By Martin Asser
BBC News
Haditha is an agricultural community of about 90,000 inhabitants on the banks of the Euphrates north-west of Baghdad.
It lies in the huge western province of Anbar, which has been the heartland of the insurgency since US troops led the invasion of Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein in 2003.
It is a dangerous place for the US marines who control this part of Iraq - and for the inhabitants, caught between insurgents and American troops.
On the morning of 19 November 2005, the Subhani neighbourhood was the scene of an event that has become like the regular pulse beat of the insurgency - a roadside bomb targeting a US military patrol.
It killed 20-year-old Lance Corp Miguel ("TJ") Terrazas, driving one of four humvee vehicles in the patrol, and injured two other marines.
A simple US military statement hinted at the bloody chain of events which the attack started - though subsequent scrutiny showed it to be far from the truth.
It said: "A US marine and 15 civilians were killed yesterday from the blast of a roadside bomb in Haditha".
"Immediately following the bombing, gunmen attacked the convoy with small arms fire. Iraqi army soldiers and marines returned fire, killing eight insurgents and wounding another."
Video footage
The tragedy of Haditha may have been left at that - just another statistic of "war-torn" Iraq: a place too dangerous to be reported properly by journalists, where openness is not in the interests of political and military circles, and the sheer scale of death numbs the senses.
However, a day after the incident, local journalist Taher Thabet got his video camera out and filmed scenes that - whatever they were - were not the aftermath of a roadside bombing.
The bodies of women and children, still in their nightclothes, apparently shot in their own homes; interior walls and ceilings peppered with bullet holes; bloodstains on the floor.
Mr. Thabet's tape prompted an investigation by the Iraqi human rights group Hammurabi, which passed details onto the US weekly magazine Time in January 2006.
Before publishing its account on 19 March, the magazine passed the tape to US military commanders in Baghdad, who initiated a preliminary investigation.
Following their findings, the official version was changed to say that, after the roadside bomb, the 15 civilians had been accidentally shot by marines during a gun fight with insurgents.
Nevertheless, on 9 March the top US commanders in Baghdad began a criminal investigation, led by the Naval Criminal Investigation Service (NCIS).
On 7 April three officers in charge of troops in Haditha were also stripped of their command and reassigned.
5 comments:
nice work asshole. i was talking to the BUSH.
Mr Jones you hadn't heard of Haditha until recently? Ahh bien it's good your putting this out there because it was so quickly swept under the rug when it took place. What I wonder about is how many Iraqi Civillians have been killed by US Troops and their murders have been hused up. This entire war has been dirty. Everything evil done to the Iraqi People by our soldiers has been done in secret as if our troops are cockroaches frightened of their deeds to be shown in the light.
The sad thing is that Bush and his cronies are creating a generation of people that will despise this nation for the horrors that they have witnessed and I can't say that they dwill not have good reason to hate the US...
Sorry I'm getting off the soap box now.
What's wrong with that? This is nothing new in the art of war.
YABG - You can't blame Bush for this. Well, I guess he did order our troops to go over there. But you can't really blame him for that either. He was given bad intelligence. Or so they say...
Kyon - I know, I know. I'm late on this one. Yeah...I think this is something people need to know about, so I posted it.
Captain - It's not even funny how bitter you are.
This is off subject...but yea, so - that CNN guy is nice.
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