David Remnick: Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Last year, the team behind the podcast In The Dark joined us at The New Yorker. Now, you might have heard their extraordinary series about Curtis Flowers, a black man in Mississippi who spent years on death row. Flowers was tried six times for the same crime. After In The Dark examined every twist and turn of that prosecution, the Supreme Court overturned Flowers conviction entirely. The show has won two Peabody Awards as well as a George Polk Award, one of the top honors in journalism.

That was the very first ever given to a podcast. The new season of In The Dark has been four years in the making, and it's the most ambitious work they have ever done. They traveled to 21 states and 3 continents to report on a story that the world has largely forgotten. I'll mention that some of the details are difficult to hear about. You should use discretion if you're listening with children. Here's Madeleine Baran, the lead reporter for In The Dark.

Madeleine Baran: Two years ago, I went to Iraq to talk to a man about what sounded like a murder. It had happened almost 17 years earlier. The killing of the man's sister, his nephew, so many others, 24 people in all. It was a killing that had gone unpunished where not a single person had ever gone to prison. A killing committed by US Marines. The man whose family was killed is named Khalid Salman Rasif. He met me in the lobby of a hotel in the city of Erbil, Iraq. We headed up to a room with our producer, Samara Freemark and our interpreter, a woman named Ayya Muthana. We all sat down.

Madeleine Baran: Mr. Khalid, why don't you sit here?

Khalid Salman Rasif: Okay.

Madeleine Baran: Can I get you a water or a coffee or anything like that?

Khalid Salman Rasif: Some water.

Madeleine Baran: I'd wanted to meet Khalid in his hometown. It's called Haditha. Traveling to Haditha is dangerous for Western journalists. Remnants of ISIS are still active in the region, so Khalid agreed to meet us in a safer place, in Erbil, in the north.

Ayya Muthana: He's thanking you for coming here. He says that you had the longest wait. He's welcoming you guys to Iraq.

Madeleine Baran: Khalid's in his 50s. He's a lawyer and he looks like one. He has short hair and a neat mustache. Despite the fact that he traveled eight hours to meet us, his dark suit and tie were immaculate. He pulled out his phone and started showing us pictures of his first grandchild.

Khalid Salman Rasif: I am grandfather.

Madeleine Baran: She'd been born just six months earlier. What's her name?

Khalid Salman Rasif: Neba.

Madeleine Baran: Neba?

Khalid Salman Rasif: Yes. There you go. We're happy.

Madeleine Baran: Khalid used to speak English all the time, back when he needed to speak it so he could talk to the American Marines who were occupying his town, but those days are long past.

Khalid Salman Rasif: I sorry, you know, I am-- because I don't go to any school to learn English, it's very difficult. Therefore, I am sorry.

Madeleine Baran: It's been a while, but no, it's good.

Khalid Salman Rasif: It's good?

Madeleine Baran: Yes.

Khalid Salman Rasif: Perfect?

Madeleine Baran: Almost perfect.

[laughter]

Madeleine Baran: Well, it's nice to meet you in person after just talking on the phone.

Ayya Muthana: He's also so happy to see you in person. They kind of gave up on anyone talking about this case again. They didn't forget. They've been heartbroken every day since that day, but they gave up on someone talk about the case or someone re-investigate the case. He said that he was so thrilled and happy that the media is interested in coming all the way for the truth. He says that this is his duty, for the truth to be told.

Madeleine Baran: The story Khalid wanted to tell me happened in Khalid's hometown, Haditha. Haditha is a pretty small city. It's in western Iraq, in the desert, but it's right on the banks of the Euphrates River. Depending on where in Haditha you are, the place is either dry and dusty or lush with palm trees. Before the US invaded, life there was quiet, sleepy even. Some people had small farms. They would grow cucumbers and melons. Other people worked in the oil industry. On the weekends, they'd go drink tea and coffee in cafes along the river.

