.

In a later scene, an execution of a Western journalist by Iraqi rebels is about to take place, but the sheikh, esteemed by the rebels, 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.

Marshall raids an Arab wedding and massacres a number of civilians(see controversy), including the groom. The bride Leila wants revenge by becoming a suicide bomber, but is talked out of it by a sheikh who says it is against Sharia (Islamic religious law). Alemdar and Leila meet, and Leila helps Alemdar. Together they manage to kill Marshall, but Leila is also killed.

International reception

The film has pulled in record audiences on its release in Turkey, capitalising on widespread opposition to the Iraq war.
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the Prime Minister of Turkey, viewed the film with his wife and his cabinet before it came out and liked it.
Bülent Arinc, the President of the Turkish Parliament called the movie "an extraordinary film, that will go into history."
The film has received only minor exposure in the United States and is not widely known. However, on the satirical The Daily Show on the US Comedy Network, Jon Stewart
lampooned Billy Zane and Gary Busey, mainstream American actors, for appearing in the film ("Gary Busey...who apparently was available."). During the same segment, several clips of Middle Eastern terrorist characters in American films were played.
The reception in the Turkish media was split. Some called it a milestone for the Turkish film industry; others warned the movie might lead to a strengthening of religious extremism.
In Germany, the home of European Union's largest Turkish community, the film was heavily criticized for its alledged xenophobia and virulent anti-Americanism by several politicians from both both the right and left spectrum of mainstream German politics and in several leading newspapers.

Controversy

The film has proved controversial due to its portrayal of some US military personnel as being responsible for a number of real and fictional atrocities:

Real:

A scene depicts the Abu Ghraib Prison abuses, where prisoners were mistreated by US forces.
In one sequence, the American Commander Sam William Marshall (the film's villain) raids an Arab wedding and massacres a number of civilians, which might allude to a 2004-05-19 incident in Mukaradeeb.
When detainees being transported in a sealed container are in danger of suffocating, a soldier fires upon the container "in order to make holes for the air to get in", but many detainees are injured or die. A similar event occurred in Afghanistan after the battle for Mazar-i Sharif on 2001-11-09, with Taliban soldiers in the container, as described in the documentary Massacre at Mazar by Jamie Doran
.

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Movies - Valley of the Wolves Iraq

Cast

Plot

International reception

Controversy

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