Gruesome photos of US Marines massacre of Iraqi civilians in Haditha spark global outrage

A five-year-old girl, Zainab Younis Salim, was killed by US Marines during the Haditha massacre on November 19, 2005, in Haditha, Iraq. (Photo by the US military/ The New Yorker)

The recently disclosed images from the 2005 massacre by US Marines in the Iraqi town of Haditha have shocked the world, igniting a wave of outrage and condemnation on social media.

Under the Freedom of Information Act and after years of legal battles, The New Yorker magazine obtained and released the images of the carnage that killed 24 civilians, including a three-year-old girl. 

The graphic photos, which have been kept hidden for nearly two decades, show the victims, many of them shot in the head at close range.

The carnage, whose perpetrators never spent a day behind bars, adds to the long list of atrocities committed by the US occupation forces in Iraq, including those at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison.

Social media users are denouncing the bloodshed as a stark reminder of the numerous war crimes committed by the US forces in Iraq and across the region, as well as the lack of accountabilty for those involved. 

"This," journalist Murtaza Hussain reminded the world, "is what the US military was doing in Iraq."

Activist Greg J Stoker said in an X post, “This is big. US interventionism must end now.”

American journalist Max Blumenthal said the photos of the US massacre “are indictments of the contemporary US political establishment, including the current president who whipped the vote in support of invading Iraq.”

Another user highlighted Washington's efforts to conceal the truth, while others drew a parallel between the Haditha massacre and the Israeli genocide in Gaza. 

The United States invaded Iraq in 2003 based on false claims about Baghdad possessing weapons of mass destruction, leaving a trail of destruction, death, and chaos in the Arab country.

The US and its allies re-launched a military campaign in 2014 to supposedly fight off the Daesh terrorist group.

The US military claimed to be ending its combat mission in Iraq in 2021, but said it would retain some 2,500 troops in the country as alleged advisors, although Baghdad and its allies had decisively defeated terrorists in late 2017.

In 2020, the Iraqi parliament voted in favor of the expulsion of the foreign forces after a US drone strike assassinated Iran’s top anti-terror commander, General Qassem Soleimani, and deputy commander of Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Units (PMU) counter-terrorism force, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, outside Baghdad International Airport.