Khaled Salman Raseef remembers being jolted awake by a loud explosion near his home on the morning of November 19, 2005 — an event that marked its twentieth anniversary last month.
In Haditha, a once-peaceful Iraqi city along the Euphrates River, such sounds had become routine. The close-knit neighborhoods had been transformed into a war zone after the US invasion and the fall of Saddam Hussein more than two years earlier. Insurgent groups, including al-Qaeda, had taken root here to fight US forces.
By then, Raseef and his neighbors had a routine for when an improvised explosive device (IED) exploded and US raids followed. They hid the elderly, women, and children in a back room, while the men opened the doors and tried to speak calmly. Whatever happened — whether troops burst in with assault rifles raised or smashed furniture — the rule was always the same: stay polite, Raseef says, speaking in his home in Haditha.
“Usually, about an hour after an explosion, everything goes back to normal,” the fifty-one-year-old lawyer explains. “But that day was unlike any other.”
Bursts of M16 fire cracked through the morning air, followed by a grenade blast — then more gunfire. Snipers took positions on rooftops; women screamed nearby. With no cell phones or internet, residents had no way of knowing what was happening, Raseef recalls.
For hours, the sounds came in waves — gunfire, a single shot, an explosion — each followed by an eerie silence.
By afternoon, residents emerged waving white flags, fleeing the neighborhood. What Raseef then found changed his life forever. Within those few hours, US Marines had killed twenty-five unarmed civilians (twenty-four of them that day, with…
Auteur: Jaclynn Ashly
