The photos of the Haditha massacre that the military wanted to keep from the world

On the morning of November 19, 2005, a detachment of Marines in four Humvees was driving down a street in the Iraqi city of Haditha when their convoy encountered an explosive device. The explosion killed one Marine, Lance Corporal Miguel Terrazas, and wounded two others. What followed would spark one of the largest war crimes investigations in United States history.

Over the next few hours, the Marines killed 24 Iraqi men, women and children. Near the site of the explosion, they shot and killed five men who were on their way to a Baghdad college. They entered three nearby houses and killed nearly everyone inside. The youngest victim was a three-year-old girl. The oldest was a 76-year-old man. The Marines later claimed they had been fighting insurgents that day, but the dead were all civilians.

After the killing was over, two more Marines headed out to document the aftermath. Lance Corporal Ryan Briones brought his Olympus digital camera. Lance Corporal Andrew Wright had a red Sharpie marker.

Briones and Wright went from place to place, marking the bodies with numbers and photographing them. Other Marines, including one who worked in intelligence, also photographed the crime scene. When they were finished, they had assembled a collection of photos that would provide the strongest evidence against their comrades.

This project is supported by the Pulitzer Center.

The killings became known as the Haditha massacre. Four Marines were charged with the murder, but the charges were later dropped. General James Mattis, who later became Secretary of Defense, wrote one of the Marines a glowing letter denying the charges and declaring him innocent. When the last case ended in 2012 with a plea deal and no prison sentence, the Iraq War was over and stories about the legacy of the U.S. occupation were barely noticed. The news was barely noticed.

The impact of an alleged war crime is often directly related to the horror of the images that reach the public. The mistreatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison became an international scandal when graphic photos were released. The Haditha killings were no different. Some of the images taken by the Marines reached the public, but most were never released.

In a 2014 oral history interview for the Marine Corps, General Michael Hagee, who was commandant of the Marine Corps at the time of the Haditha murders, boasted about keeping the Haditha photos secret.

“Unlike Abu Ghraib, they never got to the press,” Hagee said.

The interviewer, Fred Allison, a Marine Corps historian, interjected: “The pictures. They got the pictures. That was the worst thing about Abu Ghraib.”

“Yes,” Hagee replied. “And I learned from it.” He said, “These pictures are still unpublished today. And I'm quite proud of that.”

In 2020, our team of reporters at the In the Dark podcast filed a Freedom of Information request with the Navy, requesting records that included the photos. We thought the photos would help us piece together what happened that day—and why the military dropped murder charges against the Marines involved. The Navy did not release anything. We then sued the Navy, Marine Corps, and U.S. Central Command to force them to release the photos and other records related to the Haditha murders. We expected the government to claim that releasing the photos would harm the surviving family members of the dead. Military prosecutors had already made this argument after the trial of the last Marine on trial.

While we were battling with the military for the photos, a colleague and I traveled to Iraq to meet with family members of the victims of the killings. They told me what had happened on November 19, 2005, and how they had all tried to get justice. “I believe it is our duty to tell the truth,” Khalid Salman Raseef, a lawyer who lost fifteen family members that day, told me. Another man, Khalid Jamal, was fourteen when his father and uncles were killed. He told me that he had wondered for years what had happened in the final moments of his family members. “Did they die like brave men? Were they afraid?” he said. “I want to know the details.”

We asked the two men if they would help us get the photos of their dead family members. They agreed, and so we began an unusual collaboration: an American journalist and two Iraqis whose family members had been killed working together to uncover the military's secrets.

Together with the lawyers representing us in our lawsuit against the military, I created a form that the surviving family members could sign to indicate that they wanted to give us the photos. Raseef and Jamal offered to take the form to the other family members.

The two men went from house to house in Haditha and explained our reporting and our plans.

In one house, Jamal told the father of one of the men killed on the way to Baghdad: “Of course I am one of you.” Jamal asked him to sign the form, saying: “The things that happened in the massacre will be revealed.” The father, Hameed Fleh Hassan, told him: “The drowning man will cling to the straw. … We sign. We sign. I will sign it twice, not once.”

Raseef and Jamal collected seventeen signatures. Our lawyer submitted the form to the court as part of our lawsuit. In March, more than four years after our first FOIA At our request, the military gave in and handed over the photos to us.

The New Yorker has decided, with the permission of the surviving families of those depicted, to publish a selection of these photos in order to make visible the horror of a murder that the military refused to punish.