An Atrocity of War Goes Unpunished

Summary

Podcast Summary: Reveal — "An Atrocity of War Goes Unpunished"
Date: November 1, 2025
Host: Al Letson
Main Reporter: Madeline Barron
Additional Reporting: Samara Freemark, BBC Arabic’s Namak Koshnow

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Overview:

This episode revisits the Haditha Massacre, one of the most shocking atrocities of the Iraq War, where U.S. Marines killed 24 Iraqi civilians in 2005 following a roadside bombing. Reveal host Al Letson and journalist Madeline Barron detail a years-long investigation into why accountability was never achieved for the victims’ families. The episode also uncovers the heartbreaking quest by one family to learn the fate of their missing brother, ultimately resulting in a rare moment of closure, even as U.S. military justice continues to shield perpetrators of wartime crimes.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

The Haditha Massacre: What Happened

• On November 19, 2005, after a Marine was killed by an IED in Haditha, U.S. Marines retaliated by raiding nearby homes, killing 24 civilians, including women, children, and the elderly ([01:52]).
• "Some are comparing the Haditha killings to the Vietnam massacre at My Lai." — Madeline Barron ([02:07]).
• The massacre became a notorious symbol of wartime excess and impunity.

Lack of Accountability

• Four Marines were charged with murder, but no one was convicted or imprisoned ([02:12]).
• Madeline Barron: "The Haditha case... interested me because... 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 is where we are going to say, we are gonna take this seriously. The people responsible are gonna be held accountable. But of course, that's not what happened." ([03:04])
• Charges were gradually dropped or reduced by the military justice system ([10:42], [13:23]).
• Even the squad leader’s eventual plea deal amounted to what was described as "the equivalent of a parking ticket" by his own attorney ([12:05]).

Survivors’ Testimonies

• Barron and team traveled to Iraq to speak with survivors, including those who were children at the time, such as Safa Yunus, who survived by hiding under a bed ([04:18]–[05:16]).
• Khalid Salman Rasif, whose family was largely wiped out, recounts the trauma and the years-long effort to discover the fate of missing relatives ([04:12], [19:12]).

Notable Quote

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...this is the worst trauma, obviously, a child could endure." ([05:20]–[05:51])

Military Record-keeping and Secrecy

• Key records and photos documenting the aftermath were withheld by the military ([07:29]–[08:22]).
• Marine Commandant Michael Hagee boasted about keeping photos away from journalists: "They did not get the pictures. Those pictures today have stolen." ([08:05])

Notable Quote

Madeline Barron: "When I heard this recording... I said, okay, this is my mission to get these photos." ([08:22]–[08:37])

• Barron's team ultimately obtained the photos by partnering with survivors who signed release forms ([08:48]–[09:56]).
• The military’s own records and evidence included incriminating statements and photographs showing the execution-like nature of many killings ([09:56]–[10:28]).

The Broader Problem: U.S. Military Justice and War Crimes

• Barron’s team built the largest-ever database of U.S. military war crimes cases — almost 800 — since there was no official government archive ([12:34]).
• Findings: Charges dismissed in over 65% of cases; fewer than 20% resulted in any prison sentence; median sentence was just eight months ([13:23]–[14:05]).
• "What happened in the Haditha cases, sadly, was just business as usual." — Al Letson ([14:05]).

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Investigative Twist: Seeking Mamdu Hamid

• Near the end of the investigation, a new lead emerged: the case of Mamdu Hamid, a man shot by Marines on the day of the massacre, whose fate was never reported to his family ([15:15]–[16:16]).

Uncovering Mamdu’s Story (Segments [17:31]–[48:39])

• Reporter Samara Freemark uncovers Lance Corporal statements describing Mamdu’s shooting and evacuation ([16:16]–[17:09]).
• Khalid Salman Rasif had been approached by Mamdu’s mother seeking answers—she searched until her death ([19:12]–[19:19], [26:52]).
• Family had been told conflicting stories: that Mamdu had been handed to Iraqi authorities, perhaps imprisoned, but exhaustive searching turned up nothing ([25:58]–[26:39]).
• The team tracks the sequence: Mamdu was shot, evacuated by helicopter, recorded by U.S. military as "enemy prisoner of war patient #8," treated, medevaced to Baghdad, and died of his wounds ([29:10]–[32:57]).

