It’s dark, and far away, but this appears to be a depiction of some sort of assault on Fallujah.
From Madeleine Bunting’s “Screams will not be heard“, the Guardian, November 8, 2004:
In an age of instant communication, we will have to wait months, if not years, to hear of what happens inside Falluja in the next few days. The media representation of this war will be from a distance: shots of the city skyline illuminated by the flashes of bomb blasts, the dull crump of explosions. What will be left to our imagination is the terror of children crouching behind mud walls; the agony of those crushed under falling masonry; the frantic efforts to save lives in makeshift operating theatres with no electricity and few supplies. We will be the ones left to fill in the blanks, drawing on the reporting of past wars inflicted on cities such as Sarajevo and Grozny.
One reply on “And fuck if it doesn’t look pretty on our computer monitors!”
Everybody has to get ready for the fact that we will be watching battles on live TV before too much longer. Vietnam was called the living room war, but that was film that had to be transported across the Pacific, developed, and edited. The “embedded” journalists in the Iraqi invasion had live shots of tanks rolling across the desert, but no actual combat. The soldiers all seem to be wearing little cams on their helmets — wouldn’t that make a great feed?