Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Our combat mission is ending, but our commitment to Iraq's future is not. Iraqi people now
have lead responsibility for the security of their country.
After seven years of fighting, US combat troops have left Iraq.
We won. It's over. America! We brought democracy to Iraq.
But tonight we tell the story of that war and occupation that the US military doesn't
want you to know, the one they wrote themselves. Dispatches has been sifting through nearly
four hundred thousand secret army documents to uncover the full and unreported horror
of the conflict. It's the biggest leak of official documents in history.
Tonight we reveal reports that US troops were killing more civilians than insurgents at checkpoints,
that they killed people who were trying to surrender, that even after the scandal of
Abu Ghraib, US soldiers continued to abuse prisoners. And also, how the Americans stand
accused of turning a blind eye to the torture and *** of detainees by the Iraqi security services.
This is the cemetery at Najaf, in southern Iraq. It has existed for a thousand years
and is the biggest in the world. Since the invasion by coalition forces to topple the
dictator, Saddam Hussein in 2003, it has expanded by 40%. It now covers over three square miles.
Everyone in Iraq has been affected by the violence. Some days we buried two hundred,
sometimes more, sometimes less. These were the numbers we had to deal with.
The United States and its coalition partners respect the people of Iraq. We are taking
unprecedented measures to spare the lives of innocent Iraqi citizens.
There is often a difference between what political leaders say in public and what they may have
known in private, as we discovered when we received access to data from WikiLeaks, the
whistleblowers website. It contained nearly four hundred thousand secret reports, known
as SIGACTS -- that's shorts for significant activities. With the exception of a couple
of months, they were all logged by the military in Iraq, between 2004 and 2009.
This is almost military anthropology, this is a blow by blow account of individual American
soldiers and how they react.
But it was raw data, so the Bureau of Investigative
Journalism in London built a computer programme to analyse them. We used key words to search
specific subjects, looked for patterns in the data, decoded hundreds of military acronyms,
and read tens of thousands of reports. We have no way of knowing just how accurate or
comprehensive these reports are, but they do show what the US Army knew and when.
The one person we asked to comment on them was Dr Toby Dodge, who has advised both the UK
and the US governments on Iraq. One concern was that the documents named ordinary American
troops and Iraqi civilians. We have deleted those details.
Much more problematic for the Americans is the insight these leaks give into their modus
operandi, how they're functioning on the streets. The escalation of force, the killing of innocent
Iraqis, I think, is, it paints a damning picture of, of a culture of forced protection, to
the exclusion of everything else.
We got a shooter on the roof!
We will continue taking the greatest care to prevent harm to innocent civilians, yet
we will not permit the spread of chaos and violence.
Initially the Americans stated that they weren't recording a body count, or casualty figures,
and left it to others. But they were. In the files, we found just over one hundred and
nine thousand deaths. With our software, the location of every one can be mapped to reveal
that after six years of killing, barely a part of the country has escaped the bloodbath.
Despite George Bush's assurance, the majority of these, over sixty six thousand, were civilians,
that's nearly two thirds. Also recorded among the Sigacts, one hundred and seventy six thousand
wounded in total. In Baghdad, Iraq's capital, the secret reports expose, for the first time,
what kind of place the US and Britain are leaving behind. Because we can identify the
location of each incident, we can also show that hardly a single street corner has escaped
a bomb, *** or atrocity.
Saddam Hussein's palace, hit by a dozen bombs, Baghdad under the fiercest bombardment yet.
American and British troops have seized much...
The coalition hoped that the removal of Saddam Hussein would win them the hearts and minds
of Iraqis. Instead, they found themselves under attack from insurgents.
Our analysis of the secret reports shows that on average, over the six years they cover,
improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, were being detonated at a rate of thirty a day,
many of which were carried by suicide bombers, and the reports contain some chilling examples.
A twelve to fourteen year old boy wearing
a backpack and on a bicycle rode into the intersection and the boy detonated his explosives.
Intelligence assessment: Al Qaeda in Iraq is using mentally handicapped persons to target coalition forces.
Under these circumstances, troops manning checkpoints or riding convoy,
lived in constant fear, and some simply opened fire unnecessarily.
One officer used civilians to lower the risk to his men.