It's the kind of place where it seemed like everyone knew everyone. By the time Khalid's story begins in 2005, all that had changed. The Iraq war had started two years earlier. The United States military had invaded, overthrown Saddam Hussein, and captured Baghdad. Now, the US military was trying to establish control over the rest of the country. That was proving more difficult. In western Iraq, where Haditha is, an insurgency movement was growing. Foreign fighters from groups like al-Qaeda were starting to arrive.

Ayya Muthana: Terrorists, al-Qaeda, started to make their appearance in Haditha City.

Madeleine Baran: Now, when Khalid went to the marketplace, he'd see people he didn't recognize, people who weren't from Haditha, people who spoke with foreign accents from Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Syria. He'd see people with their faces covered so that no one could see who they were. He tried to just keep his head down and stay out of their way. In 2005, a new battalion of US Marines arrived in Haditha to try to drive the insurgents out. There were two groups of outsiders in Haditha, both of them terrifying to the people in town.

The insurgents would plant IEDs under Haditha's streets, and occasionally, pop up to fire rounds at the Marines. The Marines spent their time patrolling, carrying their big guns, driving their big Humvees, looking for insurgents, and caches of weapons and explosives, detaining people they deemed suspicious. They spent a lot of time searching houses. They could burst into your home without warning. It could be late at night or early in the morning. They'd bust down your door with assault rifles drawn.

There was always the worry that if you made one wrong move, if you misunderstood a command, barked out in English, they might just shoot you or zip tie your hands and fly you off to Bucca prison. Khalid told me that the people of Haditha developed a kind of protocol for when the Marines showed up at their houses. They take all the old people and the women and children and put them in a back room, and then the men would go out and talk to the Marines in English, if possible, carefully, appeasingly.

Khalid Salman Rasif: Welcome, you can enter and you can doing anything. Please don't break anything. There is my mother here, my father here. Please, my wife is very sick, my children is very sick. When I told them, sometime they're good but sometime they said, "Shut up and sit down. Don't talking with me anything."

Madeleine Baran: The Marines demanded total cooperation from the people of Haditha. They expected the people of Editha to give them intel about the insurgents, to tell the Marines where IEDs had been placed, where the weapons caches were hidden to help them out in this fight against the bad guys. Even if you had that information, helping the Americans meant putting your own life in danger because if you did help the Americans, in any way, the insurgents could consider you a collaborator.

Ayya Muthana: If they saw any person from the local community talks to any American Marine, they would take them to Haditha's bridge and they would cut their head and put it on their back.

?Madeleine Baran: Put it on their back?

Ayya Muthana: Yes.

Madeleine Baran: Then just leave the body on the bridge?

Ayya Muthana: Leave the body on the bridge.

Madeleine Baran: That sounds terrifying.

Ayya Muthana: He's saying that it was horrifying and this is not only his experience. He's saying that this was a public situation for all of the people of Haditha. They wouldn't trust the al-Qaeda and they wouldn't trust the American military. They lived in this hard situation, terrifying moments, scared from both al-Qaeda and the US military. He said that it was basically like hell.

Khalid Salman Rasif: Yes, yes, like the hell. It's like the hell. It's very hard.

Madeleine Baran: Khalid said, they had a saying back then. When two elephants fight, the only loser is the green grass, and that green grass, in this story, it was Khalid's family. Maybe we could now talk a bit about the day of the incident. What do you remember about how that day started? It was the morning of November 19th, 2005. Khalid was 31 at the time. He lived in Haditha with his wife, his two daughters, and his parents. They lived in a middle class, or maybe even upper middle-class neighborhood, filled with two-story stone houses set close together. Khalid's sister Asma, lived with her family nearby.

His cousins were also close by, as were his aunts and uncles. Khalid was basically surrounded by his family. That morning, Khalid was asleep in his house.

Ayya Muthana: 7:15 AM, the day of the incident, he heard the sound of really strong bombing.

