Family Weeps at Video of Son’s Death in U.S. Strike, NY Times
MOSUL, Iraq — The family of a Reuters photographer killed in an American military airstrike
watched the video of it late Monday and burst into tears as they saw what appeared to be
the crews of two American Apache attack helicopters kill their son and 11 other people,
gloating at what the crewmen seemed to think was a successful strike on insurgents.
“At last the truth has been revealed, and I’m satisfied God revealed the truth,” said Noor
Eldeen, the father of the photographer, Namir Noor-Eldeen, who was 22 when he was
killed in July 2007. “If such an incident took place in America, even if an animal were
killed like this, what would they do?”. Other family members said Tuesday that the video
was clear enough to remove any doubt about the identity of their son. Also among the
dead was a Reuters driver, Saeed Chmagh, 40.
The video was released Monday by Wikileaks.org, an online organization that said it had
received it from a military whistle-blower and used donated computing power to decrypt
it. United States military officials have confirmed that it appears to be authentic. In the
video, the group of men on the street in the eastern Baghdad district of New Baghdad
on July 12, 2007, seemed to be mostly unarmed, although the chatter among the air
crews shows they are convinced that the people on the ground have both AK-47s and
a rocket-propelled-grenade launcher. An American Army ground unit nearby was
receiving fire from insurgents at the time.
On the video, there is at least one of the group of victims who appears to be carrying a
rifle, but it is dangling at his side in a relaxed manner, and he does not appear to deploy
it. In another scene, a large camera lens poking around the corner of a building is
interpreted as a rocket-propelled-grenade launcher. The view of the men is obscured by
a building as the attacking helicopter circles around it. The helicopter opens fire almost
immediately after they come into view again. “Look at those dead bastards,” one of the
cockpit voices says. “Nice.”
When a vehicle arrives at the scene to help the wounded, the helicopters fire into it. United
States troops call for a child who had been in the vehicle to be taken to the hospital. “Well,
it’s their fault bringing their kids into the battle,” one of the cockpit voices says. The
Associated Press quoted a spokesman for the United States Central Command, Navy Capt.
Jake Hanzlik, as saying that the military had no reason to believe the video is a fake, but
that they were still comparing the video and audio to see if it matched the original. The
United States military’s censored version of its report on the episode maintains that the
crewmen acted appropriately and within the rules of engagement and that the Reuters
employees were mixed in with a group of insurgents so their cameras were easily mistaken
for weapons.
“My question is, how could those highly skilled American pilots with all their high-tech
information not distinguish between a camera and a rocket launcher?” the photographer’s
brother, Nabeel Noor-Eldeen, an archaeology professor at Mosul University, said on Tuesday
after watching the video with the rest of the family a few hours earlier.
Rod Nordland contributed reporting from Baghdad.
An earlier version of this article misspelled Namir Noor-Eldeen’s first name.