The platoon leader was in the habit of directing Iraqi civilians to clear the road of trash
and debris if he suspected that it may be an IED.
Under rules of engagement, known as escalation of force, anyone approaching the military
was warned to slow down and stop to be searched.
The one to my right. Got it?
If they didn't, warning shots would be fired. Our analysis reveals more than eight hundred people
were killed when soldiers opened fire in escalation of force incidents. Of these, 80%, that's
six hundred and eighty one, were civilians. A further two thousand, two hundred were wounded.
A cold analytical eye on this I think clearly indicates that far too many Iraqi civilians
are being killed for no reason.
One shooting was caught on camera by a photographer
embedded with a US Army unit in Tal Afar, North West Iraq. A married couple, Camille
and Hussein Hassan, were driving home, hurrying to beat the curfew. The US secret report gives
the American version of what happened next.
A sedan sped toward the patrol and failed to stop after visual
signals were given. A shot was fired at the front tyre, but the
vehicle did not stop. The patrol engaged the vehicle, killing two civilians.
Camille and Hussein were shot dead, but they weren't alone in the car.
There were six children in the back seat, all were unharmed.
The Hassan's fourteen year old daughter Jilan was heard to yell out, "Why did they shoot
us? We were just going home." And now we know the filed report was inaccurate. Not all the
children were unharmed. A bullet pierced the spine of eleven year old Rakan, who was rendered
a paraplegic. The US Army offered compensation to the family of seven thousand, five hundred
dollars, calculated as two thousand five hundred for each life taken, and two thousand five
hundred for the car.
Very often soldiers find themselves looking at a vehicle that
seems suspicious, ah, and they get jumpy and then they open fire on
it. And of course there are cases where soldiers have lost comrades and they're angry, and
they then are more inclined to look for the, the insurgents in the next vehicle coming,
or the next convoy that comes down the road.
When Iraqi civilians looked into the faces
of our servicemen and women, they saw strength, and kindness, and goodwill.
Our analysis of the files shows that only thirteen coalition troops were killed during
those escalation of force incidents. But firing shots near ordinary people at checkpoints
was fatal. We found thirty children killed. One round ricocheted off the concrete, hitting
a six year old. Sometimes, little allowance was made for the
fact that there may be a reason for a driver to be in a hurry.
Doctor was transporting a pregnant woman to the hospital and was shot by coalition forces.
Soldiers killed a pedestrian who they suspected was carrying something suspicious, when what
he had in his possession turned out to be innocuous.
The soldiers approached cautiously to look into the satchel, to discover it contained
books. I think the data shows a lot of Iraqi civilians
were killed because they posed a minor threat, they were ki, there, there, there was a, almost
a cavalier use of force against Iraqi civilians, in the name of forced protection.
The civilians with, from a different culture, they interpret things differently. So if there
are warning shots fired, em, civilians might speed up rather than slow down, because they
just heard a shot. Em, if they see people waving at them, they may think they're being
waved away. Em, the fact is, you can never second guess what civilians in a different
society are going to do. According to a former Iraqi police chief,
US Army behaviour changed over time. During 2004, they started shooting their weapons
up to the sky as a warning. But after that, they started shooting civilians.
We went to Iraq to find some of those who appeared in the escalation of force reports,
to see how the American's account compared with theirs. Hussam and Kareen Abas are survivors
of one such incident, which happened on this street in Baghdad.Kareem's father, Waheed,
was driving them to his restaurant where they all worked. They had only got one hundred
metres from their house, when they found themselves surrounded by US Military Humvees.
It was dark. There were no signs or anything. No roadblocks. We were intending to get out
and raise our hands. We reversed the car, we opened the door, they suddenly shot the
door. We closed the door and slowly reversed until we reached over there. That's when my
father was shot here and here and slumped forward. The car reversed on its own and as
it's going back, the soldiers were shooting. We cross-checked their account with the official
report in the secret files. It acknowledges the death of a civilian, and it claims that
escalation of force procedures were followed. Signals with a laser and vehicle mounted spotlight;
continues to shout and use visual signals to stop the car; fires warning shots with
smallest calibre weapon; firing an M2 machine gun into the ground in front of the vehicle,
and firing M4 into the engine block, disabling the vehicle.
We told Hussam and Kareem what the Army had said in the significant activity report.