Madeleine Baran: The sound of an explosion woke Khalid up, and he jolted out of bed. He heard shrapnel raining down outside. Some of it even hit a tree in his garden. An IED had exploded on the road near his house. Khalid didn't know it then, but he would later learn that the IED had hit a convoy of Marines traveling down the road. It had destroyed one of the Marines Humvees. One of the Marines was now lying dead in the road, his body torn apart. The remaining Marines in the convoy were mounting a response.

Khalid Salman Rasif: I heard M16.

Madeleine Baran: The distinctive sound of American M16 assault rifles coming from the road nearby, and the sound of Marines shouting.

Ayya Muthana: He heard the military just shouting hysterically, like they were shouting in a really strange behavior.

Madeleine Baran: Then all of a sudden, Khalid heard what sounded like a grenade going off inside a house, right there in his neighborhood. That was followed by the sound of more gunfire. Khalid looked out. There were Marines everywhere. They were on the streets, on the rooftops. Hours passed. Khalid and his family decided to flee to a safer part of town. They set off on foot, carrying white flags so the Marines wouldn't shoot them. They got to a relative's house and hunkered down.

As the day wore on, more family arrived, and word began to trickle in that something horrible had happened at Khalid's sister Asma's house and another house close by. The next morning, Khalid woke up early. He headed to Asma's house to see what had happened. When Khalid got to the house, it was quiet. No one seemed to be home. As he walked inside, the first thing he saw was blood. There was so much blood, even the air smelled of it. There was blood on the walls, the floors, and the furniture, even on the ceilings.

There were bloody drag marks leading out the door. Where was Khalid's family? Where are they? What has happened? Where did they go? Then someone came by, told Khalid that the Marines had taken all the bodies to the hospital. The bodies? Khalid took off running for the hospital. At some point, one of his cousins drove up. He said, "Jump in," and together, they drove the rest of the way. When Khalid got to the hospital, he found a crowd had gathered. People were walking in and out of a small air-conditioned room that the hospital was using as a morgue.

Khalid Salman Rasif: Like freezer for bodies.

Madeleine Baran: Freezer for bodies?

Khalid Salman Rasif: Yes.

Madeleine Baran: There was a nurse there, holding a list of names.

Ayya Muthana: They said, your relatives are all inside. You can go and identify them.

Khalid Salman Rasif: Yes.

Madeleine Baran: The floor of the room was covered in bodies and body parts. Some of the bodies were in body bags, others were in trash bags. They started opening one bag, and another and another. This is my Aunt Khamisa. This is my Uncle Hamid. This is Jahid. This is Rashid. This is Huda. They kept opening bags. This is Younis and his wife, Aida, and their children, Noor, Muhammad, Sabaa, Aisha, Zainab, and then this is my sister, Asma. This is Asma's husband, Walid. Asma and Walid's four-year-old son, Abdullah.

There were other bodies there, too. People who weren't from Khalid's family, but who he knew. Four brothers, Marwan, Qahtan, Chasib, and Jamal, and five other men. Ahmed, Akram, Khalid, Wajdi, and Mohammed. 24 bodies in all, 14 men, 4 women, and 6 children. The oldest was a 76-year-old grandfather and the youngest was a three-year-old girl. The killings were gruesome. Whole families had been nearly wiped out and how they were killed also stood out.

Ayya Muthana: What he noticed was gunshots. He said that most of them got shot in the head or in the chest. They died this way.

Madeleine Baran: Adults shot in the head, children shot in the head. Khalid stood in the cold room, surrounded by the bodies of his family. He would go on to spend years wondering, why? Why did this happen? He's actually devoted his life to answering that question. Now, I was wondering, too. I've spent the past four years, along with the rest of the In The Dark team, investigating the killings of Khalid's family and the others that day, a mass killing carried out by US Marines over just a few hours in Haditha. This story would take us to 21 states and 3 continents.

