Geography is not usually the interesting part of a story like this. Here it is, because almost everything odd about the footage comes from the fact that this all happened in a few hundred metres of an ordinary, crowded neighbourhood in the middle of a working morning.

Where the district actually is

Al-Amin al-Thaniyah lies east of the Tigris, in the eastern half of Baghdad, within the broader area often written in English as New Baghdad. It is not a suburb in the spread-out sense. It is a dense grid of low concrete blocks, flat roofs, small shops at street level, unfinished buildings on empty plots, and narrow side streets that vehicles half-block.

In 2007 several hundred thousand people lived in the wider area. It was a working-class district with families, markets, garages and schools, and the fighting happened between all of that rather than somewhere set apart from it.

EastSide of the Tigris the district sits on
Hundreds of thousandsPeople living in the wider area in 2007
Low-riseConcrete blocks, shops at street level
A few streetsDistance covering all three engagements

What the surge changed about places like this

Before 2007, American units largely operated out of big fortified bases and drove into districts to patrol. The surge changed the method as much as the numbers. Troops were pushed into small outposts inside neighbourhoods with orders to stay there and hold the ground.

For a district like Al-Amin al-Thaniyah, this meant a constant American presence on streets where people were also going to work, and it meant daily contact between soldiers and whoever was fighting them. The surge page covers the policy; what matters here is what it put on the street.

A strategy that put infantry inside the neighbourhood put helicopters above it, every day, for a year.Why an Apache was overhead on an ordinary Thursday morning

The weeks before the airstrike

By July, fighting in the district was routine. American vehicles were being hit with rocket-propelled grenades and small-arms fire. The infantry company working the area had taken casualties and was operating in a state of near-permanent alert.

This is context, not excuse. But it explains why a group of men standing on a corner, one of them with something long on his shoulder, read to a helicopter crew as a threat rather than as a scene from an ordinary morning. In that district, in that month, both readings were plausible, and the sight could not tell them apart.

What a month like that does to a unit

Soldiers being shot at in the same streets every week stop reading a crowd as a crowd. That is not an excuse and it is not a legal defence. It is the reason a group of men on a corner, one of them carrying something long, read as a threat rather than as a Thursday morning.

Why everything in the footage is so close together

People watching for the first time are often surprised at how short the distances are. The group of men, the wounded man at the kerb, the spot where the van stops, the building hit later, and the soldiers who arrive on foot are all within a few streets of each other.

Density is the whole problem

In open country a 30mm cannon burst and three anti-armour missiles are a local event. On a street of shops and flats, in daylight, they are an event that reaches whoever happens to be walking past. The man visible strolling by the building seconds before the first missile is the clearest illustration of that in the entire recording.

It also explains how the van appeared so fast. A vehicle on its way somewhere else was a street away when the shooting started. In a dense district, a passer-by is always thirty seconds from anything.

  • The group of men at a street corner.
  • The wounded man at the kerb, metres away.
  • The van, arriving from a street away within minutes.
  • The building, hit about half an hour later, nearby.

The district afterwards

Life in Al-Amin al-Thaniyah went on. The families of the men killed stayed in the area. When WikiLeaks prepared the release in 2010 it sent people to Baghdad to find them, and that is how some of the names in this archive were established at all. Before that, several of the dead were simply not recorded anywhere a reader outside Iraq could reach.

The wounded children, Sajad and Doaha, grew up there. Their father did not.

Reading a Baghdad street you can only see from above

The footage gives you a keyhole view: grey, narrow, from a thousand feet, of a place none of the people arguing about it have walked through. It is worth holding on to the fact that under that keyhole was a normal neighbourhood having a normal Thursday, with the extra fact that there had been shooting in it all week.

Almost every confident claim about this event, in either direction, gets weaker once you picture the actual street. That is a good reason to keep the geography in view while reading the frame-by-frame analysis or the main account.

For what happened in these streets, read the day itself and then the main account of the recording.

Questions people ask about this

Is New Baghdad the same as Al-Amin al-Thaniyah?

Close enough for most purposes. New Baghdad is the English name commonly used for the eastern district that contains Al-Amin al-Thaniyah, the specific neighbourhood where the airstrike happened.

Why were US troops there at all?

The 2007 surge moved American units off large bases and into outposts inside Baghdad neighbourhoods, with orders to hold ground rather than patrol from a distance.

Was it a residential area?

Yes. Mostly low concrete blocks of flats and houses with shops at street level, plus building plots with unfinished structures on them.

Where this comes from

  1. July 12, 2007, Baghdad airstrike — Wikipedia
  2. Iraq war reporting archive — The Guardian
  3. Iraq Body Count — Iraq Body Count project

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