Photo Gallery The Iraq War Logs
The online whistleblower platform WikiLeaks is posting close to 400,000 US military reports from the Iraq war on the Web. The logs show in detail how brutally the war was waged and the helplessness with which the United States acted. This Nov. 23, 2006 photo shows the aftermath of a car bombing in the Sadr City area of Baghdad.
US Commander-in-Chief George W. Bush, standing on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln under a banner that read "Mission Accomplished," declared the conflict to be over when he said on May 1, 2003: "Major combat operations in Iraq have ended." On that day, the chronicle of the Iraq war that WikiLeaks has now published had not even begun.
In one respect, the US Armed Forces, which compiled these documents, and the website WikiLeaks, which is now publishing them, share something in common: Both organizations see these documents as an insider's view of the Iraq war, and thus as accounts that offer the most detailed, comprehensive and realistic version of the bloody truth so far. This photo shows WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange at a July 2010 press conference in London about the Afghanistan leaks.
The documents describe scenes of sheer terror on a massive scale. Starting in 2004, terrorists began kidnapping foreigners, decapitating them and dumping their bodies by the roadside like trash. Kim Sun Il, a South Korean working for a US military contractor, was found on a road between Baghdad and Fallujah on June 22, 2004. This image is from an Islamist video allegedly showing Kim being beheaded.
A flood of reports show that it wasn't just ordinary police officers and soldiers who cooperated with the Shiite militias in their fight against the American occupiers, but that politicians as well as high-ranking police and military officials were directly involved in attacks on US troops and civilians. The Mahdi Army, in particular, appears to have infiltrated large segments of the police. This 2006 photo shows members of the Mahdi Army marching in Sadr City, Baghdad.
The Wolf Brigade was an elite military unit, run by the Iraqi Ministry of the Interior and trained by US specialists in the fight against al-Qaida. However the Iraq war logs indicate that the elite forces were spreading fear and loathing themselves, by brutally oppressing and even torturing other Iraqis. This October 2005 shows arrested suspects at Wolf Brigade headquarters in Baghdad.
The war logs also contain information on the July 12, 2007 helicopter attack on a group of Iraqis, including two Reuters employees, that was the subject of the "Collateral Murder" video released by WikiLeaks.
Mercenaries employed by the American private security firm Blackwater in Iraq had a reputation for ruthlessness -- but as the war logs show, they were also the victims of brutal attacks.