We would talk to hundreds of people, Iraqi civilians, Marines, eyewitnesses, experts. We would obtain thousands of pages of government documents. We would look at photos, videos, drone footage, reports, intelligence assessments, handwritten notes, records from the peculiar and secretive parallel justice system that handles crimes committed by American service members. We would even sue the US military, all to find out what really happened that day in Haditha and why was no one punished for the killings?

From The New Yorker, this is Season 3 of In The Dark. Episode 1: The Green Grass. In the days after the killings, Khalid walked around Haditha in a daze. He just lost his sister, his sister's husband, his nephew, so many other family members. Khalid told me what those days were like. The word he used the most was shocked.

Ayya Muthana: Seeing his family dying, like his whole family, he was shocked.

Madeleine Baran: Shocked when he saw the bodies of his family in the hospital, shocked in the days that followed. After a week of this, Khalid said, "I woke up."

Ayya Muthana: He said that God gives some people a hidden power to just act when something happened in these kind of situations.

Madeleine Baran: Khalid wanted to know why the Marines had killed his family. He wanted to know what had happened inside those houses, how the killings had happened. He wanted the people responsible to be punished. An investigation, a prosecution, a punishment, the kinds of things that a person expects when their family is killed. What he wanted was justice. Khalid said the Marines hadn't even come to his family to apologize. They actually hadn't said anything to him at all about the killings. It was like it hadn't happened.

Khalid and some other town leaders in Haditha gathered at the town's central library. Local leaders were there and the city council. Khalid was actually a member. They came up with a list of demands. They wrote them down in the form of a letter. Someone in the group translated the letter into English. Now, they needed to get that letter to the Marines. Going to the American base was extremely dangerous. Insurgents monitored the road to the base to see who was coming and going. If they spotted an Iraqi civilian traveling there, sometimes that person would later end up decapitated on the bridge.

Ayya Muthana: Anybody who goes to the American base, it was basically like a suicide.

Madeleine Baran: Khalid was desperate. Eight days after the killings, he and the other men headed down that suicidal road to the American base to meet with the Marines.

David Remnick: Reporter Madeleine Baran, she'll explain what happened when the men arrived at the base when we continue. This is Episode 1 of In The Dark's new season and you're listening to The New Yorker Radio Hour. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, I'm David Remnick. The investigative journalist Madeleine Baran and her team have spent the last four years reporting the new season of the award-winning podcast In The Dark. Today, we're presenting the first episode of the new season. In 2005, 14 men, 4 women, and 6 children, the youngest being three years old, were all killed by US Marines in Iraq in the small city of Haditha.

In The Dark is asking why one of the most high-profile war crimes prosecutions in American history failed to deliver any justice. A number of the victims were relatives of a man named Khalid Salman Rasif, and he identified them at the local hospital in a makeshift morgue. Eight days after the killings, Rasif and other men who had lost family members tried to get some answers from the Americans themselves. We'll continue the story now.

Dana Hyatt: How are you?

Natalie Jablonski: Hello.

Madeleine Baran: I want to introduce you to an American who was at the base when Khalid and the other Iraqi men arrived. His name is Dana Hyatt. Our producer, Natalie Jablonski, went to his house in Connecticut to talk to him.

Natalie Jablonski: Nice to meet you. I'm Natalie.

Dana Hyatt: Dana Hyatt.

Madeleine Baran: Hyatt's now retired from the military. He'd served 28 years.

Natalie Jablonski: I see some Marines logos here and some photos.

Dana Hyatt: Got a little mini museum there.

Natalie Jablonski: Oh, yes.

Dana Hyatt: Then I taught school.

Madeleine Baran: Hyatt had kept a scrapbook of photos of his tribe in Iraq and he showed it to Natalie.

Dana Hyatt: We can go through some of this stuff if you want.

Natalie Jablonski: Yes, let's take a look.

Madeleine Baran: Flipping through its pages, it's like a highlight reel of all the stereotypes the American military applied to Iraq during the war. You have the smiling Iraqi kids.

Dana Hyatt: Give out bubble gum, candy.

Madeleine Baran: The palm trees.

