Two children were in the van. That single fact did more to change how people felt about this footage than any argument about rules of engagement, and it is worth setting out carefully, because the detail is often repeated wrongly.
Who they are
Sajad and Doaha Salih were the son and daughter of Saleh Matasher Tomal. On the morning of 12 July 2007 they were in the front of his van as he drove them across the district. Reports at the time put Sajad at around ten and Doaha at around five, and as with much else in this record the ages are approximate.
They were doing nothing more than being driven somewhere by their father on a Thursday morning.
What happened to them
Their father stopped the van beside a badly wounded man at the kerb and got out to help him. The helicopter crew, reporting that people were collecting bodies and possibly weapons, asked for clearance and fired 30mm cannon rounds into the vehicle.
The children were inside it. There is no evidence the crew could see them; the targeting sight cannot show that kind of detail and the angle would not have helped. Both were seriously injured. Their father was killed.
Getting them out
American infantry reached the scene within minutes. Specialist Ethan McCord looked into the wrecked front of the van and found the girl first, still alive. He carried her to an armoured vehicle, then went back and carried out the boy.
McCord has described that sequence many times since, and what it did to him afterwards. It is one of the very few accounts in this record from someone who was physically present on the ground and who chose to talk about it under his own name.
Both children were evacuated for medical treatment and both lived.
The detail that stays with people
A soldier looked into a wrecked van, found a five-year-old girl alive, carried her out, and went back for her brother. Both children lived. Their father, who had stopped to help a stranger, did not.
What is known about them since
Very little, and deliberately so here. They were children then and they are adults now. They did not ask to be in the most-watched piece of military footage of the century.
WikiLeaks sent people to Baghdad before the 2010 release to find the families of those killed, and some information about the household reached English-language reporting through that work and through later interviews. This archive does not publish addresses, family contact details or medical detail beyond what is necessary to understand what happened, in line with our policy on the people in this story.
How children end up in a record like this at all
There is a habit in the way military incidents get written up that this case exposes neatly. Reports count people by category: enemy killed in action, civilians killed, wounded. A five-year-old in a front seat becomes a line in the third column, and the line does not say that her father was the man lifting a stranger off the road when the rounds arrived.
That flattening is not a conspiracy, it is just what paperwork does. It is also why the footage had the effect it did. A form cannot show you a child being carried across a street by a soldier who is going to think about it for the rest of his life. Thirty seconds of video can, and once it has, the categories stop doing their job.
The detail people get wrong
Three corrections worth making
- The children were not killed. Both survived. This is the single most common error about the case.
- They were not in the group of men in the street. They were in a passing vehicle that stopped.
- The crew almost certainly could not see them. Nothing suggests otherwise, and the equipment could not have shown them.
Getting these right matters, and not only for accuracy. Every exaggeration of this story gives people a reason to dismiss the whole thing, and there is more than enough in the accurate version. The myths page collects the rest.
Why Sajad and Doaha changed the argument
By the time the van is hit, a viewer has already spent several minutes being told that this is a story about identification at distance, about grey shapes and split-second judgement. Then soldiers open a door and there are two children inside, and the frame of the argument collapses.
It is not a legal argument, and it is not the only one this morning raises: four separate ethical questions run through it. Nothing about the presence of the children changes what the crew could see or what the rules said. What it changes is the question you find yourself asking. Not was this permitted, but how did a system arrive here, in daylight, in a residential street, with a five-year-old in the wreck and nobody answering for it afterwards.
That shift is what the release of this footage did to millions of people in April 2010, and it is why footage moves public opinion in a way that written casualty reports never have.
Questions people ask about this
Did the children die?
Could the helicopter crew see them?
Where are they now?
Where this comes from
- July 12, 2007, Baghdad airstrike — Wikipedia
- Iraq Body Count — Iraq Body Count project
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