No, there were no signs or anything, no signs, no warning, they rammed our car.
After the soldiers killed Waheed, the young men allege that they were assaulted.
They made us lay on the ground and put their feet on our heads...they ground our heads
into the road. They beat me here and here. Non stop beating and dragging, they would
drag us from here and drag us there. The classified report gives a different version
of events. Respectfully transported the vehicle and the
deceased to the family's house, in order to allow them to begin funeral preparations and
conducted consequence management. Coalition forces will be preparing a condolence packet.
In two other reports of escalation of force we examined, US troops claim that they followed
procedures before opening fire. But in each case, when we cross checked, the Iraqis involved
told a different story. What you can tell is the soldier's word appears
to be always taken, is, there's very little questioning and the, the death of innocent
civilians seems to be written off time after time, em, be, because of the protection, the
mini, the minim, the minimisation of risk to American soldiers beyond everything else.
Iraqi civilians were even more vulnerable to American attack from the air, something
the coalition didn't like admitting. We looked at the reports of one aerial operation called
Steel Curtain, and attack on insurgents crossing into Iraq, and found they did record collateral
damage.In 2006, American television interviewed Lieutenant Colonel John Harris of the US Air
Force who was involved in the operation. Do you think that civilians were killed in
any of those incidents? I don't know of any, any friendly fire, ah,
I can't, I can't say that they were or they weren't. We do our absolute best to make sure
that collateral damage is minimised in every case.
Colonel Harris didn't appear to be aware of what was contained in the significant activity
reports on Steel Curtain -- the deaths of thirty civilians, including a dozen children.
Steel Curtain reported finding civilian bodies buried in three separate locations.
The US military caused so many casualties, that they undoubtedly pushed more and more
of the Iraqis they had hoped to win over into insurgency. By 2007, four years after the
invasion, the country had descended into anarchy. Two bodies down (inaudible).
The situation in Iraq is unacceptable to the American people, and it is unacceptable to
me. Our troops in Iraq have fought bravely, they have done everything we have asked them
to do. Where mistakes have been made, the responsibility rests with me.
The president dispatched a new commander, General David Patraeus, who announced a change
in tactics on the ground, to protect civilians and better target the insurgents. It was called
The Surge. It involved the increasing use of air power.
The usefulness of air power in counter-insurgency is as a monitor, you use it to see what's
going on, to listen to, ah, collect intelligence. But using it, ah, either for bombing or for,
for, ah, attacking or strafing a, a building on the ground, or somewhere where you thing
insurgents are, are hiding, is very dangerous indeed.
Come on, fire! Keep shoot'n, keep shoot'n, keep shoot'n.
This video filmed from the cockpit of an Apache helicopter, put on the internet by WikiLeaks,
proves the point. Come on. Clear.
Two Reuters journalists were killed and two children were wounded after the helicopter
opened fire. Hey, uh, I need to get the Brads to drop rads,
I got a wounded girl we need to take to Rustamayah. The helicopter video also shows a hellfire
missile being fired into a building, after the pilot claimed six insurgents were hiding
in it. If you'd like, ah, Crazyhorse One-Eight could
put a missile in that building. You're clear. I'm firing.
But in the military record of this incident, there's no mention of the pedestrian walking
past when the missile was fired. Target hit, it was a missile.
We've discovered from the raw data that 80% of hellfire missiles, that's over thirteen
hundred, were fired after the start of Patraeus' surge.We travelled to a remote rural location,
three hours from Baghdad, to find the survivors of one of the most shocking attacks.
We were walking behind Allawi looking at him and then we heard a huge explosion. After
the explosion we couldn't see anything because of the smoke. Then we went to where he was
standing and all we could find were pieces of flesh. We started screaming until our family
arrived. According to the secret record, US Forces,
who were conducting surveillance, through an improvised explosive device, or IED, was
being planted. Five IED emplacers who were trying to blend
in with a sheep herd. We heard the noise of an explosion and we
rushed to the site. The children came towards us screaming, "Alawi has been blown to pieces."
We collected the remains bit by bit. His head was more than 100 metres away. We wrapped
everything up in a blanket. The significant activity report shows that
two Apache attack helicopters, using the call-sign, Carnage 27, let off fifty rounds from their
machine guns, and launched a hellfire missile at the emplacers.
