Al Letson:From the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Reveal. I’m Al Letson. In June of 2022, investigative reporter Madeleine Baran traveled to Iraq to talk to a man who’d survived a terrible tragedy during the Iraq war. Madeleine Baran:Hello. Speaker 3:Good morning. Madeleine Baran:Should we go out? Speaker 3:[inaudible 00:00:21] follow me. Al Letson:Khalid Salman Raseef lives in the town of Haditha. On a November morning in 2005, a convoy of U.S. Marines was driving through his neighborhood when an IED exploded under one of their Humvees. One Marines, Lance Corporal Miguel Terrazas, was killed. Two other Marines were seriously injured. What happened next was a troubling chapter in the Iraq war. And a warning: This story describes acts of violence that may disturb some listeners. After the bombing, several U.S. Marines opened fire on Iraqi civilians. They entered houses and killed Khalid’s sister, his aunt, his uncle, his 4-year-old nephew, and more people, too. Their deaths were a part of what became known as the Haditha massacre, the killing of 24 civilians. Speaker 4:… everyone. In a war filled with horrors, this was one of the most shocking. An attack last year in the small Iraqi town of Haditha that left dozens of civilians dead. At first- Al Letson:The oldest victim was a 76-year-old grandfather and the youngest a three-year-old girl. Speaker 5:Some are comparing the Haditha killings to the Vietnam massacre at My Lai. Al Letson:Four Marines were charged with murder. They faced the possibility of life in prison, and for a while it seemed like there would be some accountability for the killings. But over the years, the media stopped paying attention, the U.S. withdrew from Iraq, and the cases against the Marines began to fall apart. In the end, there wasn’t a single criminal conviction for the killings. How did that happen? That’s the question Madeleine Baran and her team of investigative reporters and producers try to answer in the third season of the podcast In the Dark from The New Yorker. Their investigation went deep. It lasted four years and took them across 21 states and three continents. This month marks 20 years since the Haditha Massacre, so we’re bringing back their story. I asked Madeleine what made her focus on this case. Madeleine Baran:The Haditha case in particular interested me because of the fact that no one had gone to prison for the killings. No one had been punished. At the time, back after the killings, everyone from president George W. Bush on down was talking like this was the case where we are going to do the right thing. This is where we’re going to say we are going to take this seriously, the people who are responsible are going to be held accountable. But, of course, that’s not what happened. Al Letson:You did so many different kinds of reporting for this story, including traveling to Iraq and talking to some of the survivors there. What was that like? Madeleine Baran:Well, we didn’t know exactly what to expect when we met with the survivors in Iraq, myself and then other members of the team. And what we quickly learned was that these survivors, some of whom were little kids, when their family members were killed, wanted to talk with no ambiguity, even when it was very difficult, wanted to tell the world in detail what had happened to their family members that day and to themselves. And they wanted to also talk about how appalled they were by the fact that no one had been punished for killing their family members. Al Letson:You said your team talked to some survivors who were children at the time. What did they remember? Madeleine Baran:Quite a lot. And not surprisingly, their accounts are disturbing. One woman was just 11 years old when her family was killed. She recounted how she heard the Marines come into their house. They all hid in a bedroom in the back of the house. She was there with her mom, her aunt, her brother, her sisters, and then a Marines came into that bedroom and just started shooting at them. And what this woman, her name is Safa Younis, described was Marines shooting at people, her family, who were obviously civilians, including little kids who are huddled on a bed with their mom. And the reason that Safa survived to recount all of this is that she was actually hiding under the bed during the killings. But she did say at one point a Marines lowered his weapon and aimed it under the bed and fired it in her direction, but the bullet missed her. Speaker 6:[foreign language 00:04:43]. Speaker 7:[foreign language 00:04:47]. We were under the bed. He get his rifle under the bed and start shooting at us when we are under the bed. Al Letson:I can imagine something like that happening to you as a child. It will be with her for the rest of her life. There’s no way you can rewire your brain not to carry that type of trauma. Madeleine Baran:Yeah. And for Safa, everybody who could have experienced it with you, who you could talk about it with, all of them are killed too. And so, yeah, this is the worst trauma obviously a child could endure. Al Letson:On the flip side, you also talked to a lot of Marines in the U.S. Madeleine Baran:Right. We spent months knocking on doors across the country, talking to Marines, specifically Marines who were in Haditha that day. Speaker 8:And I remember I opened a Humvee and I just see