Saleh Matasher Tomal: The Man Who Stopped

Of all the people who died on 12 July 2007, the one whose actions are least ambiguous is the man who was not part of anything. He was driving past. He saw someone bleeding in the road. He stopped, and it killed him.

Who he was

Saleh Matasher Tomal lived in the area. On the morning of the airstrike he was driving his son and daughter through the district. Accounts of exactly where they were going differ slightly, with several reports saying he was taking the children to a tutoring session. He was not a fighter, he had no connection to the group in the street, and he was not armed.

Details about his life beyond that morning are thin, for the same reason that most of the men killed in the first burst have never been named at all. When WikiLeaks prepared the release in 2010 it sent people to Baghdad to trace the families, and a good deal of what is known about him in English comes from that work.

He was driving past. He saw someone bleeding in the road. He stopped, and it killed him.The least ambiguous action anyone took that morning

What he did

The first burst of cannon fire had already happened. Saeed Chmagh, badly wounded, was pulling himself along the kerb in full view of the helicopter overhead.

A plain van came down the street and stopped. Tomal got out with one or two other men and went to the wounded man. They took hold of him and began lifting him towards the vehicle.

That is the entire action. There is no weapon in the footage. Nobody points anything at anything. Two or three men are picking up a person who is bleeding to death in a road.

The whole of what he did

He stopped a vehicle. He got out. He took hold of a bleeding stranger and began lifting him. There is no weapon anywhere in the footage of that phase, and nobody points anything at anything.

What happened next

The crew reported that people were collecting bodies and possibly weapons, asked for clearance to engage, and received it. They fired 30mm cannon rounds into the van.

Tomal was killed. Saeed Chmagh, who had survived the first burst and been alive for several minutes, was killed. The van was wrecked with the two children inside it. The legal argument about this phase is set out on its own page, and it is the hardest part of the morning to defend.

• First burstHe is not there. He is driving his children across the district.
• Minutes laterHe sees a wounded man at the kerb and stops the van.
• Seconds after thatHe is out of the vehicle, lifting a stranger.
• Immediately afterThe crew request clearance and fire. He is killed.

The children in the front seat

Sajad, around ten, and Doaha, around five, were in the front of the van. Nothing in the record suggests the crew could see them; the sight could not show that. Both children were badly wounded and both survived, pulled out of the wreck minutes later by an American soldier who has spoken about it ever since.

They lost their father in the same seconds. Their page is here.

• Sajad, around ten, in the front of the van. Badly wounded. Survived.
• Doaha, around five, beside him. Badly wounded. Survived.
• Their father, at the roadside helping a stranger. Killed.

Why this death sits differently

Almost every other question about this morning can be argued. Whether the men on the corner were fighters. Whether a camera lens looked like a launcher. What was inside the building.

There is nothing to argue about here. A man saw a wounded person and stopped his car. Under the law of armed conflict, helping the wounded is not taking part in hostilities, and doing it does not make you a target. Under any ordinary moral reading it is the thing you would want a stranger to do if it were you in the road.

The name, and why spellings differ

You will see his name written several ways in English, because Arabic names transliterate differently depending on who is doing it and from which dialect. Reports use variations of both the given name and the family name, and some accounts give only part of it.

This is a small thing that tells you something larger. Names that pass through a military report, then a wire service, then a translator, then a newspaper subeditor come out slightly changed each time. For most of the men killed that morning, the process broke down completely and no name reached English-language records at all. That he is named here, and consistently enough to be recognised, is partly luck and partly the result of people going to the district afterwards to ask.

What the record leaves of Saleh Matasher Tomal

No court has examined his death. No one has been charged. The Army's inquiry treated the engagement on the van as part of an engagement that fell within the rules, and closed the file.

What remains is a name, two surviving children, and about ninety seconds of grey footage in which a man gets out of a van and walks towards someone who needs help. Of everything in this archive, that sequence is the one most worth keeping in mind when people describe the whole event as complicated. Parts of it are. This part is not.