Stacey on the frontline review

Stacey on the frontline: Girls, guns and ISIS documentary review

Stacey on the frontline: Girls, guns and ISIS is a documentary following Stacey Dooley as she travels to Northern Iraq for 2 weeks to experience the life of the female soldiers that fight on the frontline against ISIS. At the start of the show she visits a training camp to meet up and talk to some of the girls about their experiences and finds out many were actually once held captive by ISIS. After experiencing the living conditions and everyday routines before traveling to another training camp a bit closer to the front line. The next training camp is near a city where some of the girls used to live before it was destroyed by ISIS and lots of people were killed including women and children. Some of the soldiers open up to Stacey about the terrible conditions inside the ISIS camps and a few of them get emotional and have to leave. Towards the end of the documentary Stacey travels to the frontline and gets to experience first hand what it is like to get shot at and being in the hostile environment.

This documentary shows representations of: Gender, religion and issues. Gender is a key theme in this because the women are being allowed to go and fight alongside the rest of the army as equals which would definitely not be allowed on the other side in the ISIS camps where they actually torture and kill women and children for no real reason at all. Religion is also significant as the documentary is around ISIS who have taken the peaceful Islamic religion and have twisted it and now carry out world wide terror attacks and kill hundreds of thousands of people, this leads on to the last representation which is issues. The attacks all over the world have caused the world to live in fear of the terrorist group. The issue and threat of terrorists has been around for years but as technology improves the attacks become more and more extreme and frightening.  

I think the main target audience for this documentary is people who are interested in the ongoing war with ISIS and the people who are fighting them including the Iraqi women in the documentary, I suppose it could also be of interest to women as the women in the documentary are fighting alongside the men who live alongside them which is usually not the case in most cultures especially ISIS . Although you can only see one sides perspective, this documentary still gives an accurate representation of the issues in Iraq as Stacey Dooley gives a first person perspective in several different camps and bases with lots of different people who share their experiences with her.

I think the documentary was really good as it gave lots of background information and a first hand account of the battle in Iraq as well as talking to the soldiers and their families to explain how bad the conditions really are in Iraq.