THERE was a time, not long ago, when Iraq never seemed to be out of the news. Its key towns and cities – Mosul, Baghdad, Kirkuk, Basra, Tikrit, Erbil, Al-Fallujah – became ghastly shorthand for bloodshed, terror attacks, human misery piled upon human misery.

As the Herald’s distinguished photojournalist David Pratt observes, Iraq has been at war of one kind or another since 1979. This “troubled, tortured, tangled country” is divided along ethnic, tribal and religious lines; it has endured a genocidal dictator and has been “invaded, occupied and pulverised” by the world’s greatest superpower. And all of that is without mentioning the brutal ISIS insurgency.

The world has moved on to other trouble-spots, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine merely being the latest; but Pratt, this newspaper’s Foreign Affairs Editor and one of Britain’s most accomplished foreign correspondents, has never quite forgotten the “complex, beautiful” land and its inhabitants. A few months ago he returned there with the film-maker Robbie Fraser for a new project.

Pictures from Iraq, like its predecessor, Pictures from Afghanistan two years ago, will premiere at the Glasgow Film Festival this weekend before being screened by BBC Scotland. And, like that earlier film, it’s a thought-provoking and quietly riveting piece of work ­– “part-reportage, part-travelogue”, as Pratt describes it.

The camera follows him as he journeys in northern Iraq and Erbil, capital of the Kurdish autonomous region ­­– “a state within a state, not unlike Catalonia, Quebec, or Scotland”.

There are some 40 million Kurds across Iraq, Iran, Syria and Turkey; together they are, by one reckoning, the biggest people in the world without their own state. Saddam Hussein’s regime reputedly killed some 100,000 Kurds during the so-called Anfal campaign of the late 1980s; over a million others were displaced.

In the film Pratt is reunited after nearly six years with Major General Sirwan Barzani, a legendary figure in the Kurdish army, the Peshmerga, and nephew of a former president of Iraqi Kurdistan, Masoud Barzani. He is also managing director of a mobile phone operator in Iraq with seven million subscribers, and is estimated to be worth some $2 billion.

Barzani, a veteran of the long battle against Saddam and, much later, against ISIS, tells Pratt that though the general situation in Erbil is much better than when they last spoke, there are still regular terror attacks being made, and some instability.

Parked nearby is a cluster of captured VBIEDs ­­- vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices: ISIS suicide armoured car-bombs, in other words. One of them, Pratt is apprehensive to learn, is full of TNT.

During the film Pratt interviews female members of the Kurdistan Freedom Party and meets an old friend, the Swedish/Iraqi journalist Urban Hamid. The duo have covered many conflicts together over the years; the last time they met was in May 2018, en route to Syria.

Fraser’s evocative footage is interspersed with Pratt’s striking photographs and with archive footage of the younger Pratt reporting, for example, on the arrival of the US 173rd Airborne Brigade in northern Iraq in 2003, and on other elements of Iraq’s sprawling, bloody recent history.

There is also a video of the moment when ISIS Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, at a Mosul mosque, announced the formation of a caliphate stretching from Aleppo in Syria to Diyala in Iraq. “What came next”, Pratt says in voiceover, “is one of the darkest chapters in human history since the end of the Second World War”.

The documentary shows northern Iraq as it is today – bustling, cosmopolitan, bewitching. You can see what Pratt means when he says he loves Iraq, as well as Afghanistan and the wider Middle East.

Pratt and Fraser shot the documentary, and one on the Balkans, last September and October, “Essentially with these documentaries I’m returning to places where I’ve taken the most significant of my pictures. It all springs from Only With the Heart, a retrospective exhibition of my pictures at the Sogo Arts gallery in Glasgow in 2019.

“They’re all countries that either are at war or have been at war in some shape or form. In northern Iraq we crossed through different factions of fighters in northern Iraq …. We met Hashd al-Sha’bi, which is supposedly the Iranian proxy militia.

“It was interesting to meet up with people like General Barzani. He’s one of the wealthiest guys in northern Iraq, but he has earned his stripes. He fought with the Black Tigers, as they are called. He took us to a still-active front line where the Black Tigers are still engaged in fighting the last remnants of ISIS. ISIS, incidentally, is re-grouping: in Makhmur mountain there’s still a group of them that is laying tunnels and operating in villages under cover, and have sleeper cells. It’s still an active frontline.

“Indeed, two weeks after we left the Makhmur mountain, the same unit we filmed came under attack. They lost 10 men and a local Kurdish policeman was beheaded by ISIS.

“So although it’s fair to say that the world’s attention has moved away from Iraq, the problems have not gone away”, Pratt adds. “Not only is ISIS re-grouping but there are also quite a lot of political fault-lines between the Kurds and Baghdad, and the extent of Iranian influence, all of which is reflected in the film through a series of encounters”.

He likens Pictures from Iraq to the late chef Anthony Bourdain’s travel documentary, Parts Unknown; where Bourdain used food as the basis, Pratt uses his photography.

The documentary, which was jointly funded by BBC Scotland, Screen Scotland, BBC Persian and the international distributor, Terranoa, is set to be screened in July alongside not just Pictures from Afghanistan but also another new Pratt-Fraser project, Pictures from the Balkans, which was shot last year.

These are just a reminder of Pratt’s remarkable career. Robbie Fraser puts it succinctly: “These films are made possible because of David’s stellar independent archive of stills and video, and his on-the-ground experience from a career of more than 40 years”.

There are, he says, other countries whose stories he and Pratt would like to tell in this manner; Pratt’s extensive archive, after all, extends to Congo, Haiti, Somalia, and Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories. “Watch this space”, Fraser adds.

** Pictures From Iraq is at the Glasgow Film Theatre at 1.15pm on Sunday, March 13, followed by a Q&A with David Pratt. See https://glasgowfilm.org/