Notable Moment

Pedro Garcia, a Marine on the chopper: "Knowing one of my buddies is killed, I told him, excuse my language, but go f*** yourself. Let him die." ([29:10]–[30:31])

• Another Marine gave Mamdu oxygen; hospital staff recorded him as a "John Doe." ([30:53]–[33:03])

• Mamdu’s body was unclaimed, photographed by Baghdad’s Medico Legal Institute, and buried anonymously. Yet the morgue kept photographic records ([36:58]–[37:09]).

• In 2025, the Reveal/“In the Dark” team, with local help, guides Mamdu’s brother Juma to the morgue, where he identifies a photo of Mamdu’s body, bringing tragic closure ([45:43]–[48:39]).

Notable Quote

"If only they told us... that he is dead. At that time, they did not only killed him, they killed him twice. One, when they killed him like in reality. And second, when they didn't tell about what happened to him." — Mamdu’s brother, via Khalid’s translation ([43:43])

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Aftermath and Accountability

• Despite evidence of systemic failure, prospects for reform are slim ([48:39]–[51:25]).
• Senator Elizabeth Warren demanded answers; in response, the Inspector General was fired, and Pentagon offices for civilian protection faced shutdown ([48:39]).
• Ongoing U.S. policy shifts, recounted by Letson, appear to further loosen rules and oversight of military conduct ([48:39]).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments (with Timestamps)

• Madeline Barron: "We managed to put together the largest database of alleged war crimes committed by US service members that were investigated by the US military." ([12:34])
• Al Letson: "The government decided not to hold anybody accountable. I mean, I don't know how else to put it. And it just says so much that it's his own attorney who's saying this." ([12:05])
• Madeline Barron (pushing for photo release): "When I heard this recording, that is really when I said, okay, this is my mission to get these photos." ([08:22])
• Juma, Mamdu’s brother, on finally learning the truth: "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." ([42:52])
• Mamdu’s brother (on U.S. silence): "They killed him twice." ([43:43])

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Important Timestamps

• [01:52] – Setting, scale, and comparisons of the Haditha massacre
• [04:18] – Survivors’ testimonies
• [07:29] – Military’s withholding of key records and photos
• [09:56] – Barron receives photos: "The photos were devastating"
• [12:34] – Creation of database of war crimes cases
• [13:23] – Only 1 in 5 cases led to prison, median sentence 8 months
• [16:16] – New lead: Mamdu Hamid
• [19:12] – Family’s search recounted
• [25:58] – Years of searching by Mamdu’s family
• [29:10] – Eyewitness Marine account of Mamdu’s evacuation
• [32:57] – Mamdu’s death and misidentification
• [36:58] – Baghdad morgue’s practice of photographing all unclaimed bodies
• [45:43] – Juma identifies Mamdu’s photo in the morgue
• [48:39] – Outlook for justice and reform

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Tone & Language

• The narrative is urgent and empathetic, channeling both the clinical persistence of investigative journalism and the raw emotion of family loss and survivor trauma.
• Reporters and survivors speak directly, often recounting painful or horrifying details without euphemism.

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Conclusion

This episode stands as a meticulous investigation into military impunity and its real human cost, revealing how systems of accountability flounder and ultimately fail not just to punish perpetrators, but to grant basic closure to survivors. The story’s most powerful moments are both the exposure of systemic cover-ups and the deeply personal resolution offered to one family nearly twenty years after their loss.

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For more: [In the Dark podcast, Season 3] and newyorker.com.

Transcript

[Madeline Barron]

It's one of Britain's most notorious crimes, the killing of a wealthy family at Whitehouse Farm. But I got a tip that the story of this famous case might be all wrong. I know there's going to be a twist one day, a massive twist at every level of the criminal justice system.

[Al Letson]

There's been a cover up in this case.

[Madeline Barron]

I'm Heidi Blake. Blood Relatives is a new series from in the Dark and the New Yorker. Find it now in the in the Dark podcast feed.

