Word: haditha
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...disorienting time for the U.S. Marine Corps in the wake of the alleged massacre of civilians in the Iraqi town of Haditha. One senior Marine officer, for example, is spending his days with grim reading, as Congress, the Pentagon and the press investigate charges that the Marines were responsible for the deaths of some two dozen Iraqi civilians. He has gone through Congressional reports about the My Lai massacre. He has read America in Vietnam by Guenter Lewy. He has a well-thumbed copy of The Rape of Nanking, a searing account of Japanese atrocities in that Chinese city during...
...unfolded have recently been patched up. The bullet holes have been filled, the scorch marks from FRAG grenades painted over and walls repaired. ?A stranger would not know anything special had happened there,? says Taher Thabet, a local journalism student and human-rights worker whose video first brought the Haditha massacre to TIME's attention. ?But those of us who live there, we look at the fresh concrete or the new paint and we know what was there before...
...Those memories would have come in handy for sleuths of the U.S. Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS, who have spent time in Haditha in recent weeks, to uncover the facts of the massacre. Belated as the investigation was, the residents of Hay al-Sinnani say they were gratified by its thoroughness. That there have been three separate enquiries suggests the U.S. military ?want to get at the truth,? says Walid Abdel Khaliq, the doctor of the Haditha morgue where the victims' bodies were taken...
...Curiously, no political group has sought to make capital out of the Haditha massacre. It says a great deal of the huge gap between Iraq's politicians (who tend to restrict themselves within the safe confines of Baghdad's highly protected Green Zone) and its people that not a single politician has bothered to visit Haditha, or even sent condolences to the bereaved families. Some Sunni leaders have mentioned the massacre in speeches, but only in the most desultory manner. ?There are so many atrocities against our people,? says Saleh Mutlak, a prominent Sunni politician and member of parliament. ?Everybody...
...Insurgent groups have actually made more of the massacre. Within days of TIME's story (which was picked up by the Arab media), pamphlets appeared in Haditha, congratulating ?those who participated in exposing the dirty deeds of the Americans.? The pamphlets were released by a group using the name ?Islamic Resistance? - a cover for the terrorist group Ansar al-Sunnah. TIME's story was cited in websites and Internet bulletin boards known to be used by insurgent groups. The families say they have never been contacted by any insurgents...