They were an anti-armour helicopter designed for the Cold War, to confront columns of Warsaw
Pact tanks.And the hellfire missile is a battlefield missile, it's pretty powerful, ah, and it
is designed to be used against armoured vehicles, or concentrations of troops.
The crew had made a horrifying mistake. They hadn't blown up insurgents.
It was six children digging for roots to use as fire wood. After the thirteen year old
boy was killed the other children ran out of fear.
It happened because of the Americans. They brought us freedom? Where is the freedom they
have brought us? They have brought us only slaughter and killing.
Our analysis of the reports shows that the military acknowledged only a hundred and three
civilians killed as a result of air strikes in six years.
The figure a hundred and three is, is, is ludicrously too low. Air power is a very blunt
weapon, by using air power regularly an in, in fact increasing the use of air power as
the occupation goes on, you're undoubtedly killing a great deal more civilians than the
US's own internal assessment suggests. And buried away in the files on air strikes
we discovered, was another reference to the call sign Crazyhorse One-Eight.
Hotel Two-Six: Crazyhorse One-Eight. Oh yeah, look at those dead ***.
It's one of the most grotesque incidents we found and involved their treatment of insurgents
who wanted to surrender. Crazyhorse One-Eight reports anti-Iraqi forces
got into a dumptruck, headed north, engaged and then they came out wanting to surrender.
The helicopter crew radioed base, seeking advice.
Crazyhorse One-Eight cleared to engage dumptruck. Lawyer states they cannot surrender to aircraft
and are still valid targets. Moments later, the two men were killed with
a hellfire missile. Yet we discovered four reports where insurgents were allowed to surrender
to a helicopter.But this video, leaked by LiveLeaks, shows that others were gunned down with their hands in
the air.The number of deaths caused by the Americans in Iraq, now revealed in the secret
files, is shocking. But we have also discovered reports that US Forces were abusing prisoners
long after the scandal of Abu Ghraib, and for the first time, the records reveal what
the Americans knew about the barbaric practices of the Iraqi security services.
We've been given access to the largest leak of military documents in history -- secret
American Army reports, logged during the war and occupation of Iraq. In all, they amount
to thirty eight million words, and we've had to build a computer programme to help analyse
the content. One of the most disturbing stories we've uncovered involves the American's treatment
of prisoners, after they had been exposed in the Abu Ghraib scandal.
Good evening. The creeping nightmare of America's involvement in Iraq took a new and darker
turn today, with claims of torture by US Forces. An American television network...
Following international outrage, changes were promised by the US Defence Secretary, Donald
Rumsfeld. It's my obligation to evaluate what happened,
to make sure that those who have committed wrongdoing are brought to justice, and to
make changes as needed, to see that it doesn't happen again.
But we've unearthed three hundred allegations of abuse, meted out by American forces on
Iraqi prisoners, after Abu Ghraib. Detainee reports that he was abused during
his capture. Detainee is missing his right eye and has scars on his right forearm.
Detainee alleged that American forces: (1) punched him and hit him with weapons; (2)
threw urine on him, and; (3) applied electric shocks to his body.
Two marines allegedly videotaped themselves holding a knife to a detainee's throat and
a M9 to the detainee's head. Over a six year period, the data records the
imprisonment of a hundred and eighty thousand Iraqis, that's one in fifty of the adult male
population. A lot of innocent people, large numbers of
innocent people, were being hoovered up in these military operations, and then sent into,
into a prison system that clearly couldn't cope with them. That is exacerbating the problems
the Americans had on the ground in, in Iraq, alienating the population, making them seem,
at best, like an indiscriminate deployer of force and incarceration of innocent people.
One of the main reasons given by political leaders to justify the invasion of Iraq, was
to put an end to the oppression and appalling human rights abuses of Saddam Hussein's regime.
They would offer the Iraqi people protection. We will tear down the apparatus of terror
and we will help you to build a new Iraq, that is prosperous and free. In a free Iraq,
there will be no more torture chambers, the tyrant will soon be gone. The day of your
liberation is near. But this was another hollow promise. We've
also detected more than thirteen hundred individual cases of the torture and abuse of Iraqi prisoners
by Iraqis in their police stations and army bases, witnessed or reported on by coalition
troops. Subjected to torture by members of the Iraqi
army. He was suspended from the ceiling. The use of electric drills to bore holes in his
legs. Tortured him by pouring chemicals on his hands,
cut his fingers off, and hid him when coalition forces visited.