[Al Letson]

From the center for investigative reporting and PRX. This is Reveal. I'm Al Ledsen. In June of 2022, investigative reporter Madeline Barron traveled to Iraq to talk to a man who survived a terrible tragedy during the Iraq War. Hello, good morning. Khalid Salman Rasif lives in the town of Haditha. On a November morning in 2005, a convoy of US Marines was driving through his neighborhood when an IED exploded under one of their Humvees. One Marine, 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 four year old nephew, and more people too. Their deaths were part of what became known as the Haditha Massacre, the the killing of 24 civilians in a war filled with horrors.

[Madeline Barron]

This was one of the most shocking. An attack last year in the small Iraqi town of Editha that left dozens of civilians dead.

[Al Letson]

The oldest Victim was a 76 year old grandfather and the youngest a 3 year old girl.

[Madeline Barron]

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 US withdrew from Iraq and 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 Barron and her team of investigative reporters and producers and tried 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 Madeline what made her focus on this case.

[Madeline Barron]

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 gonna do the right thing. This is where we are going to say, we are gonna take this seriously. The people responsible are gonna 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?

[Madeline Barron]

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, you know. 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, I mean, 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?

[Madeline Barron]

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 Marine came into that bedroom and just started shooting at them. And what this woman, her name is Safa Yunus, described was Marines shooting at people, her family, who were obviously civilians, you know, including little kids who were 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 Marine lowered his weapon and aimed it under the bed and fired it in her direction, but the bullet missed her. Me and Noor, we were under the bed.

[Khalid Salman Rasif]

He gets his rifle in the bed.

[Madeline Barron]

And starts shooting at us when we.

[Al Letson]

Are under the bed. I can imagine something like that happening to you as a child. It will be with her for the rest of her life. I mean, there's no way you can rewire your brain not to carry that type of trauma.

[Madeline Barron]

Yeah. And, you know, for Safa, everybody who could have experienced it with you, who could you could talk about it with, all of them are killed, too. And so, yeah, I mean, 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. right?

[Madeline Barron]

We spent months knocking on doors across the country talking to Marines, specifically Marines who are in Haditha that day.

[Al Letson]

And I remember I opened a Humvee and I just see bodies stacked up.

[Madeline Barron]

You know, and I opened another one, same thing.

[Al Letson]

I'm like.

[Khalid Salman Rasif]

Nobody ever just stops and says, hey, tell me about this. You're the first person to actually sit and listen for a second. I mean, maybe in their eyes, it's justified. You know, they lost one of the.

[Al Letson]

Most loved guys in the company, you.

[Khalid Salman Rasif]

Know, so they just weren't happy.

[Al Letson]

In their eyes, if that was the case and their eyes, you know, it's justified. Not in my eyes.

[Madeline Barron]

In your eyes, what would that be? Sounds like murder.

[Khalid Salman Rasif]

Right.

[Madeline Barron]

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 US Military. And this was interesting because despite this being the Haditha killings, being one of the biggest war crimes cases in, in modern history, so little had been made public about what actually happened that day. You know, unlike other, well, quote, unquote, 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 US Military, right?

[Madeline Barron]

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 a recording, an audio recording of the head of the Marine Corps at the time of the Haditha killings, Commandant Michael Hagee. And in this interview, he. He's being interviewed by a Marine Corps historian, and he brags about how proud he was that he was able to keep these photos from reporters. The press never got, unlike Apple Gray.

[Khalid Salman Rasif]

Never got the pictures. They got the pictures. That was what's bad about Albert Bray. And I learned from that. So they did not get the pictures. Those pictures today have stolen.

[Madeline Barron]

Where are they? 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 common knot 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 gonna do. Let me show you what I'm gonna do.

[Madeline Barron]

Exactly.

[Al Letson]

So what did you do?

[Madeline Barron]

Well, we started in the most reportedly 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 were not going to release the photos to us because they could re victimize 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 US 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 US 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?

[Madeline Barron]

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?

[Madeline Barron]

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 Marine who was involved in the killings got sent a glowing letter from General James Mattis, praising him and dismissing all the charges against him. Only one Marine, the squad leader, Sergeant Frank Wuderich, 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 Woodrich's lawyer and he said the charge his client pleaded guilty to was basically the equivalent of a parking ticket.

