According to a report by the New York Times a few days ago, not long ago, in a garbage dump on the outskirts of Baghdad, Iraq, a reporter from the newspaper discovered as many as 400 pages of secret files about the massacre in the town of Hadidah.
On November 19, 2005, soldiers from Company K, 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment, killed 2,400 civilians in the Iraqi town of Hadizai after a comrade was killed by a bomb while on patrol. These files, which were supposed to be destroyed with the withdrawal of the US troops, confirmed the tragedy that took place in the town of Hadisse, and also showed that the mental state of US soldiers on the battlefield was extremely unstable. American current affairs commentator Molly Evans said mental stress cannot be used as an excuse to kill civilians.
Use the secret archives to make a fire for a "big meal"
One by one, U.S. Marines sat down, vowed to tell the truth, and then began an undercover investigation into the 2005 Hadesey massacre.
Hadidish is a small town on the Euphrates River in Iraq's Anbar province, where U.S. Marines killed 2,400 Iraqis, including a 76-year-old in a wheelchair, on the morning of November 19, 2005. And toddlers.
The undercover investigation was in early 2006. The files resulting from the investigation were once considered top war secrets. According to the "New York Times" report on December 14, recently, in a garbage dump on the outskirts of Baghdad, the newspaper's reporter found 400 pages of archives. At the time, a worker at the dump was using them to make a fire for a smoked carp 'feast'. Also found were secrets such as military maps.
The archives are said to have been transported from a U.S. military base to a dump by an Iraqi contractor, along with a trove of other materials. The worker, who was preparing to cook on the archives fire, said he had no idea what was written on the archives; in the past few weeks, a large number of war materials had been reduced to ashes.
"What can we do with them? These things are useless to us, but we know they are very important to Americans, so it is better to burn them." The staff member said.
These files, which were supposed to be destroyed with the withdrawal of US troops, confirmed the tragedy that took place in the town of Hadidish. The incident made Iraqis hate the U.S. military because, to this day, not a single murderer has been punished.
Colonel Barry Johnson, a spokesman for the U.S. military in Iraq, said the files have not yet been declassified, so they should be destroyed when discovered. "While they were inappropriately discarded and then rediscovered, we still have no right to talk about the classified information inside."
War dehumanizes soldiers
Colonel Thomas Carrick, the commander of U.S. troops stationed in Iraq's western Anbar province at the time of the tragedy, described to military investigators what he witnessed. "The corpses with their throats slit, some with their heads beheaded..."
This batch of discarded files shows that the mental state of American soldiers on the battlefield is extremely unstable. Colonel Carrick said checkpoints would be hit with grenades, causing casualties. "You know, this kind of thing is sometimes done by civilians..."
The New York Times reported that war dehumanized soldiers. Shooting at civilians is not a big deal when the danger facing cannot be determined.
A person familiar with the matter, who asked not to be named, said that during the mission, if U.S. soldiers feel they will be attacked, they will shoot first and then shout, often killing civilians by mistake. If Marines are attacked by someone hiding in a building, they usually don't take the time to find the attacker, but instead raze the building in one fell swoop, potentially injuring innocents.
"When a vehicle crosses the cordon and doesn't stop, Marines will fire on it. Innocent people will be killed," said Sergeant Major Edward Sachs.
Sachs said he and his comrades did not understand why so many Iraqis did not stop at the checkpoint. His guess was that they were illiterate, or had bad eyesight.
"They kept walking towards the checkpoint. It's hard to imagine what's going to happen next," said Colonel John Ledoux.
Bomb attack triggers tragedy
In 2005, the 1st Regiment of the U.S. Marine Corps departed from Camp Pendleton, California, to Anbar Province, Iraq. Company K, 3rd Battalion of the regiment, was stationed in the town of Hadidish, and many of the soldiers were serving in Iraq for the second or third time.
Sunni and foreign mercenaries operating in Anbar province, a stronghold of anti-American forces, have been trying to drive the Americans out of Iraq and wipe out as many Americans as possible. Of the 4,483 American soldiers killed in the Iraq War, 1,335 died in Anbar province.
On March 31, 2004, one year before the First Marine Corps arrived in Iraq, four employees of the American "Blackwater" company were killed in Fallujah, Anbar Province, their bodies were burned, and two of them were hanged. on a bridge. A few days later, U.S. troops moved into Fallujah. In the next two years, the US military and anti-US armed forces continued to fight, and Anbar province has been in a state of chaos. The brutal fighting left many American soldiers on the brink of mental breakdown.
All of this paved the way for the tragic incident that took place on November 19, 2005 in the town of Hadisse.
That morning, a 4-vehicle patrol of K Company was hit by a bomb in the town of Hadice, killing 20-year-old Private First Class Mikel Terrazas on the spot.
The bomb was mounted on a gas tank and detonated with a remote control.
Before long, a taxi passed an American patrol. The U.S. military suspected that the people in the car were here to check the bomb, so they ordered the five people in the car to get out of the car. Five people tried to escape after getting out of the car, but were shot and killed by the US military. In the hours that followed, 19 others were shot and killed by these American troops.
Afterwards, the U.S. military claimed that the dead were militants, but in fact, they only found a submachine gun in a resident’s home that day, and there was no evidence that the gun was used to attack the U.S. military.
Iraq cannot hold murderers accountable
On the second day of the incident, Iraqi reporters who lived near the incident filmed the bloody scene with a video camera, according to the online magazine "Salon". Later, the video was forwarded to the US "Time" magazine through an Iraqi human rights organization. "Time" reporter asked the Marine Corps about this matter, and the spokesman for the other party, Jeffrey Pohl, said: "This is a rumor created by al-Qaeda." For those civilian victims, the US military said that they "died on the road. side bomb".
In January 2006, Time magazine interviewed residents of the town of Hadisse, and witnesses confirmed it was a bloody killing.
After the report was published, the U.S. military conducted a three-week investigation from February to March of that year. The investigation was led by Colonel Gregory Watt. The investigative report was never made public, and The New York Times managed to learn part of it from a senior military officer.
According to the officer, autopsy results showed that 2,400 of the dead had marks of being shot, with the vast majority of gunshot wounds in the head and chest, which is difficult to explain with roadside bombs. The officer used the term "execution style" to describe the massacre.
Weeks after the incident, the Marines paid the families of the 15 victims $2,500 per victim. This is the maximum amount of compensation under USMC regulations. Other victims were not compensated for "hostile conduct".
Because the Iraqi interim government and the United States signed a troop agreement, Iraqi law cannot pursue the matter .
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