What happened in the sky and on the street in New Baghdad on 12 July 2007, phase by phase.
Most accounts of this event compress it into a single moment. It was not one. Over roughly forty minutes an Apache crew engaged three separate times: a group of men in a street, a van that stopped to pick up a wounded man, and a building. Different people were killed in each. Different arguments attach to each.
This section takes them apart. Start with what the video is, then the day itself, then the frame-by-frame reading of what the footage does and does not show.
If you are new to the subject, these in this order will give you the whole of it. The main pages come first because everything else refers back to them.
Names the record holds for this part of the story.
He was driving his two children through the district when he saw a wounded man at the roadside and stopped. H…
Between six and nine other men were killed in the first burst of cannon fire. Most have never been publicly n…
Roughly half an hour after the first burst, the same crew fired three Hellfire missiles into a partly built r…
Saleh Matasher Tomal's son and daughter. Both were in the front of the van when it was fired on, and both sur…
The callsign of the AH-64 Apache whose gun camera recorded the footage and whose crew fired in all three enga…
The wingman aircraft. It was working the same area at the same time and its crew appears on the radio through…
Everything filed under this topic, newest work first.
The full story of the 2007 Baghdad airstrike and the leaked cockpit video that made the world watch it: what the footage shows, who died, a…
A careful reading of what the footage does and does not show, phase by phase, and where the honest disagreements actually sit.
Every dated event in this story in order, from the surge that put American infantry in the district to the plea deal that closed the case s…
The documents, reports and archives this whole site rests on, with a plain guide to which ones are worth your time and what each one can an…
The morning of the airstrike set out in order: who was in the district, why the helicopters were there, and how forty minutes went the way …
The hardest part of the footage to defend: a civilian vehicle stops to pick up a wounded man, and is fired on. What the law says about resc…
The third and least examined engagement of that morning: three Hellfire missiles fired into a partly built block of flats, and a death toll…
Al-Amin al-Thaniyah was an ordinary crowded neighbourhood of shops, flats and side streets. Knowing what kind of place it was changes how t…
The camera that made this recording was never meant to be watched by the public. Understanding what it can and cannot show explains most of…
What a US aircrew was and was not allowed to do that year, where those rules come from, and why staying inside them is not the same as bein…
The US Army examined this airstrike within weeks and cleared the crews. What that investigation was, what it looked at, and the questions i…
The callsign of the helicopter whose camera recorded everything. Who the crew were, why they have never been named, and why this archive do…
The infantry company working the district that summer, the war it was having, and why its soldiers reached the van within minutes of it bei…
He was driving his two children across the district when he saw a wounded man in the road. He stopped. It is the simplest and hardest fact …
A boy of about ten and a girl of about five were in the front seat when the van was fired on. Both survived. Their father did not.
What actually changed inside the US military after the video became public, what changed outside it, and how much of the reform people assu…
The claims about this footage that do not survive contact with the record, from both directions, and what the accurate version says instead.
Each answer below is the summary; the link goes to the page that sets it out against the record.
The rest of the archive, and where each one picks up.
The people who were killed doing journalism, and the people who risked everything to make the footage public.
How the footage got out, how it was published, and what it did to the idea of a government secret.
Court-martials, indictments, extradition hearings and the question nobody has answered: who was held responsible?
What a camera in a gunsight does to an audience, and what news organisations owe the people in the frame.
Baghdad in 2007, the surge, the counting of the dead, and why one morning in one district looked the way it did.
The war that began on 28 February 2026, and the strike on a girls' school in Minab that became its defining atrocity.
The incidents that set the terms for how civilian deaths in war are counted, argued about and answered for.