[Al Letson]

It's meaningless. The government decided not to hold anybody accountable. I mean, I don't know how else to put it. 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. 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?

[Madeline Barron]

This was not easy. Before our 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 sources. And then what we did is we would FOIA the US Military, military for the records of those cases. And then many times, the US 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?

[Madeline Barron]

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.

[Madeline Barron]

Exactly.

[Al Letson]

Madeline, thank you so much for talking to us about this reporting.

[Madeline Barron]

Thanks. Alone.

[Al Letson]

Just when Madelyn and her team from in the Dark thought their reporting was done and they knew all there was to know, Madeline got a call from one of the producers.

[Samara Freemark]

Hey, Madeline.

[Madeline Barron]

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.

[Khalid Salman Rasif]

Foreign.

[Madeline Barron]

Hi, y'. All. My name is Nadia Hamdan and I'm a producer here at Reveal. Reveal is a non profit news organization and we depend on support from our listeners. Donate [e-mail] donate, donate and thanks.

[Al Letson]

From the center for Investigative Reporting and prx. This is Reveal. I'm Al Letsin. 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 US 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 Sherritt, one of the Marines involved in the killings. He's describing what happened when his squad leader, Sergeant Frank Wuderich, spotted a man on the street and opened fire.

[Samara Freemark]

Wouterich took his first shot, but missed. I went to fire because Woterich 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, Sarah, 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 Ahmed Hamid.

[Al Letson]

We pick up the story with the 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 when whose family came under attack by the Marines in November 2005. Here's reporter Madeleine Barron.

[Madeline Barron]

We were with our interpreter talking to Khalid Salman Rasif, 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, he ran into a mother who told him about her missing son. On the same day of the incident, the woman told Khaled 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. 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. Khalid said that for years, this mother would come to him asking about her son, and he was very shy from her because he didn't have any information about the son. Nobody knows anything about him. 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 Samarra a voice memo.

[Khalid Salman Rasif]

Hello, Mamdu Hamad. That's his name.

[Madeline Barron]

Mamdu Hamid. The document had said Manda Hamed. Not exactly the same, but close. We asked Khalid if he could connect us with Mamdu's family, and he agreed. Mamdu's mother, who'd asked Khalid for help all those years ago, died in 2013. But Mamdu's brothers are still alive.

[Khalid Salman Rasif]

Yes. Here, please.

[Madeline Barron]

So he asked Namak Hoshno, the BBC reporter we are working with, to go with an interpreter to meet them. So, thanks very much for coming.

[Khalid Salman Rasif]

Could you please introduce yourselves? Your name?

[Madeline Barron]

The brothers names are Qasim. Qasim Ahmad Ahmad Ahkhun and Juma Juma Ahmed Hamed. They all met at Khaled's house and the brothers told Naamak more about Mamdu and what happened that day. Back in 2005, Mamdu was 27 years old. He was charming, outgoing. His brothers described him as the kind of guy who got along with everyone.

[Khalid Salman Rasif]

He was very friendly, used to have jokes with others. He mixed with people. He establish good relationship and friendship with others.

[Madeline Barron]

A cousin later sent us a picture of Mam Du. He's looking right at the camera, grinning, a huge grin. A person next to him is giving him bunny ears.

[Khalid Salman Rasif]

A lovely guy.

[Madeline Barron]

The family lived in Hiditha, in a neighborhood a little ways away from where Khalid's family lived. Before the war, Mamdu and his brothers worked in construction. But when the Americans arrived, that kind of work dried up. And so the brothers started doing all kinds of odd jobs, just trying to scrape a living together. On the morning of November 19, 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.

[Khalid Salman Rasif]

Ask him to take the TR to bring Gaz.

[Madeline Barron]

Mamdou and his brother Juma set off on foot with two of their cousins, Haider and Yasin. 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.

[Khalid Salman Rasif]

They didn't know there was an incident.

[Madeline Barron]

The men walked through the town, out of their neighborhood and into Khalid Salman Recif's. The streets were quiet. And then out of nowhere.

[Khalid Salman Rasif]

The Americans started shooting them.