I think if anything this is the, the most chilling, horrific and damning evidence in
the material. I think it's fair to say that this material indicates that the Iraqi security
services, the Iraqi police especially, are using torture indiscriminately. This is incredibly
damning. Detainee jabbed with a screwdriver, struck
with cables and hoses in the arms back and legs, electrocuted, sodomised with a hose.
But the best guarantee of our security is that people everywhere in the world are allowed
to live their lives in decency and freedom, that the knock on the door is not the knock
on the door of the secret police and that in the end, that freedom is what they want
in Iraq, what people want everywhere, and what we should be giving to them.
During the Saddam time, the knock on the door was from the security services. But after
the occupation, it, ah, the torture is done by police and security services, which is
the state torture, and militias, by different groups, by gangs. And nobody knows who is
doing it outside the state, but the to, the torture is widespread.
With torture now being endemic in Iraq, this completely undermines any justification for
the invasion, and any morality for the occupation in the aftermath of the invasion.
We've also identified two similar military orders, issues in 2005, which instructed US
soldiers on how to respond to Iraqi on Iraqi abuse of prisoners. Fragmentary order 039
stated that: Reports of Iraqi on Iraqi abuse be reported
through operational channels. Provided the initial report confirms US forces were not
involved in the detainee abuse, no further investigation will be conducted, unless directed
by higher headquarters. And the logs also reveal that the Americans
handed over suspects to the Iraqi security services, knowing that torture was endemic.
Almost on a daily basis, US soldiers filed reports of abuse and torture, by Iraqis, on
Iraqis. One detainee was diagnosed with a possible
closed head injury, another with a possible jaw fracture, and a third with a possible
spinal injury. Iraqi police and Iraqi army shot and killed
a local national. Three marines discovered the local national after they heard the two
shots fired. Iraqi police beat them...died as a result
of the abuse. All these reports were marked:
As coalition forces were not involved in the alleged abuse, no further investigation is
necessary. In total, we found twenty one ending with
that phrase. In some cases there were investigations into torture, but we don't know what action,
if any, was taken against the Iraqi perpetrators. The US forces infamously dismantled the Iraqi
Army, rebuilt it and retrained it. They constantly, from 2003 through to 2009/10, retrained, ah,
had, ah, advisors amongst the Iraqi police. And yet they didn't systematically, regularly
intervene to stop what they knew was happening. Good afternoon folks.
During a press conference, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Peter Pace,
and the then US Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, seemed at odds over what orders
existed if US troops were aware of torture. It is absolutely the responsibility of every
US service member, if they see inhumane treatment, ah, being conducted, to intervene, to stop
it. But I don't think you mean they have an obligation
to physically stop it, it's to report it. If they are physically present when inhumane
treatment is, is taking place, they have an obligation to try to stop it.
They really did not try hard enough to stop these infringements of human rights, because
they didn't care and they, they wanted to let Iraqis, ah, kill each other, you know,
and, and, ah, the thing, the, you know, the more Iraqis were killed by Iraqis than they
were killed by, by Americans or anybody else, you know.
Individual cases are reported, the evidence is collected, but there s, still seems to
be a culture of Iraqi impunity to use torture, because as far as we can tell indiv, the,
the, the, the, those people repeatedly using torture are not repeatedly prosecuted.
The Americans made public claims that they investigated allegations of torture in some
of Iraq's prisons on seven separate occasions, between late November 2005 and March 2006.
But the people being held in those facilities were being properly taken care of, they were
being fed, they had water, they were taken care of, so no abuse, no evidence of torture
in those facilities. But the data shows that during the same time
period, the army recorded seventy six separate allegations of abuse of Iraqis by the Iraqi
security services in other places, and reported them up their chain of command.
I don't think they turned completely a blind eye, but I don't think they made, ah, really
strenuous efforts to stop it, either because they did not want to interfere and, ah, and
also because they didn't want to get involved. One of the ways that the US wanted to hand
control back to the Iraqi people was to establish and train new Iraqi security forces, but these
were easily infiltrated by sectarian militias with their own motives.
