Long Hidden Images Of Haditha Massacre Reveal Dark Chapter Of US Occupation

The residents of Haditha, a city located in the banks of the Euphrates River in Iraq’s western province of Anbar, even after years still recall the horrors of the massacre committed by US soldiers during its occupation.

The US military worked for years to suppress the photographs of the massacre of innocent civilians. The images that were concealed depicted the horrific aftermath of one of the most significant war crimes in modern US history.

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On the morning of November 19, 2005, a US convoy was traveling through Haditha, Iraq, when an IED explosion killed one Marine and injured two others. What later followed was one of the most brutal killings of the US in the pages of history.

The next few hours were hours of indiscriminate slaughter. The Marines killed twenty-four Iraqi men, women, and children. And they were not ready to stop with one explosion, they further went on to shoot five men who were driving to college in Baghdad. Unleashing a killing spree, they entered three nearby houses and killed all civilians inside the youngest of the victims was just three years old while the oldest was a seventy-six-year-old man.

Later the Marines defending their act claimed that they were fighting insurgents. Soon after the killing was over, two other Marines took their Olympus digital camera to document the aftermath. They went on from one house to another numbering each of their victims with red marker.

By the time, they have done with the photographs, they have created a collection of pictures that would be the most powerful evidence against their fellow Marines.

The killing was later added to one of the tragic histories of Iraq and came to be known as the Haditha massacre. Four Marines were later charged with murder, however, it was dropped later.

By 2012, the final case charged was also ended with a plea deal that resulted in no prison sentences. As the Iraq war ended, the horrific stories started to fade from public attention as well.

Mostly the war crimes were magnified on the basis of the graphic images that reached the public. One such image from the Iraq war which shook human conscience is that of Abu Ghraib. However, unlike Abu Gharib’s photos, the images of Haditha remained hidden.

General Michael Hagee, the commandant of the Marine Corps at the time, later boasted in a 2014 oral history interview that the Haditha photos had never been released. “Those pictures today have still not been seen. And so, I’m quite proud of that,” Hagee said.

Determined to retrieve the images, a team from the Dark podcast in 2020 filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the Navy to release the images aiming to reconstruct the incident.

When the Navy did to respond to the query, the team sued the Navy, Marine Corps, and US Central Command. They abstained from releasing the pictures claiming that it would harm the surviving families.

During the legal battle, the journalists traveled to Iraq and met with the victim’s families. With the support of families who wished to know the final moments of their lost ones went from door to door collecting signatures. After four years of legal battle, the military finally relented and handed over the images.

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The New Yorker later published a selection of these photos with the permission of the victim’s relatives. The graphic images depict men, women, and young children in defenseless positions.

Among the victims included the photograph of the five-year-old Zainab Younis Salim who was shot in the head while lying in bed beside her mother, sisters and brother.

The Naval Criminal Investigative Service (N.C.I.S) revealed chilling details including one of the Marines admitting that he recognized the people whom he shot as women and children.

Despite the overwhelming evidence, including photos that show that there were no weapons in the homes or the bodies, the military did not pursue significant punishment for the Marines involved.