Dana Hyatt: This woman coming from the river area, palm fronds.

Madeleine Baran: The Marines hobnobbing with tribal leaders.

Dana Hyatt: [unintelligible 00:23:44] over there.

Madeleine Baran: The livestock in the streets.

Dana Hyatt: This guy is herding his sheep out here, like biblical times. The houses, the way they look.

Madeleine Baran: Then there are the photos of zip tied detainees, lying in the desert.

Dana Hyatt: Stuff happened.

Madeleine Baran: In Haditha, Hyatt was what's called a civil affairs officer. His job was to build relationships with the civilians in town, win them over to the Marine side, what the military calls hearts and minds.

Dana Hyatt: The hearts and minds helping. Helping to make Haditha better, helping to, I don't know, improve their lives.

Madeleine Baran: When the Marines did something that harmed civilians, Hyatt's job was basically to paper it over. Like he'd hand out money to repair homes the Marines had damaged.

Dana Hyatt: Here you go. Here's $20, here's $50, here's $10, whatever.

Madeleine Baran: Hyatt wasn't involved in the killings of Khalid's family, but he had seen some of their bodies. Hyatt had gone with other Marines to the hospital that night when the bodies were unloaded from Humvees and put in the makeshift morgue where Khalid would later find them.

Natalie Jablonski: What were you thinking at that point? Or what did you make of that?

Dana Hyatt: I don't know. I mean, I was purposely not trying to think too much about it. I didn't want some of those visuals constantly being there later.

Madeleine Baran: Instead, Hyatt's focus was on managing the fallout. That's why he was at the hospital that night.

Dana Hyatt: I talked with the hospital personnel. I gave them my information because we figured there were going to be questions, there were going to be complaints, there were going to be all kinds of what-the-hell-happened type things.

Madeleine Baran: Hyatt was right. There were questions. Now, Hyatt found himself in a meeting with a group of Iraqis, including Khalid, talking about precisely these, as he put it, what-the-hell-happened type things.

Dana Hyatt: Then this is the city council meeting. This was because of the incident.

Madeleine Baran: Hyatt scrapbook has some photos of the meeting.

Natalie Jablonski: Yes, there's quite a few people in the room.

Dana Hyatt: I think you're probably looking at 20, 25 people in there.

Natalie Jablonski: Oh, wow.

Madeleine Baran: In the photos, you can see a group of Iraqi men crammed into a pretty small room, sitting scrunched up next to each other on couches.

Dana Hyatt: This is the mayor. This was another interpreter.

Madeleine Baran: You can see Khalid sitting on one of those couches, wearing a dark suit. Hyatt calls him the lawyer.

Dana Hyatt: There's the lawyer.

Madeleine Baran: On a little red stool were paper cups of tea that the Marines had set out.

Dana Hyatt: We were trying to be hospitable.

Madeleine Baran: Sitting in the corner and looking stern was the top Marine in the room, the head of the Marines in Haditha. His name was Jeffrey Chessani. Chessani was a lieutenant colonel. He was 41 years old. He was ambitious. He'd spent nearly half his life climbing the ranks of the Marine Corps and thought he might soon be promoted to colonel. Khalid remembers Chessani being fairly quiet in this meeting. He remembers Dana Hyatt doing most of the talking. When another Iraqi man we spoke with, the director of the hospital in Haditha, Dr. Wahid al-Obeidi, recalls Chessani kicking the whole thing off.

Dr. Wahid al-Obeidi: The leader, Colonel Chessani, we know that he knows everything.

Madeleine Baran: Chessani clearly knew that people had died that day. A lot of people. According to Dr. al-Obeidi, he started with standard officials speak, the kinds of things you say to try to smooth things over.

Dr. Wahid al-Obeidi: We all come here and we want to help you.

Madeleine Baran: "We're here to help. This shouldn't affect the good relationship between us."

Dr. Wahid al-Obeidi: It does not affect the relation.

