The calm before the storm: moments before call-sign Crazyhorse opened fire on unarmed civilians (Source: Wikileaks)
On July 12 2007 a US apache helicopter shot several Iraqi civilians in an incident that shocked the world when footage of the event was published by whistleblower website, Wikileaks.
The footage, taken from the helicopter, shows people fleeing for the safety of buildings being pursued, then the buildings they run to blown up. The attack resulted in 12 dead civilians, including a Reuters’ journalist and cameraman.
In ‘Permission to engage’, Al Jazeera tracks down families of the victims and a former US soldier to tell the story behind the Wikileaks ‘Collateral murder’ film.
But the footage leaked to Wikileaks is just one incident of several involving a unit relating to the call sign ‘Crazyhorse’. The particular incident filmed involved Crazyhorse 18. Through cables leaked to Wikileaks as part of its Iraq war logs cache of documents, the Al Jazeera documentary traces several other incidents involving the call sign. Many of these attacks also resulted in civilian deaths, or collateral damage as they are referred to by US army personnel.
Just 4 days after the death of the two Reuters’ journalists, in a neighbouring area of Baghdad, another incident occurred in which 14 civilians were fatally wounded in an operation involving two helicopter gunships responding to call signs ‘Crazyhorse 20’ and ‘Crazyhorse 21.’
In February 2007, two Iraqi insurgents were killed after attempting to surrender to a helicopter gunship. Soldiers aboard ‘Crazyhorse 18’ were given legal advice from a nearby military base: ‘Lawyer states they can not surrender to aircraft and are still valid targets’. The men fled to a nearby shack after Hellfire missiles were fired at their truck. The men were killed minutes later when the shack was destroyed by further missiles.
The pseudonym ‘Crazyhorse’ has its roots in US Army history. An ‘operation crazyhorse’ took place in Vietnam in 1966, after North Vietnamese plans to ambush a US Army foot patrol were intercepted. About 250 US soldiers from two airborne battalions, defeated and killed 500 NVA soldiers in a fierce firefight.
The commander of one of these battalions, Captain Mozey, instructed his men to put ‘Death from above’ cards on every enemy they killed. ‘Death from above’ and ‘crazyhorse’ were both referred to and made famous by the reckless Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore in ‘Apocalypse now.’The Al Jazeera documentary talks to people directly affected by the reckless, gung-ho nature of the helicopter pilots of the ‘crazyhorse’ battalion, to produce a moving and personal account of the footage.
Ethan McCord is a former US Army soldier who became disillusioned with the Iraq war after the events that took place on July 12 2007. McCord talks through the video, explaining that the presence of the Apache helicopter was justified due to problems they’d had with insurgents in that area.
The helicopter initially opens fire on a group of people and kills 8. McCord says this initial encouragement could be justified. ‘They’re still following the Geneva conventions here… we’re all trained [in] the loopholes of the Geneva conventions in the Army… we’re taught how to look after ourselves and how to engage individuals without getting into trouble.’The only survivor from the first round of machine gun fire was journalist Saeed Chmagh, who had a severe gunshot wound in his leg.
‘At first he was OK. He just kept on crawling towards a house in the Amin,’ Chmagh’s widow explains. ‘A van stopped to take him to the hospital. They saw he was injured.’
The driver of the van was on his way to his brother’s house with his children. ‘We saw a wounded man lying in the square, my father stopped to help him,’ the driver’s son explains in the documentary. ‘He got out of the car and the Americans opened fire.’ Both children were injured in this second attack, but survived; the driver, Saeed and another civilian were all killed.
In the second attack, which kills a further four people, the American soldiers seem to be killing rescuers. ’This is where I start to have a problem,’ McCord concludes. ‘This is not following the rules of engagement, they’re embellishing information and it’s wrong; this constitutes a war crime.’
Ground patrols turn up at the scene; McCord is among them. He is highlighted in the footage picking the son of the driver out of the car and carrying him to his armoured vehicle.
‘A major turning point was when I pulled those kids out of the van,’ McCord explains. ‘I stopped firing my weapon, I stopped beating people needlessly. It was that point that I really realised what we were doing is wrong.’ Ethan McCord found it hard to cope with what he had seen and done in Iraq, but things didn’t get any better after finally coming home. ‘The guilt and the anger and everything, and you know I got hospitalised, I tried to commit suicide when I got home.’
‘With such pain, friendship may be too much to ask, but please accept our apology, our sorrow, our care and our dedication to change,’ write McCord and fellow ex-US soldier Josh Stever, in a letter to widow of the driver that was killed by the ‘crazyhorse’ gunship.
‘I accept his apology but what good is it to me?’ asks the widow. ‘He can’t bring back to me what I lost. What is the point?’
Watch the Al Jazeera film here.
Read the Bureau’s work on Wikileaks Iraq material at iraqwarlogs.com
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August 30th, 2012 at 6:40 pm (#)
“Permission to Engage” has taken what Defense Secretary Gates called “looking at war through a soda straw” to a whole new level. The same could be achieved by video taping war through a sniper’s scope. Both show only one thing … people getting killed!
