The first misbegotten phase of the American war in Iraq effectively came to
an end on Saturday, November 19, 2005. “It was a mediocre morning” in the
upper Euphrates River Valley town of Haditha, 150 miles northwest of Baghdad,
Marine Lance Cpl. Justin Sharratt would later recall. “It wasn’t too busy, and it
wasn’t suspiciously quiet.”
Then, at about 7:15, near the corner of what they called Routes Chestnut
and Viper, Sharratt’s squad was hit by a roadside bomb. The Marines of 1st
Squad, 3rd Platoon, Kilo Company, 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment, would
do many things that long day in response to the bombing, and they later would
offer much conflicting testimony about their actions. But one thing they clearly
did not do was protect Iraqi civilians—and that is why the Marine killings at
Haditha are key to understanding the failure of the first years of the American
war in Iraq, and why it became imperative to revamp U.S. strategy, beginning by
revisiting many of the basic assumptions of what the Americans were trying to
achieve there and how.
As the smoke and dust cleared from the explosion, the squad realized that
one of their members, Cpl. Miguel Terrazas, a well- liked twenty- year- old from
El Paso, Texas, was dead. He was literally blown apart—his torso strewn on the
dusty ground while his legs remained in the vehicle. Two other Marines were
wounded.
A white Opel sedan rolled toward the chaotic scene. The Marines signaled
it to halt. When it did, five young Iraqi men got out of the car. “They didn’t even
try to run away,” Sgt. Asad Amer Mashoot, an Iraqi soldier, later told officials
from the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. Some had their hands in the air
when Staff Sgt. Frank Wuterich began to shoot them, one Marine and two Iraqi
soldiers told investigators. Sgt. Sanic Dela Cruz then urinated on the head of one
of the slaughtered men. Wuterich later would tell investigators that he considered
them to be a threat.
The Marines began moving toward the houses along the road, “running and
gunning” in Marine parlance, conducting what they would later describe as a
methodical if violent sweep for insurgents. Their actions looked different from
the other end of their weapons. In the second house the Marines entered, Safah
Yunis Salem, thirteen years old, said she played dead to avoid being shot. She was
the sole survivor in the house, with seven family members killed, including
Zainab, five, and Aisha, three. “He fired and killed everybody,” she told American
investigators. “The American fired and killed everybody.”
Lance Cpl. Stephen Tatum later said in a statement to military investigators
that he knew he was shooting children. “While in the house which I identified as
House #2, I did identify some targets as children before I fired my weapon killing
them,” he explained. “My reason for this is that House #1 was declared hostile.
While in house #1 I was told that someone ran to house #2 making it hostile. . . .
While in house #2 SSGT [Staff Sgt.] WUTERICH fired shots into a room. This
again made me think the house was hostile. I went to assist SSGT WUTERICH
and saw that children were in the room kneeling down. I don’t remember the
exact number but only that it was a lot. My training told me that they were hostile
due to SSGT WUTERICH firing at them and the other events I mentioned
leading up to this. I am trained to shoot two shots to the chest and two shots to
the head and I followed my training.”
One villager, Aws Fahmi, later said he watched and listened as the Americans
went from house to house killing members of three families. He heard his neighbor
across the street, Younis Salim Khafif, plead in English for the lives of his
family. “I heard Younis speaking to the Americans, saying: ‘I am a friend. I am
good,”’ Fahmi said. “But they killed him, and his wife and daughters.” An old
man in a wheelchair was shot nine times. Another of the victims was a one- yearold
baby.
At 5 p.m., a call went out on a Marine radio: We need a truck to come pick up 24 bodies. Eight were deemed by the Marines to have been insurgents, including the five from the Opel. The remainder were clearly civilians. Other Marines arriving on the scene sensed something was wrong. “The only thing I thought was, ‘Hey, where are the bad guys? Why aren’t there any insurgents here?”’ Lt. William Kallop later testified.
Lance Cpl. Andrew Wright, sent to the site to help collect the bodies, was
moved to take out his digital camera and snap a series of photographs. “Even
though there was no investigation at the time, I felt that the photographs would
be evidence if anything came up in the future,” he later would explain to agents
of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. “In my opinion, the people that I
photographed had been murdered.”
Official Marine Corps statements presented a different image. The next day,
Capt. Jeffrey S. Pool, a Marine spokesman in Iraq, said in a terse press release that
15 Iraqis were killed by a roadside bomb, and that “after the bombing, gunmen
attacked the convoy with small- arms fire. Iraqi army soldiers and Marines returned
fire, killing eight insurgents and wounding another.” Almost all aspects
of this statement were incorrect.
The U.S. military justice system eventually would conduct a thorough review
of the Haditha incident. Charges were dismissed against six of the Marines,
and a seventh was acquitted. Wuterich still faces several charges, including voluntary
manslaughter, and many of the Marines involved were found not guilty
of wrongdoing. But there is no getting around the fact that 24 Iraqis were killed
and that some of them were women and children. The only way to sidestep
the question was to persuade one’s self, as Cpl. Sharratt did, that, “they were all
insurgents”—including the women, children, and wheelchair- bound old man.
“Personally, I think I did everything perfectly that day,” he concluded. “Because
of me, no one else died”—by which he meant only, no other Marines.
What happened that day in Haditha was the disturbing but logical culmination
of the shortsighted and misguided approach the U.S. military took in invading
and occupying Iraq from 2003 through 2006: Protect yourself at all costs,
focus on attacking the enemy, and treat the Iraqi civilians as the playing field on
which the contest occurs. Kalev Sepp, a counterinsurgency expert who conducted
an official study of the effectiveness of U.S. military battalion, brigade, and regimental
commanders in Iraq at the time, reported that the Marines were “chasing
the insurgents around the Euphrates Valley while leaving the population unguarded
and exposed to insurgent terrorism and coercion.” This bankrupt approach was rooted in the dominant American military tradition that tends to view war only as battles between conventional forces of different states. The American tradition also tends to neglect the lesson, learned repeatedly in dozens of twentieth- century wars, that the way to defeat an insurgency campaign is not to attack the enemy but instead to protect and win over the people. “The more we focus on the enemy, the harder it is to actually get anything done with the population,” noted Australian counterinsurgency theorist David Kilcullen, who
would play a prominent role in fixing the way the American military fought in
Iraq. The aim of a counterinsurgency campaign is to destroy the enemy—but
often by isolating him and making him irrelevant rather than killing him. The
best insurgent is not a dead one, who might leave behind a relative seeking vengeance,
but one who is ignored by the population and perhaps is contemplating
changing sides, bringing with him invaluable information.