[Madeline Barron]

There were Marines on the street a few hundred meters away firing at them. What Mamdu's brothers were describing appeared to be the moment that Lance Corporal Justin Sharrott described in his statement to investigators. The moment he said Woidrich 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 Yasin in the stomach and ripped through his back. Yasin fell face first to the ground. Mamdou stopped running. He checked on Yassine. Are you okay? Are you alive? Yassine said, go run. A neighbor pulled Yassine into a nearby house. He was eventually taken to a hospital, and he survived. Mamdu, Juma, and Haider kept running. Unbeknownst to them, they were running right into another squad of Marines, second squad. And then.

[Khalid Salman Rasif]

His brother Mamduh was shot in his head.

[Madeline Barron]

Mamdu was hit, too. Neighbors got Mamdu into a house. His cousin Haider went into the house with him. Haider later told his family what happened inside. How Mamdu, 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 Mamdu out to an American helicopter. Mamdu's brother Juma watched from a distance as the helicopter lifted off.

[Khalid Salman Rasif]

They took Mamduh and they left.

[Madeline Barron]

And that was the last anyone in Haditha ever saw of Mamdu Hamid. In the days and weeks and months and eventually years that followed, the families searched for Mom Dew. 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.

[Khalid Salman Rasif]

We keep worrying and keep asking every day and night, where is Mamdua?

[Al Letson]

Where is Mamdua?

[Khalid Salman Rasif]

Is he still alive?

[Madeline Barron]

The family tried everything to find him. Mamdu's brothers Jummah and Qasem 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.

[Khalid Salman Rasif]

He was handed to the Iraqi forces.

[Madeline Barron]

Maybe Mamdu 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 Mamdu.

[Khalid Salman Rasif]

So he checking all the computers for Iraqi forces, other Iraqi security forces.

[Madeline Barron]

But the search came up empty. The family kept trying. Jummah and Qasem traveled with their mother to prisons all over Iraq, checking to see if Mamdu was being held in any of them.

[Khalid Salman Rasif]

Baghdad looking.

[Madeline Barron]

But he wasn't. Qasim said their mother refused to stop, hoping that Mamdu might still be out there somewhere and that one day they might find him.

[Khalid Salman Rasif]

She didn't stop looking for him. She knocked all the doors. Mr. Khalid, Baghdad American Iraqi forces. She didn't give up.

[Madeline Barron]

And she wouldn't allow Juma and Qasem to stop looking either. Juma and Qasim never gave up hope they might one day find Mamdu. But after their mother died, they did stop searching. They told Naamak that they wanted to end this anguish of not knowing if Mamdu 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 Mom Do. 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 Mamdu. You're listening to REVEAL from the center for Investigative Reporting in prx. This is Reveal. I'm Al Edson. The last time anyone in Haditha had seen Mamdu Hamid, 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 Barron and the team from in the Dark wanted to find out what happened to Mamdu after he was flown out of Haditha. So they kept digging and eventually found someone who'd been with Mamdu when he was evacuated. Here's Madeline.

[Madeline Barron]

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 Tarazas.

[Khalid Salman Rasif]

I look over and I'm like, who the hell is this? And then one of the guys from 1st Platoon, they're like, excuse my language, but they're like, that's a piece of that pulled the trigger on the ied. And I'm like, why? Why is he here? Why?

[Al Letson]

Why?

[Khalid Salman Rasif]

And I remember saying, you piece of.

[Madeline Barron]

Mamdu, of course, was not the trigger man. But Garcia didn't know that. Onboard the chopper, Mamdu was hooked up to oxygen.

[Khalid Salman Rasif]

He didn't look good.

[Madeline Barron]

Someone asked Garcia if he would squeeze the oxygen bag to help mom do breathe.

[Khalid Salman Rasif]

And I remember it was a crew chief. He told me. He goes, hey, I need you to blow the little masking with a little ball to you. Squeeze in. 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 I literally told him it might have been cold, but when they told me who, who that person was, and then knowing that one of my buddies is killed, I told him, excuse my language, but go yourself. Let him die.