bodies stacked up. And I opened another one, same thing. I’m like, “Shit.” Speaker 9:Nobody ever just stops and says, “Hey, tell me about this.” You’re the first person to actually sit and listen for a second. Speaker 8:Maybe in their eyes it’s justified, you know? They lost one of the most-loved guys in the company, so they just weren’t happy. In their eyes, if that was the case, in their eyes, it was justified. Not in my eyes. Madeleine Baran:In your eyes, what would that be? Speaker 8:Sounds like murder, right? Madeleine Baran:And we also did all kinds of other reporting. And the most time-consuming type of reporting by far that we did was to try to pry loose records from the U.S. military. And this was interesting because despite this being the Haditha killings being one of the biggest war crimes cases in modern history, so little had been made public about what actually happened that day. Unlike other “well-known” war crimes, we did not know the basic ins and outs of what took place. And we also didn’t have some of the most critical records. We’re talking about things like a trial transcript of the trial of the squad leader; lots of the investigative documents that NCIS, the Navy’s law enforcement agency, had produced, and then of course there were the photos. Al Letson:Yeah, let’s talk about the photos. So these are photos taken by the U.S. military, right? Madeleine Baran:Yes. So these are photos that the Marines took in the hours after the killings. These are photos of the houses and of the bodies of the victims. And most of these photos had never been seen by the wider public. We got an audio recording of the head of the Marines Corps at the time of the Haditha killings, Commandant Michael Hagee. And in this interview he’s being interviewed by a Marines Corps historian, and he brags about how proud he was that he was able to keep these photos from reporters. Speaker 10:The press never got, unlike [inaudible 00:07:37], never got- Speaker 11:The pictures. They got the pictures. That’s what’s bad about all the break [inaudible 00:07:43]- Speaker 10:And then I learned from that. So they did not get the pictures. Those pictures today have still not been seen. Be quite proud of that. Speaker 11:Where are they? Speaker 10:I’m not telling. Speaker 11:Oh, okay. Madeleine Baran:And so when I heard this recording, that is really when I said, “Okay, this is my mission to get these photos. Whatever is in them has got to be worth it if this is how the Commandant is talking about them.” Al Letson:Yeah. As a reporter, when you hear something like that, you take it as a challenge. Like, “Okay, buddy. That’s what you’re going to do? Let me show you what I’m going to do.” Madeleine Baran:Exactly. Al Letson:So what did you do? Madeleine Baran:Well, we started in the most reporterly of ways, by filing a FOIA request. But that went nowhere. And so then we sued the military. And what we anticipated was that the military was going to argue in court that they are not going to release the photos to us because they could revictimize the family members of the people who were killed. And that’s an argument the military had actually made before. So what we decided to do was something pretty, I would say, unconventional. We decided to try to partner with the survivors themselves to try to work together to get these photos from the U.S. government. And I ran this idea by two survivors, two Iraqi men, and right away both were on board. And what they offered to do was to take a form house to house in Haditha that other surviving family members could sign. And what their form basically said was that they authorized the U.S. government to release the photos of their dead family members to us. And so these two men went door to door, they collected 17 signatures in all, we sent those forms to our lawyers, who filed them in court, and eventually, after four years of this, FOIA requests, lawsuits, and this, the military finally agreed to turn over the photos to us. Al Letson:I’m almost scared to ask, but what did the photos show? Madeleine Baran:Well, the photos were devastating. What they showed very clearly were women and children shot at close range, many of them shot in the head. We spoke with a forensic expert. We sent him the photos and he reviewed them and he was particularly shaken by one of the images. And I should say, this is a man who’s really seen everything, but this was so upsetting to him. And this was a photo of a young boy shot in the head at close range, and this expert called it an execution. Al Letson:Yeah, I think one of the hardest things about this story is that so many children were killed and there was all this evidence about what happened that day, and yet no one was ever punished for these killings. Why is that? Madeleine Baran:Well, there are a number of reasons. First, none of the Marines reported this right away as a possible war crime. And so by the time investigators found out about it and got there to look into it, months had passed. But the investigation was quite thorough and it uncovered all kinds of evidence, including incriminating statements made by the Marines who were participants in the killings. But here is the thing that’s important to know about war crimes cases, unlike a murder that happens, let’s say, like in Chicago or Oklahoma City or somewhere, it’s not