James Steele spent the 1980s running American proxy wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua, training local forces accused of death squad killings. Two decades later he turns up in Iraq, and this investigation by the Guardian and BBC Arabic, the result of a 15-month inquiry, traces what he did there. From 2004 Steele and fellow retired colonel James Coffman oversee the Special Police Commandos, an Iraqi force funded and equipped through channels controlled by General David Petraeus; Coffman later describes himself, in an interview with a US military newspaper, as Petraeus' 'eyes and ears' on the ground. The commandos grow to more than 17,000 men, recruited heavily from Shia militias including the Badr Brigades, and run a network of torture centers that help ignite a sectarian civil war costing tens of thousands of lives, with Sunni communities bearing the brunt of the violence. Narrated by Dearbhla Molloy, the film lays out the chain of command from commando cell to Baghdad to Washington.