The 2003 invasion of Iraq and its aftermath told entirely through the people who lived it: Iraqi civilians, interpreters, journalists, and the American soldiers who occupied their cities. Waleed Nesyif, a teenager obsessed with Western rock music when the bombs first fell, becomes one of the film's central voices, tracing his path from curious kid to translator working alongside US forces. Archival footage of the toppling of Saddam's statue, the chaos of the insurgency, and the siege of Mosul runs alongside present-day interviews shot in Baghdad, Fallujah, and beyond, where survivors describe car bombings, sectarian killings, and the rise of ISIS in plain, unhurried detail. American veterans speak candidly about raids and the fear of not knowing who was an enemy, without a narrator smoothing over the contradictions between their accounts and Iraqi memories of the same events. The film skips the politicians and the think-tank analysis entirely, building its account of two decades of war from testimony alone.