tried in a regular justice system. These war crimes cases are almost always handled by the military’s justice system. And in this case, almost as soon as these cases began to enter that system, they started to fall apart. So some of the Marines had the charges against them just outright dismissed. One Marines who was involved in the killings got set a glowing letter from General James Mattis praising him and dismissing all the charges against him. Only one Marines, the squad leader, Sergeant Frank Wuterich, went to trial for the killings before an all-military jury. And in a surprise move in the middle of the trial, the prosecutors basically dropped the whole thing. They agreed to a plea deal to an incredibly minor charge that carried no prison sentence and that was that. I talked to Wuterich’s lawyer and he said the charge his client pleaded guilty to was basically the equivalent of a parking ticket. Speaker 12:It’s meaningless. The government decided not to hold anybody accountable. I don’t know how else to put it. Al Letson:And it just says so much that it’s his own attorney who’s saying this. And it kind of speaks to another part of your investigation. You and your team wanted to find out if what happened with the charges against the Marines for the Haditha killings was an outlier or part of a larger problem with the military justice system. How did you find an answer to that? Madeleine Baran:This was not easy. Before a reporting, there was no database or no central archive where you could just look at all the war crimes cases, like some place you could go or a site you could visit. So we spent years basically creating that ourselves. We scoured news stories, we read human rights reports, gathered all kinds of source, and then what we did is we would FOIA the U.S. military for the records of those cases. And then many times the U.S. military didn’t respond in a sufficient way, and so then we sued them. And this went on and on for quite some time. And in the end, we managed to put together the largest database of alleged war crimes committed by US service members that were investigated by the US military. Al Letson:Your team identified almost 800 cases in all. What did the records you obtained show?Madeleine Baran:Well, it was quite startling. So, remember that the crimes we’re talking about here are not small. They are quite serious. Crimes like murder, sexual abuse. And we found that most of the time the charges were just dismissed. This happened in more than 65% of the cases we looked at. Of the remaining ones, the ones that were determined to be criminal, most of those punishments were pretty minor. Like some docked pay, a rank reduction, or a stern letter placed in a permanent file. And we found that fewer than one in five perpetrators connected to these crimes appeared to receive any kind of prison sentence at all, less than one in five. And for those that did, the median sentence was just eight months. Al Letson:So what happened in the Haditha cases, sadly, was just business as usual. Madeleine Baran:Exactly. Al Letson:Madeleine, thank you so much for talking to us about this reporting. Madeleine Baran:Thanks, Al. Al Letson:Just when Madeleine and her team from In the Dark thought their reporting was done and they knew all there was to know, Madeleine got a call from one of the producers. Samara Freemark:Hey, Madeleine. Madeleine Baran:Hi, Samara. Samara Freemark:So I was calling you because I found something that’s kind of interesting. Al Letson:An unexpected new lead. That’s coming up on Reveal. Al Letson:From the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Revealed. I’m Al Letson. Today we’re bringing back an investigation about one of the most high profile war crimes cases to emerge from the war in Iraq, the killing of 24 civilians in the town of Haditha, and the failure of the U.S. military to successfully prosecute anyone for those killings. It’s the subject of the third season of the podcast, In the Dark. As the team neared the end of their reporting, In the Dark producer, Samara Freemark discovered documents that suggested there might be another victim of the killings, a victim no one knew about. Here she is reading a statement she found from Lance Corporal Justin Sharratt, one of the Marines involved in the killings. He’s describing what happened when his squad leader, Sergeant Frank Wuterich, spotted a man on the street and opened fire. Samara Freemark:“Wuterich took his first shot but missed. I went to fire because Wuterich had fired, but my weapon failed to fire and jammed. I did not see a weapon, and no one had shot at us.” Al Letson:Other Marines started firing at the man too, and he was shot in the head. Then Marines loaded him onto a Black Hawk helicopter and flew him away. The statements Samara found didn’t say who the man was or what happened to him. She got obsessed with trying to figure it out, and dug deeper into the investigative records, recording herself as she went along. One day she found something. Samara Freemark:Oh, wait a second. Al Letson:A pair of documents describing the man shot by Marines and airlifted out of Haditha. Samara Freemark:There is a name in here, Manda Amid Hamid. Al Letson:We pick up the story with In the Dark episode the team made after tracking down every lead they could find. As it turns out, a key clue came