Madeleine Baran: Then Dr. al-Obeidi said Chessani offered an explanation for what happened that day, how all those people ended up dead. This explanation, as soon as Khalid and Dr. al-Obeidi heard it, they knew it wasn't true. Dr. al-Obeidi said, Chessani told them that the civilians had died because of an IED explosion and an ensuing firefight. In other words, it was the insurgent's fault. He made it sound like Khalid's family just got caught in the middle of something. Chessani had known since that very first night that civilians had been killed by his own Marines.

Chessani would later admit that he'd heard from one of his captains that Marines had gone into people's houses and killed women and children inside. Rather than immediately report all these details up the chain of command or call for an investigation of a possible war crime, Chessani, according to two officers, had approved a report for his higher ups that said that, "Yes, civilians had died, but that they had died in an IED explosion and in crossfire with enemy fighters." The report said that Marines had returned fire and that eight insurgents had been killed.

The way this report described it, it didn't seem like the Marines had done anything wrong. Of course, Khalid had no way of knowing any of this. Sitting there in that meeting, one thing he did know for sure was that the story Chessani was telling him and the other town leaders was definitely not true. He knew that firsthand. He'd seen the bodies of his family members with his own eyes. He'd seen the bullet wounds in their heads. He'd gone into his sister Asma's house. He'd seen the blood on the walls.

He tried explaining all this to the Marines, to Chessani, and to Dana Hyatt, the man whose job was to build relationships with the locals.

Dana Hyatt: Some of his family members were killed that day. He's like, crying to me about it, and I'm like, "All right, but we lost a Marine that day, too. I'm sorry that--" "Major, it was my--" I know, and I'm sorry. I'm sorry that that happened, but we also lost a Marine that day.

Madeleine Baran: There was something else that Hyatt told Khalid at this meeting and in the weeks that followed. That, Khalid's family, the people who died, weren't wholly innocent.

Dana Hyatt: I said, "Your family lived in a neighborhood that allowed this to happen." Like, "It's not just us, you guys allowed somebody to do this."

Madeleine Baran: Hyatt assumed without any evidence, that Khalid's family probably saw the IED being planted in the road and didn't tell the Marines about it. Therefore, he felt like, "Yes, I'm sorry you're upset they were all killed, but whatever happened inside those houses is kind of their fault."

Dana Hyatt: I felt bad that it was his family that got killed, but I also strongly felt that somehow, they bore some responsibility for it. I told him them that.

Madeleine Baran: Khalid had come to this meeting looking for answers and some kind of justice. Instead, he was having to sit there and listen as his family members were being partly blamed for their own deaths. It would have been understandable if Khalid had just walked out of the meeting at that point but he stayed. He still wanted to try to reason with the Americans. Khalid and the other people from town presented the Marines with a letter of demands they'd prepared. Dr. al-Obeidi read it to me in.

Dr. Wahid al-Obeidi: In the morning of the 19th November 2005, a painful death. Stress has happened when an American soldier had executed three families with a number of universities.

Madeleine Baran: The letter called the events of November 19th a "painful disaster" and-

Dr. Wahid al-Obeidi: A crime of war.

Madeleine Baran: -a war crime.

Dr. Wahid al-Obeidi: Which could be never forgotten.

Madeleine Baran: The letter demanded that the military investigate what happened and punish the people responsible.

Dr. Wahid al-Obeidi: The main point we want from him is to investigate about these incidents. We told him that he must call and tell his leaders about this.

Madeleine Baran: The Marine Corps has clear rules for what to do. If you're a commander and you receive an allegation of a war crime, once you get it, you can't ignore it. You have to report it up to your superiors and to military police and try to secure evidence. This isn't optional. It's required. The meeting ended. Chessani never launched an investigation. Chessani was later charged for failing to accurately report and thoroughly investigate the incident as a possible war crime. The case against him was dismissed. We tried to talk to Chessani, a reporter, Parker Yesko, went to his house in California.

Jeffrey Chessani: Can I help you?