You are missing the bigger picture. The soldier in the Humvee (Hotel 2/6) called for air support (Apaches) because he was taking small arms fire from two locations in a nearby courtyard – 100 meters to his east. When the video begins the helicopters are arriving, flying from south to north, causing the combatants to retreat from their positions.
There is no possible explanation other than the guys with an AK47, RPG and RPG round were at the intersection firing at the Humvee shortly before. They backed away with the arrival of the helicopters. The fellow that escorted Reuters employee, Namir Noor-Eldeen, told him to get down low to photograph the Humvee. This fact alone proves he was at the location previously.
There were combatants (5) standing at the other location – intersection one block south – when the Reuters employees arrive in the courtyard. They did the same thing they do in all of the other gun-site videos posted on the internet. Lay down their weapons nearby when they hear or become aware of Apaches and walk around pretending to be innocent civilians.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUhS2phBe0I
(Editor’s note: This comment is based on supposition that fails to ignore the wider point that Crazyhorse call signs have repeatedly been implicated in events that breach the acceptable conduct of combatants in war. The last point reinforces the challenges that the US Army faced, but unarmed is unarmed – and so should not be treated as a legitimate target).
August 30th, 2012 at 6:56 pm (#)
Your headline is wrong. It should read:
WALLOWING IN IT.
Cheers.
August 30th, 2012 at 10:38 pm (#)
As soon as you based your “murder” story on “facts” from Al Jezeera and Wikileaks you killed your own credibility. Seriously, “murder”? If you want your site to be taken seriously rather than be seen as another sad forum for poms who haven’t got over America’s independence from Britain then please put the “investigative” back into journalism. If I want anti-semitism masquerading as reporting I can go to BBC world.
(Editor’s note: the term Collateral Murder Video one that Wikileaks termed the film. Other major news organisations call it as such as well. The Bureau has worked with both Wikileaks and Al Jazeera and found them to be credible. I won’t dignify your comment about anti-semitism with a response)
September 1st, 2012 at 6:28 pm (#)
In this Al Jezeera production the wife of the van driver said her husband went to visit her brother. When the video was first released WikiLeaks told us her husband was taking the children to school.
Her son said Americans blocked the road forcing them to go another way. No doubt, a reference to the Humvee (Hotel 2/6) when it was at a previous *BP (Blocking Position). At Gadins and First Street preventing traffic from entering Gadins or the road leading to that open courtyard.
The boy could not see this Humvee unless the van (taxi) was being used by the Reuters employees. No doubt, when confronted with the Humvee in the middle of the road, the passengers – Namir and Saeed – got out and walked. The van proceeded to and waited at the Mosque.
This would certainly explain how the van and photographers could each be four blocks away from the intersection, where combatants were attacking the Humvee, before both, simultaneously, began moving toward that location. As well as, how each could be aware of the dangerous intersection acknowledged by the fact that the photographer knelt down to photograph the Humvee while the van turned off one block before entering the deadly crossroad.
It also explains why the van driver was traveling north on this particular road three minutes after the helicopters engaged. He was on standby waiting for his passengers to finish getting photographs of the Humvee that was being attacked by combatants.
*[In Iraq, the purpose of a BP is twofold: (1) to prevent vehicles from gaining access to the protected location, and (2) to prevent VBIEDs from getting close enough to kill or injure Soldiers or civilians. Blocking positions are neither intended nor designed to allow traffic to pass. The intent is to achieve maximum standoff from approaching vehicles and force them to turn around.]
September 1st, 2012 at 11:47 pm (#)
I wasn’t going to comment until i read the comments, but – seriously! 1 Where did ‘anti-semitism’ come from? 2 While i can see that journalists who embed with rebels take risks, and i have lived through the blind and fawning repetition of the official line and the modern news habit of treating anyone with a grudge as a saintly innocent – bizarrely, real life tends to lack hyperbole or people who are 100% innocent, who knows, i may live to see even this in news reporting – the final responsibility for a guerilla war and the inevitable consequences of its techniques lies, if there is one side who clearly provoked/started it, with that side.
I was against us funding Saddam and i was against this war, like nearly everybody, and if you can’t see the consistent morality in that and have to ascribe it to jealousy, you are paranoid. For comparison, French media ascribed the large scale of British donations after the boxing day Tsunami to a desire to re-impose our empire! Chill.
September 10th, 2012 at 12:00 pm (#)
Unarmed civilians?
http://imgur.com/WnNGU
I didn’t know carrying an AK47 means you’re unarmed.
http://i.imgur.com/DtlzN.png
Is a guy with an RPG unarmed too?
(Part of this message was deleted for being abusive).
Also, what happened to the journalists is regrettable, but seriously, if you’re out in the open with armed insurgents,and said insurgents are sighted by a helicopter what do you expect them to do exactly?