out of that first visit with the man in Haditha whose family came under attack by the Marines in November 2005. Here’s reporter, Madeleine Baran. Madeleine Baran:We were with our interpreter talking to Khalid Salman Raseef, the lawyer who’d lost 15 members of his family that day. Khalid had a lot of information to share about his family, what they were like, what he saw that day, everything he’d done to try to get the killings of the 24 people investigated. In the middle of all this, Khalid briefly mentioned that there was a woman in Haditha who’d come to him for help shortly after the killings. Translator:[foreign language 00:02:41]. He ran into a mother who told him about her missing son on the same day of the incident. Madeleine Baran:The woman told Khalid that her son had gone out that morning and never came home, and she hadn’t seen him since. She asked Khalid for help figuring out what had happened to him, and Khalid tried. He told us, he asked the Marines about the woman’s son multiple times. Translator:Khalid, all the time when he was meeting with the Americans, he was asking about him and they all the time told him that we don’t know this person. We don’t know what happened to him. We know nothing about him. Madeleine Baran:Khalid said that for years, his mother would come to him asking about her son. Translator:And he was very shy from her because he didn’t have any information about the son. Nobody knows anything about him. Madeleine Baran:Khalid said he felt ashamed that he was never able to give the mother any answers. Back when we talked to Khalid, he didn’t remember the missing man’s name. So Samara texted Khalid and asked him if he could track it down, and right away Khalid sent Samara a voice memo. Khalid Salman Raseef:Hello. Mamdouh Hamad, that’s his name. Madeleine Baran:Mamdouh Hamad. The document had said, Manda Hamad, not exactly the same but close. We asked Khalid if he could connect us with Mamdouh’s family, and he agreed. Audio:[foreign language 00:04:21] Madeleine Baran:Mamdouh’s mother who’d asked Khalid for help all those years ago, died in 2013. But Mamdouh’s brothers are still alive. Namak Khoshnaw:Yes, here please, actually. Madeleine Baran:So we asked Namak Khoshnaw, the BBC reporter we are working with to go with an interpreter to meet them. Namak Khoshnaw:So thanks very much for coming. Could you please introduce yourselves, your name? Madeleine Baran:The brothers names are Qasim- Qasim Ahmed Hamad:Qasim Ahmed. Madeleine Baran:… And Jomaa. Jomaa Ahmed Hamad:Jomaa Ahmed Hamad. Madeleine Baran:They all met at Khalid’s house and the brothers told Namak more about Mamdouh, and what happened that day. Back in 2005, Mamdouh was 27 years old. He was charming, outgoing. His brothers described him as a kind of guy who got along with everyone. Translator:He was very friendly, used to have jokes with others. He mixed with people. He established quick relationship and friendship with others. Madeleine Baran:A cousin later sent us a picture of Mamdouh. He’s looking right at the camera, grinning a huge grin. A person next to him is giving him bunny ears. Translator:A lovely guy. Madeleine Baran:The family lived in Haditha in a neighborhood a little ways away from where Khalid’s family lived. Before the war, Mamdouh and his brothers worked in construction. But when the Americans arrived, that kind of work dried up. So the brothers started doing all kinds of odd jobs, just trying to scrape a living together. Audio:[Foreign language 00:06:11] Madeleine Baran:On the morning of November 19th, 2005, the brothers had a job to do. A guy who ran an operation selling gas around Haditha, wanted them to walk to a nearby town to pick up one of his trucks. Translator:Ask him to take the truck, go to Beji to bring gas. Madeleine Baran:Mamdouh and his brother Jomaa set off on foot with two of their cousins, Haider and Yassin. The men didn’t know that anything out of the ordinary had happened that morning. They’d been too far away to hear the IED explode, and too far away to hear any of the shooting that followed. Translator:They didn’t know there was an incident. Madeleine Baran:The men walked through the town out of their neighborhood and into Khalid Salman Raseef’s. The streets were quiet, and then out of nowhere… Translator:The Americans shooting them. Madeleine Baran:There were Marines on the street, a few hundred meters away firing at them. What Mamdouh’s brothers were describing, appeared to be the moment that Lance Corporal Justin Sharratt described in his statement to investigators. The moment he said, Wuterich opened fire on a man, and so he tried to shoot too. Sharratt hadn’t given investigators a clear reason why they were shooting at the man. And the men told Namak, they had no idea why the Marines were shooting at them. They said they weren’t carrying weapons or anything that could have been mistaken for a weapon. They’re just walking through town. The Marines didn’t call out any warning. They just started shooting. The men ran trying to escape, but one of the Marines bullets hit Yassin in the stomach and ripped through his back. Yassin fell face-first to the ground. Mamdouh stopped running. He checked on Yassin, “Are you okay? Are you alive?” Yassin said, “Go, run.” A neighbor pulled Yassin into a nearby house. He was eventually taken to a hospital and