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Surprise correlations between distinct texts are like chemistry. They spark transformations of thought. When reading Agri Isma\u00efl<\/a>\u2019s personally informed writing for Gl\u00e4nta on warfare in the Kurdistan Region in Iraq, I was compelled to revisit Anthony Downey<\/a>\u2019s academic text for Springerin on algorithmic-based weapons. I had remembered several shared references between the two but wasn\u2019t expecting so many common impressions.<\/p>\n The writers\u2019 approaches to analysing the Middle East are poles apart: Isma\u00efl\u2019s bricolage of historical and contemporary accounts evidencing the persecution of Kurdish people is the antithesis of Downey\u2019s methodical unravelling of AI-programmed weapons that \u2018predict\u2019 the future. But both clearly assert that the region is a repeated target: \u2018a laboratory for war and its associated technologies\u2019 (Isma\u00efl), \u2018a testing ground for Western technologies\u2019 (Downey).<\/p>\n And it was their investigations of how war imagery and imaging has mutated that compelled me to delve further. The more I looked, the more cross-references I found to the degenerative path of visuals and visualization objectifying human lives to death.<\/p>\n Unsurprisingly, both writers locate the Gulf War as a turning point in the imaging of modern warfare. The Kurdish author based in Sweden describes his childhood experience of watching the war televized \u2018live\u2019 in the US: \u2018as soon as the first cruise missiles had landed in western Iraq, visible to us through green-hued night vision footage, we spent most of that holiday at the hotel glued to CNN\u2019s 24hr broadcast\u2019. Understandably, obsessive indoor viewing took over from sightseeing. \u2018For the first time, the war on TV was fought in what, to us, seemed like real time,\u2019 writes Isma\u00efl, acknowledging the broadcasting\u2019s inherent subjectivity: the footage had been highly censored. News of conflict in his homeland wasn\u2019t new to the nine-year-old, but this was his formative experience of imagery \u2018which created a simulation of war without bloodshed or human casualties.\u2019<\/p>\n The British professor of Visual Culture in the Middle East and North Africa cites artist Harun Farocki, whose Eye \/ Machine<\/em> series (2000-2003) interpret \u2018operational images\u2019 from 1991: \u2018Farocki observed that a \u201cnew policy on images\u201d had ushered in a paradigm of opaque and largely unaccountable methods of image production that would inexorably inform the future of \u201celectronic warfare\u201d.\u2019 The application of algorithmic computing technology, as Downey describes, returned \u2018discrete, autonomous procedures \u2013 related to targeting in particular \u2013 from within so-called \u201cblack box\u201d apparatuses.\u2019<\/p>\n Imaging from targeting cameras on bombs reported their own event. The notionally photographic image and computer simulation had become indistinct. And remote onlookers, party to these God-like views, were sitting at a safe distance in domestic spaces.<\/p>\n Twenty-five years on and \u2018real-time\u2019 war imagery had intensified its reach, having migrated to smaller, multiple screens. Isma\u00efl describes his experience of the Battle of Mosul in 2016 as \u2018a row of emoji bouncing across the screen, past the smoke, over the sand and the soldiers.\u2019 Watching war news streams \u2013 the epitome of doom scrolling \u2013 is compulsive. And social media infantizes traumatic responses.<\/p>\n I\u2019m reminded of Taste of Cement<\/em>, the 2017 documentary film following refugees from Syria \u2013 also in part Kurdish \u2013 in Beirut, Lebanon, building high rises while their homes topple. After long days of labouring, the workers move down into the basement, spending their evenings watching scenes of destruction, videos from their mobile phones reflected in their eyes \u2013 melancholy inducing repeatedly self-inflicted doses of violence on violence. The collective fixation on the one TV screen in a Los Angeles hotel room has morphed into hand-held, personally accessible imagery.<\/p>\n Isma\u00efl is critical of \u2018this flow of immediate images\u2019: it \u2018provides no context, no background, no explanation for what we are seeing. It is both thrilling and dull, and in many ways this technology is playing catch-up to war.\u2019<\/p>\n Downey tracks the digitization behind today\u2019s warfare, its development from imaging physical locations to creating imaginary targets \u2013 not fictional sites, as such, but places and moments before any sign of violence has been recorded. Downey calls this anticipated military tactic an \u2018occupation of the future\u2019: remotely powered AI that predicts the enemy\u2019s moves before they have decided to strike, hitting out in advance.<\/p>\n \u2018This ambition to \u201csee further\u201d,\u2019 writes Downey, \u2018supports the neo-colonial ambition to see that which cannot be seen \u2013 or that which can only be seen through the algorithmic gaze and its rationalization of future realities.\u2019<\/p>\n What is of course missing from these \u2018contemporary theatres of warfare\u2019, Downey recognizes, is \u2018their real-world impact\u2019. But Isma\u00efl rightly warns of the postcolonial dead end facing the Kurdish people: \u2018The space they inhabit isn\u2019t\u00a0real<\/em>, not in the way that nation states are real,\u2019 he writes. \u2019It is a borderland, a form of limbo. Yes, real people live there: people with dreams and hopes and fears. But the land they live on, that they\u2019re geographically bound to, is and has been a no man\u2019s land where nation states can act with impunity.\u2019<\/p>\n What better rational could there be as invitation to find out more about this region and its people, to \u2018see\u2019 them, starting with two well-researched perspectives?<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\nLive coverage<\/h2>\n
Constant flow<\/h2>\n
Future strikes<\/h2>\n