At the time, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was suspected of possessing weapons of mass destruction and sponsoring terrorist activities, which provided adequate ground for the US to invade Iraq in 2003. However, people have a strong propensity to believe that Saddam’s affiliation with Al-Qaeda was a mere fabrication made by the Bush Administration to cover its real intention: control of Iraq’s oil reserves.

April 9, 2003 marked the toppling of the Firdos Square statue of Saddam Hussein, an iconic event that caught unmatched media attention and was televised all over the world in a bid to signal the collapse of Hussein’s regime and fool the public opinion into believing that the Iraqis greeted the US invaders as peacekeepers who liberated Iraq from the tight grip of a brutal dictator.

The US forces took over Baghdad on April 9 and brought down the 12-meter statue which was built in 2002 in honor of Saddam Hussein, amid a reportedly large crowd of Iraqi citizens, foreign journalists, photographers and TV crews, using the crane of an US M88 Hercules tank tower, after Iraqi wrestler and weightlifter Kadhem Sharif failed to topple it with his sledgehammer.

Hearsay and contradictory stories surrounded the collapse of Saddam Hussein’s statue. The 2004 documentary film “Control Room” featured Al-Jazeera journalists claiming that the toppling was a pseudo-spectacle and that Iraqi citizens had been summoned to the Square to act out their role in the show. Skepticism also shrouded the size of the crowd with some estimating the number at a several hundred people at most, with a quarter to half of them being journalists and soldiers.

Whether or not the scene was staged or the media amplified the iconic footage to mislead the public remains arguable. What is certain, however, is that uninhibited looting operations swept over Baghdad in the few weeks following the US takeover and resulted in a massive destruction of infrastructure.

The 21-day long invasion paved the way for insurgencies against the US occupation, followed by sectarian killings that culminated into something close to civil war. It wasn’t until December 18, 2011 that the US troops ended their mission and withdrew from Iraq, leaving behind tens of thousands of victims and dreadful memories of violence and bloodshed.