From the first days of the Iran-Iraq war in 1980 to the defeat of Daech in 2017, this documentary series tells the story of forty years of conflict that led Iraq to chaos. An Iraqi story as much as an American and French one, where diplomatic, economic and military interests mingle, told by those who lived it, in Washington, Paris or Iraq. A dive into 40 years that changed the world. In the early days of 1980, Saddam Hussein, then perceived as a modernist by Western nations, engaged in a total war against his Iranian neighbor. Europe and the United States saw the Raïs as a shield against the Islamist obscurantism of the Mullahs.