There was Counter Terrorism, there was the National Police Force, special forces like
commandos, different titles, each one serving their own agendas. Each one belonged to a
different political party. They were settling old scores and taking revenge, especially
returning exiles. That is why we have such a huge abuse of human rights.
In or out of police uniform, the sectarian militia death squads of the new Iraq were
responsible for bloodshed on an unprecedented scale.The
data shows that the Americans were aware of the horrific level of the violence. Over thirty
two thousand, five hundred civilians were murdered, the vast majority found by coalition
patrols, were unidentified corpses, dumped, often in the river Tigris. More than ten thousand
were found shot in the head; nearly four hundred and fifty were decapitated; over a hundred
and sixty were children.A senior Iraqi Army office, who wanted to remain anonymous, witnessed
the horror. People were killed because of who they were
-- either a Sunni or a Shia. If you had the Sunni name Uthman, you got killed because
of it. If your name was Ali you were a Shia and were killed because of that.
In 2006/2007 you had, ah, bodies dropped at, ah, up to a hundred, a hundred and fifty a
day, with drills, bodies floating in the river with terrible signs of torture and killings.
And they were done by militias, or policemen, ah, that affiliated with militias.
Floating in the Tigris, burned with chemicals, body did not have head or hands. Twelve year
old male, cinder block smashed into his face and tied to his head.
The child was about six years old, several small holes, originally thought to be gunshot
wounds, were holes caused by a drill. While the numbers of bodies can be counted,
there are no reliable figures for the numbers of Iraqis who have simply disappeared.In the
Baghdad morgue there's a missing room. Families whose relatives are missing, presumed dead,
come here to try and recognise a body. They have killed my husband, my father, all
the men. No one remains. All are dead. The photographs of twenty thousand corpses
are kept on file, to help people like Athraa Mohammed. She's trying to find the body of
her husband, who disappeared two years ago. If he is among them how am I going to recognise
him? They are burned...tortured, disfigured and hard to recognise. How can we recognise
him? Athraa Mohammed is one of Iraq's one million
widows. What kind of crime is this, to leave these
poor children like this. All these widows, the young men and women who were killed.
There is no official agency to help people in their desperate search. But given that
the US Military knew the date, time and location of thousands of deaths, maybe the database
could provide some answers and help families discover what happened to their missing relatives.One
thing the database does reveal is the greatest irony in America's war on terror -- the alleged
link between Al Qaeda and Iraq, which was used to justify the war.
We've obtained the US Military's secret logs of the war and occupation in Iraq. They give
a totally new insight into the conflict and its aftermath.
Deadly chaos in the heart of Baghdad. A man with a mobile phone filmed the second blast
and... Concerns about a new wave of terrorism. Local
police say they arrested two members of Al Qaeda after another car bomb was intercepted.
Scores were dead and dying after two massive suicide bombs...
The secret files reveal the greatest irony in America's war on terror -- the reported
link between Al Qaeda, the terrorist group behind the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade
Centre, and Iraq. And yet again, the files expose the difference between what leaders
say in public, and what was happening on the ground.
Iraq today harbours a deadly terrorist network, headed by Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, an associate
collaborator of Osama Bin Laden and his Al Qaeda lieutenants. Iraqi officials deny accusations
of ties with Al Qaeda. These denials are simply not credible.
But the files show that when the American Army invaded, they quickly discovered a different
story.We looked for references to Al Qaeda in Iraq from the earliest days of the occupation.
In 2004 there are only seven brief mentions of the terrorist organisation, and no suggestion
that they had killed anyone. By 2008 however, there were more than eight thousand entries,
that's one in seven of all the significant activity reports being filed, and Al Qaeda
in Iraq was linked to the deaths of forty five coalition soldiers, almost five hundred
members of the Iraqi security services and nearly thirteen hundred civilians.
Al Qaeda in Iraq has been created as a consequence of the American invasion of Iraq. The Americans
tried to break it in 2007/8 and as American troops are now drawing down, Al Qaeda is reconstituting
as a major cause of death and suffering in Iraq.
Al Qaeda in Iraq grew stronger by exploiting the Iraqi's discontent with the Americans,
caused by civilian casualties, the Abu Ghraib scandal and the divisive political system.