he survived. Mamdouh, Jomaa, and Haider kept running. Unbeknownst to them, they were running right into another squad of Marines, second squad, and then… Translator:Mamdouh was shot in his head. Madeleine Baran:Mamdouh was hit too. Neighbors got Mamdouh into a house. His cousin, Haider, went into the house with him. Haider later told his family what happened inside, how Mamdouh, despite his head wound, was still conscious as he lay on the floor of the house, how he was praying and asking Haider to take care of the family. Haider told the family how a group of Marines entered the house and carried Mamdouh out to an American helicopter. Mamdouh’s brother, Jomaa, watched from a distance as the helicopter lifted off. Translator:They took Mamdouh and they left. Madeleine Baran:And that was the last anyone in Haditha ever saw of Mamdouh Hamad. In the days, and weeks, and months, and eventually years that followed, the family searched for Mamdouh. They had no idea what had happened to him. They didn’t know if he was alive or dead, if he’d been treated by the Americans, or if he’d been arrested and was now in prison. Translator:We keep worrying and keep asking every day and night, “Where is Mamdouh? Where is Mamdouh. Is he still alive?” Madeleine Baran:The family tried everything to find him. Mamdouh’s brothers, Jomaa and Qasim would go with their mother to the American base over and over again, begging for any information, good or bad, about what had happened to their brother. The Marines didn’t offer them any answers. At one point, someone at the base told them… Translator:He was handed to the Iraqi forces. Madeleine Baran:Maybe Mamdouh had been handed over to Iraqi forces, and so the family found a relative who had access to the computer database that contained records of the people the Iraqis were holding. The man ran a search for Mamdouh. Transaltor:So he’s checking all the computers for Iraqi forces, other Iraqi security forces. Madeleine Baran:But the search came up empty. The family kept trying. Jomaa and Qasim traveled with their mother to prisons all over Iraq, checking to see if Mamdouh was being held in any of them. Transaltor:Baghdad looking. Madeleine Baran:But he wasn’t. Qasim said their mother refused to stop hoping that Mamdouh might still be out there somewhere, and that one day they might find him. Translator:She didn’t stop looking for him. She knock all the doors. Mr. Khalid, Baghdad, American, Iraqi forces. She didn’t give up. Madeleine Baran:And she wouldn’t allow Jomaa and Qasim to stop looking either. Jomaa and Qasim never gave up hope. They might one day find Mamdouh, but after their mother died, they didn’t stop searching. They told Namak that they wanted to end this anguish of not knowing. If Mamdouh was dead, they wanted to know, maybe even find his body and bring it home for a proper burial. And of course if their brother was still out there somewhere alive, they wanted to find him. But it had been so long, almost 20 years. They tried everything, looked everywhere, talked to everyone, but they’d never been able to find Mamdouh, and so we decided to try. Al Letson:In a moment, the In the Dark team goes on a quest to find out what happened to Mamdouh. You’re listening to Reveal. Al Letson:From the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is Reveal. I’m Al Letson. The last time anyone in Haditha had seen Mamdouh Hamad, he was being put in a US military helicopter after being shot by Marines in the head. He was still alive at that point, even still talking, according to his family. Madeleine Baran and the team from In the Dark wanted to find out what happened to Mamdouh after he was flown out of Haditha, so they kept digging, and eventually found someone who’d been with Mamdouh when he was evacuated. Here’s Madeleine. Madeleine Baran:We actually managed to find a Marine who was on that Black Hawk helicopter that day. His name is Pedro Garcia. He’d been wounded that day in a different engagement in another part of town. Garcia remembers being told by someone that the Iraqi man being loaded onto the Black Hawk with him was responsible for the IED that killed Lance Corporal Miguel Terrazas. Pedro Garcia:I look over and I’m like, “Who the hell is this?” And then one of the guys from 1st Battalion, they’re like, excuse my language, but they were like, “That’s the piece of shit that fucking… that pulled the trigger on the IED.” And I’m like, “Why? Why is he here? Why? Why?” And I remember saying, “Fuck you, piece of shit.” Madeleine Baran:Mamdouh, of course, was not the triggerman, but Garcia didn’t know that. On board the chopper, Mamdouh was hooked up to oxygen. Pedro Garcia:He didn’t look good. Madeleine Baran:Someone asked Garcia if you would squeeze the oxygen bag to help Mamdouh breathe. Pedro Garcia:And I remember it was a crew chief. He told me, he goes, “Hey, I need you to blow the little mask thing with the little ball,” you squeeze it and it pumps air, “pump air into him to keep the circulation.” He wanted me to do that to him, to the Iraqi guy, and I literally told him, it might have been cold, but when they told me who that person was and then knowing that one of my buddies is killed, I told him, excuse my language but, “Go (beep) yourself. (beep) let him die.” Madeleine Baran:Mamdouh didn’t die. Another Marine ended up squeezing the oxygen