The video of that statue being pulled down was a staged propaganda event. The civilians were Kurds who were bussed in, not locals. There were not very many of them and the whole area was ringed with a huge number of US soldiers to keep the real local people away. It was a planned PR stunt.
I never heard that. Then it was a pretty good one, because it’s now famous. By the way, that’s the ONLY video of these news videos that claims its copyright for monetization, presumably because of the foreign footage.