Perpetrators went unpunished: Photos of the Haditha massacre emerge

As a result of a lawsuit filed by the American magazine The New Yorker against the US military regarding the photographs, the images have been made accessible to the public by the magazine for the first time.

The magazine's report details the day on November 19, 2005, when US soldiers entered homes in the city of Haditha and massacred 24 civilians following an attack on a vehicle carrying American troops in the area.

According to this, U.S. soldiers killed a total of 24 civilians in the massacre within minutes—the youngest being a 3-year-old girl and the oldest a 76-year-old man—numbered the bodies, and subsequently took photographs of these individuals.

The New Yorker magazine demanded that the photographs, which had been hidden from the public for years, be brought to light as part of a lawsuit filed against the U.S. military alongside the families of those killed in the massacre; after a process lasting approximately 4 years, the military was forced to hand over these photographs to the magazine.

In one of the photographs published by the magazine, a 5-year-old girl named Zeynep Yunus Salim is seen shot in the head, with the number "11" written on her back by U.S. soldiers.

In another frame, a woman identified as Ayda Yasin Ahmed is seen lying in the same bed, covered in blood alongside the bodies of her children. The victims in the photograph were identified as Saba (10), Ayşe (3), Zeynep (5), Muhammed (8), and Ayda.

In another frame, the number "12" is seen written on the cheek of the youngest victim, 3-year-old Ayşe Yunus Salim, by American soldiers after she was shot.

In one of the photographs, a mother identified as Esma Selman Rasif is found shot side-by-side with her 4-year-old son, Abdullah. The note regarding this frame states that the mother's left hand was resting on her son, the young child had been shot in the head, and according to the investigation, the U.S. soldier who fired the shots pulled the trigger from a distance of less than 2 meters.

Another frame at the end of the report shows the bodies of 5 civilians on the ground who were stopped and killed by US soldiers while on their way to the university.

The report in the magazine states that the only survivor was an 11-year-old child named Safa, who hid in a corner next to a bed during the massacre.

According to the report, based on investigation records regarding the massacre, one of the perpetrators, Corporal Stephen Tatum, told investigators that he realized the people in the room were women and children before he began firing, and explained that he "continued to fire at them even though he knew they were children."

U.S. Marine Corps soldiers massacred 24 civilians in Haditha, Iraq, in 2005, and the charges against the 4 soldiers who were tried were later dropped.

No soldiers involved in the massacre received any punishment. James Mattis, one of the commanders at the time who later became the U.S. Secretary of Defense, wrote a letter full of praise for one of the perpetrators of the massacre and argued that the soldiers involved in the incident were "innocent."