The United States and allies came, ah, believing that Iraqi society by its nature is divided
along sectarian lines. And therefore they felt that the political system they are going
to, ah, encourage, to establish, would have to reflect these, ah, sectarian differences.
Al Qaeda in Iraq was able to take advantage of the situation to deadly effect.
In 2006, Iraq was in hell. The parties, militias, Al Qaeda and the Baathists...were leading
and inflaming the sectarian violence. Our analysis of the data shows that Patraeus'
2007 surge did have an effect of member of Al Qaeda in Iraq. But the reports noted that
while significant numbers of Al Qaeda in Iraq were being killed, there were plenty more
to replace them. Intelligence assessment: We have seen multiple
sensitive reports, indicating that a surge of suicide bombers and car bombs, foreign
fighters, especially Saudi, have recently been placed into positions of power with Al
Qaeda Direct Action Cells. There is little to keep the hard core foreign fighters from
continuing to conduct these types of attacks. In 2008 this video was seized by US soldiers
in a raid. It purports to show that Al Qaeda in Iraq was training Iraqi children in terrorism.
That's a claim supported by some of the reports in the secret files. We've uncovered ten suicide
bombings involving children as young as eleven. According to the reports, Al Qaeda is Iraq's
child squads were called The Hummingbird Cell, Birds of Heaven, and Youth of Paradise. The
Americans identified why youngsters were attracted to Al Qaeda in Iraq.
Children are coerced into the organisation by the lure of money of presents and a sense
of belonging. One report describes an Al Qaeda grenade attack
on a US military police unit. 300th Military Police company reported seeing
two males, approximately thirteen years old, conduct the attack on their patrol. MP's did
not engage the two males. But Al Qaeda in Iraq weren't just recruiting
the very young. The reports suggest they found an even more vulnerable group.In February
2008, in a pet market in Baghdad, two female suicide bombers killed seventy two, and wounded
a further hundred and forty seven. It is believed that the suicide bomber was
unwitting and appears to have been handicapped. One secret report reveals a raid on this mental
hospital days after that bombing to arrest a doctor.
Intelligence assessment: Detainee allegedly received unspecified payment to provide a
list of female patients to them. These females were likely used in the 1st of February dual
suicide attack on local markets. But the most devastating attacks by Al Qaeda
in Iraq were large scale. Two blast sites, one at Baghdad Provincial
Council, one at the Ministry of Justice, sixty one killed and two hundred and fifty two wounded.
That report is one of the last contained in the American Army files. From October 2009,
they started to draw down and ship troops home, leaving Iraqis in control of their own
security. The United States Department of Defence told Dispatches that it deplored WikiLeaks
for their actions in sharing secret information with the world, which they said endangered
troops. They stated: We strongly condemn the unauthorised disclosure
of classified information and will not comment on these leaked documents, other than to note
that significant activities reports are initial, raw observations, by tactical units. They
are essentially snapshots of events, both tragic and mundane, and do not tell the whole
story. Today in Baghdad the Sunnis and Shias are
separated by huge walls, and the violence continues.
Al Qaeda has not been eliminated and is stronger than before. Violence is going to escalate.
These graves at the Najaf Cemetery have only one word on them, it's Majhoul, the Arabic
for unknown and their numbers are growing. Today in 2010, Iraq is still a very violent,
very unstable place. Averagely, about five hundred people, ah, a month, innocent civilians,
are being murdered. Violence, extrajudicial violence by the state, torture is commonplace,
ah, the political elite are resented and seen as profoundly corrupt. This is a dreadful
place to live. Military historians will take years to properly
analyse all the information in the secret files, which chronicle the detail of war as
never before. Others have already delivered their verdict.
The United States has paid a huge price to put the future of Iraq in the hands of its
people. We persevered because of a belief we share with the Iraqi people, a belief that
out of the ashes of war, a new beginning could be borne in this cradle of civilisation.
This is the 'Democracy' you brought? This is the best you can do? You have forced us
to live in a terrifying nightmare of democracy. How can you not feel sorry about people who
have died? I mean you, you would be inhuman if you didn't think that. But when I'm asked
whether I regret the decision, you know I have to say I take responsibility for it,
but I can't regret the decision.