[Madeline Barron]

Mamdu didn't die. Another Marine ended up squeezing the oxygen bag. And Mamdu was still alive when the Black Hawk landed near the hospital at Al Asad Air Base. 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 Mamdu 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 no identifying information at all. So the front desk clerk enters him into the patient log as enemy prisoner of war patient number eight.

[Madeline Barron]

At the hospital at Al Asad, medical staff intubated Mamdu. 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 Mamdu. 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 Mamdu 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 Mamdu'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 Mamdu's full medical records from the US military, but they refused to provide them. We do know that despite his head injury, Mamdu was considered stable when he left Al Asad, headed to Baghdad. The limited records we did manage to obtain say that he died, quote, 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.

[Madeline Barron]

The hospital in Baghdad held Mamdu's body for five days, not knowing who this person was and therefore having no way to contact the family. On November 24, 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 Mamdu's body. So we hired a researcher based in Baghdad to help us.

[Khalid Salman Rasif]

Hello?

[Samara Freemark]

Hi, can you hear me?

[Khalid Salman Rasif]

Yes. Hello?

[Samara Freemark]

Hi, Hi, I'm trying to reach.

[Khalid Salman Rasif]

Yes, I am.

[Madeline Barron]

The researcher didn't want us to use.

[Khalid Salman Rasif]

His real name because, like, honestly, it is not safe for me, honestly, to show for public that I'm working with American that will, like, 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?

[Khalid Salman Rasif]

You can just say Mana. Okay, that will be fine.

[Madeline Barron]

Manat was familiar with the Baghdad morgue. Its official name is the Medico Legal Institute. Manat told Samara that unfortunately, everyone who lived in Baghdad during the war was familiar with the Medical Legal Institute because it seemed like everyone had known someone whose body ended up there.

[Khalid Salman Rasif]

Especially like Baghdad residents, they do have, like, bad experience about this institute. Because myself, my friends have lost their relatives, their friends in this institute.

[Madeline Barron]

Mana agreed to go back to the Medico Legal Institute and see what he could find out about what had happened to Mamdu's body. Two weeks later, Samara got back on a call with him.

[Samara Freemark]

What was it like to go back there?

[Khalid Salman Rasif]

Oh, I got, like, flashes from what happened, from these memories. Like, you know, all the images, like, even the smells, it was like, really shocking me.

[Madeline Barron]

Mana 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 Mamdu 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 Medical Legal Institute was a place where the bodies of many of these people ended up.

[Khalid Salman Rasif]

The situation was, like, 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.

[Madeline Barron]

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 Menat 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.

[Khalid Salman Rasif]

Pictures for the bodies, like for everyone who was delivered to this institute. They have photos for everyone.

[Madeline Barron]

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 Mamdu Hamid had been turned over by the Americans to the morgue on November 24, 2005.

[Samara Freemark]

Do they have photos from November 24, 2005?

[Khalid Salman Rasif]

Yes. Yes, yes, yes.

[Madeline Barron]

Wow. Yeah.

[Khalid Salman Rasif]

Yeah. So basically, like, according to this, we might find the body of the man that we are looking for.

[Madeline Barron]

The morgue told Mana 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 Mamdu was in them. And if he was, the morgue would consult its records and be able to tell the family where Mamdu's body was buried. Samara wanted to tell Mamdu's family everything she'd learned. But she wanted someone to be there with them, helping to convey this information. So she asked Mana to meet with Mamdu's family in person. Mana met Mamdu's brothers Qasim and Juma at Khalid Salman Rasif's house. They all sat down together on a couch in Khalid's living room. They poured some tea, and Manak called Samara in by phone.

[Khalid Salman Rasif]

Hi, Samara.

[Madeline Barron]

Hello.

[Khalid Salman Rasif]

I'm with Mr. Khalid and Qasim and Juma.

[Madeline Barron]

Hi, Mr. Juma and Mr. Qassim.

[Samara Freemark]

It's very nice to meet you. Thank you for talking to me.

[Khalid Salman Rasif]

Thank you. Samara.

[Samara Freemark]

I wanted to begin by telling you how sorry I am about what happened to your family and to Mamdu. For the past several years, me and my team have been working on an investigation into what happened in Haditha on November 19th of 2005, when many civilians were killed by American Marines.

