Photographs depicting the massacre of Iraqi civilians by US Marines in Haditha nearly two decades ago have been published after a protracted legal battle. The New Yorker magazine released the images, which were previously classified, showing the brutal aftermath of the November 19, 2005, Haditha massacre.
On that day, US Marines killed 24 Iraqi civilians, including women, children, and elderly individuals, in three homes. The victims ranged from a three-year-old girl to a seventy-six-year-old man. The massacre, which also included the shooting of five men driving to Baghdad, led to one of the longest war-crime investigations in US military history.
The massacre occurred in response to the death of a Marine in an IED explosion earlier that day. Despite the fact that all of the victims were civilians, the Marines involved were never imprisoned; murder charges were dropped, and the case ended in a plea deal.
The photos show the harrowing scenes inside the homes, with bodies marked with numbers by the Marines for identification. Among the victims was 42-year-old Ayda Yassin Ahmed, found surrounded by her dead children, and five-year-old Zainab Younis Salim, who was shot in the head alongside her family.
The release of these photos came after The New Yorker pursued a Freedom of Information Act request, facing resistance from the US Navy and military. The magazine’s team, aided by Iraqi lawyer Khalid Salman Raseef—who lost 15 family members in the massacre—collected signatures from victims’ relatives to push for the release of the images. After years of legal wrangling, the US military handed over the photos in March of this year.