Parker Yesko: Oh, hey there, Mr. Chessani. My name's Parker. I'm a radio reporter working on--

Jeffrey Chessani: Parker what?

Parker Yesko: Parker Yesko. I'm a radio reporter. I'm working on a project about the Iraq war.

Madeleine Baran: Chessani is no longer in the Marines. He works at a Christian college and lives down the street from it.

Parker Yesko: Any comment on the Haditha incident? Any regrets about how you handled it?

Jeffrey Chessani: No, I don't have any comment.

Parker Yesko: I think it--

Jeffrey Chessani: I just said I want to look off.

Parker Yesko: Yes? Sure, I understand.

Jeffrey Chessani: You have a nice evening. All right?

Parker Yesko: You too.

Jeffrey Chessani: Thanks.

Parker Yesko: Thanks. Have a good night.

Madeleine Baran: Chessani's lawyer later sent us an email. He wrote, "I trust you have never been in combat and thus have no sense of the incredible stress associated with combat or the fog of war that proceeds from that, or the courage required to lead under such circumstances." As for what happened that day, Chessani's lawyer wrote, "The fact that civilians were killed during the course of an ambush initiated by the enemy from a location where civilians were located, a residential neighborhood does not evidence a war crime, except perhaps on the part of the terrorists who initiated the attack. It's false to suggest otherwise." This whole thing, he said was a "non-story."

In Haditha, the weeks passed. The military paid the families of the victims some money, $2,500 for each person who died. The military calls these kinds of payments condolence payments. The way Dana Hyatt saw it, giving the families this money was a big deal. He'd even put some photos of himself giving money to Khalid in his scrapbook. It's a strange scene. Hyatt in his uniform, Khalid in his suit, a stack of crisp $50 bills for Khalid to distribute to his family on a small table in front of them. Hyatt told us it was a lot of money for an Iraqi. Khalid didn't see it that way.

Besides, money wasn't what he really wanted. He wanted an investigation, accountability, answers, but none of the Marines in Haditha would give him those things. That might have been where this story ended were it not for one more thing that Khalid did.

David Remnick: Our story continues in a moment. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. Stick around. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. The United States withdrew most of its troops from Iraq in 2011 after eight years of fighting. The danger in our country is that the memory of that war and the crimes like what we saw in Haditha will be forgotten. For Iraqis who lived through it, the war is a vivid presence to this day. After the killing of 24 civilians in Haditha by US Marines, surviving family members demanded that the military investigate what had happened.

Instead, the military gave families what they call condolence payments, $2,500 cash for each person killed. Khalid Salman Rasif, who lost his sister and other family members. Well, he wanted something more than money. He wanted justice and he became a central figure in the reporting done by In The Dark over the past four years. Here's reporter Madeleine Baran.

Madeleine Baran: In the weeks after the killings, Khalid Salman Rasif asked a man he knew to make a video. The video was of the inside of his sister's house and the house of his other relatives nearby. The purpose of making it was to document the evidence that remained.

Ayya Muthana: To film everything that was inside the houses, the bloodstains, and pieces of the bodies. He wanted that to be on tape, to show the truth of what happened.

Madeleine Baran: Making this video was risky. The Marines could easily consider a video like this to be insurgent propaganda. That wasn't the sort of thing that the military dealt with nicely. It was the sort of thing that could lead to a person being arrested, shipped off to prison. Khalid gave the video to a neighbor who said he'd help get the story out. The video ended up getting cut together with some other videos that people had filmed. The final video is about 22 minutes long. It opens with a half second shot of some palm trees.

Then it cuts abruptly to a scene in the hospital where the bodies of Khalid's family were taken. There's a close up of a bloodied head on the floor. The camera zooms out of, and you can see more bodies and men crowding around them. It's chaotic. The men are here to retrieve the bodies of their family members, to load the bodies into cars and trucks to take them to be prepared for burial. One man is crying and has blood on his face. He helps carry a body wrapped in a black bag out to a white truck. The camera goes in closer to the back of the truck.