bag and Mamdouh was still alive when the Black Hawk landed near the hospital at Al-Asad Airbase. Samara found records of interviews that NCIS investigators did with medical personnel who worked at the hospital on the base, and they tell what happened after Mamdouh arrived. Samara Freemark:He’s flown to the hospital at the American base at Al-Asad, and when he arrives at Al-Asad, he’s in pretty bad shape, but he is still alive, and Al-Asad doesn’t have a name for him and they have identifying information at all. So the front desk clerk enters him into the patient log as Enemy Prisoner of War, Patient Number 8. Madeleine Baran:At the hospital at Al-Asad, medical staff intubated Mamdouh. Then they loaded him onto another helicopter bound for a hospital in Baghdad run by the American military. We have a statement that a Marine who was on that flight to Baghdad gave to investigators. This Marine’s job was to guard Mamdouh on the helicopter ride. He was accompanied by a nurse. The Marine told investigators that the chopper landed in Baghdad on a helipad near the hospital. The Marine then loaded Mamdouh into a six-wheel ATV and drove to the hospital. They went inside. It was full of military personnel. A second lieutenant told the Marine he’d have to fill out some paperwork about the patient he was guarding. The Marine asked if he could use the bathroom first. When he returned, the second lieutenant told him, “Don’t worry about the paperwork. The man you brought us is dead.” It isn’t clear exactly what happened in Mamdouh’s final moments or exactly when he died. It seems it could have happened on the second helicopter ride, the one to Baghdad. We requested Mamdouh’s full medical records from the US military, but they refused to provide them. We do know that despite his head injury, Mamdouh was considered stable when he left Al-Asad headed to Baghdad. The limited records we did manage to obtain say that he died “as a result of a penetrating injury to the brain.” The American military hospital in Baghdad wrote out a death certificate. They didn’t have any identifying information. Samara Freemark:So on his death certificate, he’s just listed as an unidentified John Doe. Madeleine Baran:The hospital in Baghdad held Mamdouh’s body for five days, not knowing who this person was and therefore having no way to contact the family. On November 24th, 2005, they released his unidentified remains to the Baghdad morgue. Samara wanted to find out if the morgue in Baghdad might know what happened to Mamdouh’s body, so we hired a researcher based in Baghdad to help us. Manaa:Hello? Samara Freemark:Hi, can you hear me? Manaa:Yes. Samara Freemark:Hello? Manaa:Hi. Samara Freemark:Hi. I’m trying to reach (beep). Manaa:Yes, I am. Madeleine Baran:The researcher didn’t want us to use his real name. Manaa:Because honestly, it is not safe for me, honestly, to show for public that I’m working with American. That will make some trouble for me. Samara Freemark:Is there a name that I could use that would be safe for you, just to give me something to call you? Manaa:You can just say Manaa. Okay, that will be fine. Madeleine Baran:Manaa was familiar with the Baghdad morgue. Its official name is the Medico-Legal Institute. Manaa told Samara that unfortunately, everyone who lived in Baghdad during the war was familiar with the Medico-Legal Institute because it seemed like everyone had known someone whose body ended up there. Manaa:Especially Baghdad residents, they do have bad experience about this institute because myself, my friends have lost their relatives, their friends in this institute. Madeleine Baran:Manaa agreed to go back to the Medico-Legal Institute and see what he could find out about what had happened to Mamdouh’s body. Two weeks later, Samara got back on a call with him. Samara Freemark:What was it like to go back there? Manaa:Oh, I got flashes from what happened, from this memories, like all the images, even the smells. It was really shocking me. Madeleine Baran:Manaa told Samara what he’d learned during his trip to the institute. He said the staff there told him what it was like back in the mid-2000s at the time Mamdouh was killed. The country of Iraq back then was in chaos triggered by the American invasion. Civil society had collapsed. There was basically no functioning anything. There were insurgents and warring militia groups. The city of Baghdad was filled with the sound of constant blasts from car bombs, shootings, explosions. Hundreds of people were dying each day, and the Medico-Legal Institute was a place where the bodies of many of these people ended up. Manaa:The situation was really bad at the time because they didn’t have enough space in the refrigerators to keep all of the bodies. So when it was full, they just stacked the bodies outside or in the sidewalk or everywhere. It was really chaotic. Madeleine Baran:Staff at the morgue couldn’t keep up with all the death. They couldn’t process all the bodies in any kind of coherent way. They couldn’t store them, and almost none of the bodies that were arriving at the morgue came with any identifying information, but the staff at the institute told Manaa that there was one thing the workers at the morgue back then were able to do in the midst of all this chaos, something that now seems pretty remarkable. The workers at the morgue looked