[Khalid Salman Rasif]

Yes.

[Samara Freemark]

While doing that reporting, we obtained some documents that I believe are about your brother Mamdu and what happened to him that day.

[Madeline Barron]

Yes.

[Samara Freemark]

Would you like me to share with you what I've learned from those documents?

[Khalid Salman Rasif]

The only wish that they have, they want to know, like eagerly what happened to their brother.

[Madeline Barron]

Okay.

[Samara Freemark]

So the records that I have show that Mamdu, as you know, was shot by Marines on the morning of November 19th in Haditha.

[Madeline Barron]

Samara told Juma and Qasem Hamamdu was flown out of Haditha.

[Samara Freemark]

He was medevaced to Al Assad Air Base.

[Khalid Salman Rasif]

How?

[Madeline Barron]

He was taken to Al Asad and treated there.

[Samara Freemark]

He was treated at Al Asad for about an hour.

[Madeline Barron]

And then put on another helicopter and sent on to the American military hospital in Baghdad. But before he could be treated at.

[Samara Freemark]

That hospital, Mamdu died from the gunshot wound to his head. 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.

[Khalid Salman Rasif]

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.

[Madeline Barron]

Mamdu's family was grateful to Samarra, but also angry. Why had it taken so long for anyone to tell them that their brother was dead? It was clear from the documents Samara was sharing with them that the US military had known for nearly 20 years that Mamdu 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.

[Khalid Salman Rasif]

If only they told us like that he is dead. At that time, they did not only killed him, they killed him twice. One, when they killed him like in reality. And second, when they didn't tell about what happened to him. No.

[Madeline Barron]

We asked the US Marine Corps why they didn't tell Mamdu's family the truth years ago. They didn't answer. When we asked Major Dana Hyatt, the former Civil affairs officer in Hiditha, about Mamdu, he told us he couldn't remember anyone who fit that description. In that meeting with Mamdu's family, there was one more thing to talk about.

[Khalid Salman Rasif]

They're asking about the body.

[Madeline Barron]

Samara explained that Mana had gone to the Medico Legal Institute in Baghdad and talked to people who work there and learned that there might be records of Mamdu.

[Samara Freemark]

There 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.

[Khalid Salman Rasif]

They eagerly want to know what happened and to get the corpse, or at least where they buried his body.

[Madeline Barron]

On a cool, dry morning in January, Mamdu's brother Juma woke up early and started off on the long drive from Haditha to Baghdad. The conversation he'd had with Samarra had provided some relief. But in the days after that conversation, Juma 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. Juma still wasn't convinced his brother was dead. In Baghdad, Juma met up with Mana and they headed to the medico legal institute. On the drive over, Juma told Mana 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 Mamdu. But Juma 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 Juma and Mana arrived at the medical 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 race room with a large screen mounted on the wall. Jimma 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 Juma called out, that one. That one. And there was Mamdu. You could see the gun shut 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 Mamdu after all these years, had been found.

[Al Letson]

Despite everything that the team felt 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. Just weeks later, President Trump fired the insurance inspector General of the DoD as a part of a mass dismissal of 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 war fighters to intimidate, demoralize, hunt and kill enemies of our country. The in the Dark series was reported and produced by Madeline Barron, Sumara Freemark, Natalie Jablonski, Parker Yesko and Raymond Tungakar. It was edited by Catherine Winner and Willing Davidson. Additional reporting and investigating in Iraq by BBC Arabic's Namak Koshnow. Field producer Haider Ahmed Emana. Interpreting in translation by Aya L. Shakarchy and Aya Muthana. The fool in the Dark Season was awarded the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for audio reports. It's available at newyorker.com or wherever you get your podcasts. Our show is produced by Sumara Freemark, Raymond Tungakar and Steven Rascone. It was edited by Taki Telanitas. Our Production manager is Zulema Cobb. Original music by Alison Layton Brown and Gary Meister. Sound mix by John Delore, Jim Briggs and Fernando Arruda. Our executive producer is Brett Park. Our theme music is by Camerado Lightning. Support for reveals provided by the Reva and David Logan foundation, the John D. And 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.

[Madeline Barron]

From prx.