It shows several bodies, partly covered by black tarps or body bags. An older man moves one of the tarps to reveal a very young girl, maybe three years old, lying face up dead. She has dark hair. She's wearing a shirt with blue sleeves. Her eyes are closed. Her face is covered in blood, and her arm is draped across another body. At one point, a man says in Arabic, "Are those kids the terrorists?" Back inside the hospital room, a man stands over two of the bodies, holding his head in his hands, weeping.

Another man walks over to one of the bodies and appears to pick up an arm and hold it very briefly to his cheek. Then the video moves to the houses. A friend of Khalid's addresses the camera, pointing out the evidence. He says, "Come with me. Come look at this." The camera pans and you can see blood on the walls and the ceilings inside a bedroom of one of the houses. You can see blood on the bed and the bed frame and shell casings on the ground. People in Haditha smuggled the video out to a human rights activist in Baghdad.

That activist gave the video to an American journalist at Time Magazine named Tim McGurk, who wrote a story about it, alleging that 24 civilians had been killed by US Marines and the story blew up.

Reporter 1: Some are comparing the Haditha killings to the Vietnam massacre at My Lai.

Reporter 2: They actually went into the houses and killed women and children, and they killed innocent people.

Madeleine Baran: Members of Congress vowed to look into what had happened.

Member of Congress: We will hold hearings and hold reviews and there will be thorough oversight.

Madeleine Baran: Even President George W. Bush weighed in.

President George W. Bush: The Haditha incident is under investigation. Obviously, the allegations are very troubling for me and equally troubling for our military, especially the Marine Corps.

Madeleine Baran: The US military ordered its own investigation into what happened in Haditha. That first investigation would lead to more investigations, three of them in all. It would become one of the largest war crimes investigations in US history. Seemingly every day, the case file would grow. There would be statements taken, forensic evidence gathered, cases built against the Marines responsible. Eventually, four Marines were charged with murder. They faced the possibility of life in prison.

Khalid Salman Rasif thought he might finally get the justice he fought so long and so hard for, but that's not at all what happened. I first got interested in the Haditha case, a few years ago, when I was doing some research on war crimes committed by the US military. As a reporter, I spent a lot of time in civilian courtrooms. I've watched hearings, read files, talked to lawyers and defendants. War crimes are prosecuted in a different kind of system in the United, the military justice system. This bizarre, opaque, acronym laden world that exists mostly outside of public view.

In other words, exactly the kind of world that interests me as an investigative reporter. The Haditha case, in particular, stood out to me because of a mystery at the center of it. Despite the fact that four Marines had been charged with murder and in such a high-profile case, truly one of the biggest stories out of the entire Iraq war, not a single one of those Marines ended up serving a day in prison. Over the years, every single one of the cases against the Marines collapsed. There was not a single criminal conviction for the killings.

How did that happen? As I kept reading about Haditha, I got even more interested because I realized that what actually happened that day was also a mystery. The most basic facts of the day, who killed who, why, and how, were unclear. Depending on whose story you believed, the killings were a war crime, a murder, or they were legitimate combat action and the victims were collateral damage, or the killings were a tragic mistake, unintentional, sad, but not criminal.

Basically, the only thing that everyone could agree on was that 24 people had died and it was Marines who'd killed them. The Iraq war has been over for almost 13 years. Some people might say that what happened over there is old news. It's time to move on, but how can you move on from something that you never understood to begin with? Khalid Salman Rasif, in particular, was asking me not to move on. Pleading with me, really. On this season of In The Dark, we are not moving on.

We're going back to 2005 to figure out what really happened to Khalid's family that day, to investigate the Marines and what they did, and to find out why the military justice system never punished a single one of them for the killings.

David Remnick: In The Dark is a podcast from The New Yorker. To listen to the rest of the story, which I highly recommend, follow In The Dark wherever you go for podcasts.

 

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