ahead to a time when things might be less violent, less chaotic, a time when people might be better able to come looking for information about their dead loved ones. And so the workers at the morgue took photographs of all of these bodies. Manaa:Pictures for the bodies. For everyone who was delivered to this institute, they have photos for everyone. Madeleine Baran:Photos of everyone, labeled with the date that the body had arrived. After the morgue workers would photograph an unclaimed unidentified body, the morgue would coordinate with cemeteries to arrange to have the body picked up and buried in one of them. The morgue kept track of all of this. Even now, they had records of where each body had gone. According to the US military records Samara had reviewed, the body of Mamdouh Hamad had been turned over by the Americans to the morgue on November 24th, 2005. Samara Freemark:Do they have photos from November 24th, 2005? Manaa:Yes. Yes, yes, yes. Samara Freemark:Wow. Manaa:Yeah. Yeah, so basically, according to this, we might find the body of the man that we are looking for. Madeleine Baran:The morgue told Manaa they couldn’t show him the pictures, but they said that if a family member wanted, they could come to the morgue and look at the photos and see if Mamdouh was in them, and if he was, the morgue would consult its records and be able to tell the family where Mamdouh’s body was buried. Samara wanted to tell Mamdouh’s family everything she’d learned, but she wanted someone to be there with them helping to convey this information. So she asked Manaa to meet with Mamdouh’s family in person. Manaa:[foreign language 00:10:47]. Manaa:[foreign language 00:10:52]. Madeleine Baran:Manaa met Mamdouh’s brothers, Qasim and Jomaa, at Khalid Salman Raseef’s house. Manaa:[foreign language 00:10:59]. Jomaa Ahmed Hamad:[foreign language 00:11:00]. Madeleine Baran:They all sat down together on a couch in Khalid’s living room. They poured some tea and Manaa called Samara in by phone. Manaa:Hi, Samara. Samara Freemark:Hello. Manaa:I’m with Mr. Khalid and Qasim and Jomaa. Samara Freemark:Hi, Mr. Jomaa and Mr. Qasim. It’s very nice to meet you. Thank you for talking to me. Manaa:Thank you, Samara. Go ahead. Samara Freemark:I wanted to begin by telling you how sorry I am about what happened to your family and to Mamdouh. For the past several years, me and my team have been working on an investigation into what happened in Haditha on November 19th, 2005 when many civilians were killed by American Marines. Manaa:Yes? Samara Freemark:While doing that reporting, we obtained some documents that I believe are about your brother Mamdouh and what happened to him that day. Manaa:Yes? Samara Freemark:Would you like me to share with you what I’ve learned from those documents? Manaa:The only wish that they have, they want to know eagerly what happened to their brother. Samara Freemark:Okay. So the records that I have show that Mamdouh, as you know, was shot by Marines on the morning of November 19th in Haditha. Madeleine Baran:Samara told Jomaa and Qasim how Mamdouh was flown out of Haditha… Samara Freemark:He was medevac-ed to Al-Asad Air Base. Madeleine Baran:How he was taken to Al-Asad and treated there… Samara Freemark:He was treated at Al-Asad for about an hour. Madeleine Baran:And then put on another helicopter and sent on to the American military hospital in Baghdad, but before he could be treated at that hospital… Samara Freemark:Mamdouh died from the gunshot wound to his head. Jomaa Ahmed Hamad:Oh. Samara Freemark:I am so sorry to be the one telling you this news. I know this is probably not the news that you wanted to receive, but I felt it was really important that you know this. Manaa:This is his fate and we really, really appreciate you telling us what happened to him. And now we can relieve, at least finally, knowing what happened to our brother. Madeleine Baran:Mamdouh’s family was grateful to Samara, but also angry. Why had it taken so long for anyone to tell them that their brother was dead? Jomaa Ahmed Hamad:[foreign language 00:15:11]. Madeleine Baran:It was clear from the document Samara was sharing with them that the US military had known for nearly 20 years that Mamdouh was dead. And so that whole time that the family had been asking the Marines, traveling to bases and prisons across Iraq, pleading with anyone and everyone for information, the truth was in the possession of the US military all along. Manaa:Jomaa says if only they told us that he is dead at that time. Qasim Ahmed Hamad:They did not only kill him. They killed him twice. One, when they killed him in reality, and second, when they didn’t tell about what happened to him. No, no. Madeleine Baran:We asked the US Marine Corps why they didn’t tell Mamdouh’s family the truth years ago. They didn’t answer. When we asked Major Dana Hyatt, the former civil affairs officer in Haditha, about Mamdouh, he told us he couldn’t remember anyone who fit that description. In that meeting with Mamdouh’s family, there was one more thing to talk about. Manaa:They’re asking about the body. Khalid Salman Raseef:Body, yes. Madeleine Baran:Samara explained that Manaa had gone to the Medico-Legal Institute in Baghdad and talked to people who worked there and learned that there might be records of Mamdouh there. Samara Freemark:They have pictures of bodies that were turned over by the Americans on that day, November 24th. Family members, if they want to, can go to the morgue, to the Medico-Legal Institute, and look at the pictures and try to identify their loved ones. Manaa:They eagerly want to know what happened and to get the corpse, or at least where they buried his body. Madeleine Baran:On a cool, dry morning in January, Mamdouh’s brother Jomaa woke up early and started off on the long drive from Haditha to Baghdad. The conversation he’d had with Samara had provided some relief, but in the days after that conversation, Jomaa started to doubt. It had been so many years, years and years of conflicting information, years of being told one thing and then told another thing and never being able to know anything for sure. Jomaa still wasn’t convinced his brother was dead. In Baghdad, Jomaa met up with Manaa and they headed to the Medico-Legal Institute. On the drive over, Jomaa told Manaa how he was feeling anxious. His emotions were all mixed up. He said he wanted the relief that he thought would come from knowing for sure what had happened to Mamdouh. “But,” Jomaa said, “he’s my brother. And sometimes, I don’t know, I would rather live with the hope that he’s still alive, and maybe one day he’ll walk back in the door of our family’s home.” When Jomaa and Manaa arrived at the Medico-Legal Institute, they were led through the busy halls to a section of the morgue called the Office of Missing Persons. They were shown to a room with a large screen mounted on the wall. Speaker 13:[foreign language 00:18:55]. Jomaa Ahmed Hamad:[foreign language 00:18:57]. Madeleine Baran:Jomaa couldn’t sit. He was too nervous, and so he stood gazing at the screen as an employee started up a computer and a slideshow began. One picture after another of dead Iraqi men delivered to the morgue in the month of November 2005 and never identified. So many dead men, men dead of gunshot wounds, men with their bodies blown apart, each one with their own family, their own story, an entire life reduced to a photograph of their remains being flashed up on the screen and replaced by another. They kept flipping through photos, old people, young people, middle-aged people, so many bodies. By one estimate, the war in Iraq left around 300,000 Iraqis dead. One photo flashed up onto the screen, then another, then another until… Jomaa Ahmed Hamad:[foreign language 00:19:58]. Madeleine Baran:Jomaa called out, “That one, that one,” and there was Mamdouh. You could see the gunshot to his head, but his face was clean and you could see his features clearly. There was a yellow piece of paper on his chest with a handwritten note saying the body had been delivered by the American military. Mamdouh, after all these years, had been found. Mamdouh’s family is now working to have his body exhumed from the cemetery where he was buried as an unidentified man so they can finally bring him home to Haditha. Al Letson:Despite everything that the team from In the Dark exposed about the killings in Haditha and other war crimes cases, it seems unlikely there will be any reforms to the system that could lead to greater accountability. In response to their reporting, Senator Elizabeth Warren wrote to the inspector general of the Department of Defense demanding answers on how the military handles war crimes cases. But just weeks after Warren sent her letter, President Trump suddenly fired the inspector general of the DOD as part of a mass dismissal of more than a dozen inspectors general across the federal government. And there’s more. Secretary of defense Pete Hegseth has been an outspoken advocate for American service members accused of war crimes. Earlier this year, there were reports he was moving to shut down Pentagon offices specifically created to protect civilians in conflict zones. And during a meeting with the nation’s top generals and admirals in September, he pledged to end what he called politically correct and overbearing rules of engagement. And to quote: untie the hands of our warfighters to intimidate, demoralize, hunt and kill.The In the Dark Series was reported and produced by Madeleine Baran, Samara Freemark, Natalie Jablonski, Parker Yesko, and Rehman Tungekar. It was edited by Catherine Winter and Willing Davidson. Additional reporting and investigating in Iraq by BBC Arabic’s Namak Khoshnaw, field producer Haider Ahmed, and Manaa. Interpreting and translation by Aya al-Shakarchi and Aya Muthanna. The full In the Dark season is available at newyorker.com or wherever you get your podcasts. Our show is produced by Samara Freemark, Rehman Tungekar, and Steven Rascón. It was edited by Taki Telonidis. Our production manager is Zulema Cobb. Original music by Allison Leyton-Brown and Gary Meister. Sound mix by John DeLore, Jim Briggs, and Fernando Arruda. Our interim executive producers are Brett Myers and Taki Telonidis. Our theme music is by Comorado Lightning. Support for Reveal’s provided by the Reva and David Logan Foundation, the John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Park Foundation, The Schmidt Family Foundation, and the Hellman Foundation. Support for Reveal is also provided by you, our listeners. We are a co-production of the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX. I’m Al Letson, and remember, there is always more to the story.
