Collateral Murder — WikiLeaks' Iraq War Video

Overview

The footage is 39 minutes long. The quality is grainy — cockpit gun camera footage, black and white, with targeting crosshairs overlaid. The audio is clear. That’s the part that stays with you.

On the morning of July 12, 2007, a U.S. Army Apache AH-64 helicopter codenamed “Crazy Horse 18” was operating in the New Baghdad district of eastern Baghdad. The crew — two pilots whose identities were never publicly confirmed — spotted a group of men walking along a street. Through the helicopter’s optics, some of the men appeared to be carrying weapons. Two of them were carrying camera equipment.

Those two men were Namir Noor-Eldeen, a 22-year-old Reuters photographer, and Saeed Chmagh, a 40-year-old Reuters driver and assistant. They were covering a military operation in the area.

What happened next was captured on the helicopter’s gun camera and transmitted to a military operations center. The crew requested permission to engage. Permission was granted. The Apache’s 30mm cannon fired. Noor-Eldeen, Chmagh, and approximately ten other men were killed or wounded.

Then a van arrived. A father with his two children, driving through the neighborhood, stopped to help the wounded. The crew requested permission to fire on the van. Permission was granted. The Apache fired again. The father was killed. The two children — a girl and a boy — were critically wounded.

On the audio, a crew member can be heard saying: “Well, it’s their fault for bringing their kids into a battle.”

This footage was classified. Reuters spent years trying to obtain it through the Freedom of Information Act. The military said it couldn’t be found. In 2010, a 22-year-old Army intelligence analyst named Chelsea Manning found it on a classified military network, downloaded it, and sent it to WikiLeaks.

On April 5, 2010, WikiLeaks published it under the title “Collateral Murder.”

The Incident

What the Helicopter Crew Saw

The engagement needs to be understood from two perspectives to be fairly evaluated.

From the helicopter’s perspective: the crew had been informed that U.S. ground forces were engaged with insurgents in the area. They spotted a group of military-age men, some of whom appeared to be carrying weapons. In the low-resolution gun camera footage, Noor-Eldeen’s telephoto camera lens looks remarkably similar to an RPG launcher. One man appeared to peer around a building corner in a manner consistent with preparing to fire on U.S. ground forces.

The crew identified what they believed were AK-47s and RPGs. They requested and received permission to engage. Under the rules of engagement in effect at the time, they were authorized to fire on individuals they positively identified as hostile.

What Actually Happened

From the ground, the reality was different. The group included Reuters journalists doing their jobs, men who may have been carrying personal weapons (legal in Iraq), and bystanders. The “RPG” was a camera. The man “peering around a corner” was a photographer looking for a shot.

After the first burst of fire, which killed or wounded most of the group, Saeed Chmagh was seen crawling across the ground, wounded but alive. The crew watched through their optics, waiting for an excuse to fire again. One crew member said: “All you gotta do is pick up a weapon.”

When the van arrived and the driver began loading Chmagh into the vehicle, the crew requested permission to engage the van. The rationale: the van was “picking up bodies and weapons.” Permission was granted. The van was destroyed. The driver was killed. His two children, in the front passenger area, were critically injured.

When ground forces arrived and discovered the children, a crew member responded: “Well, it’s their fault for bringing their kids into a battle.”

The children survived. Ground troops called for a medical evacuation, but were told to hand the children over to Iraqi police — American soldiers were not authorized to transport Iraqi civilians to American medical facilities.

The Reuters Investigation

Reuters learned of its employees’ deaths on the day of the incident. The news agency was told that its journalists had been killed in a firefight between U.S. forces and insurgents. When Reuters asked for the gun camera footage and details of the engagement, the military was not forthcoming.

Reuters filed multiple FOIA requests for the video. All were denied or went unanswered. The military conducted an internal investigation that concluded the crew had acted within the rules of engagement and closed the case. Without the video, Reuters could not independently evaluate what had happened.

The Reuters journalists’ deaths joined the approximately 150 media workers killed in Iraq — casualties acknowledged in official statements but never fully investigated or explained.

The Release

WikiLeaks’ Presentation

WikiLeaks published the video on April 5, 2010, at a press conference at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. Julian Assange presented two versions: a 39-minute unedited video and a shorter, edited version with annotations identifying the journalists, the children, and key moments.

The title “Collateral Murder” was deliberately provocative. Critics argued it prejudged the incident — the military maintained the crew believed they were firing on insurgents. WikiLeaks responded that the footage spoke for itself.

The video went viral immediately, accumulating millions of views within days. It was the first WikiLeaks release to achieve mass public attention and transformed the organization from a niche transparency project into a global phenomenon.

The Military Response

The Pentagon confirmed the video’s authenticity but defended the crew’s actions. Military spokesperson Colonel Dave Lapan stated that the investigation had concluded the crew “acted within the rules of engagement.” The soldiers had “reasonable belief” they were engaging hostile forces.

No military personnel were charged, disciplined, or reprimanded in connection with the incident.

The Global Reaction

The video provoked intense debate:

Anti-war response: The footage was cited as evidence that the Iraq War had normalized the killing of civilians. The crew’s casual language — joking, requesting permission to fire with evident eagerness, blaming the father for “bringing kids into a battle” — suggested a culture of dehumanization.

Military defense: Defenders argued that the crew was operating in a combat zone, had been told insurgents were present, and made a reasonable (if tragic) misidentification. War inevitably produces such incidents, and the footage showed not murder but the fog of war.

Press freedom response: Media organizations focused on the military’s years-long denial of Reuters’ FOIA requests. The fact that a major news organization could not obtain footage of its own employees’ deaths — and that the footage was only released through an unauthorized leak — raised profound questions about military transparency.

The Whistleblower

Chelsea Manning

The Collateral Murder video was part of a massive trove of classified material leaked by Chelsea Manning, a 22-year-old Army intelligence analyst stationed at Forward Operating Base Hammer in Iraq. Manning had access to classified military networks and, over several months in late 2009 and early 2010, downloaded hundreds of thousands of documents — including the helicopter video, the Afghan War Diary, the Iraq War Logs, and diplomatic cables.

Manning later described her motivation: she wanted the American public to see what the war actually looked like. The Collateral Murder video, she said, was the document that crystallized her decision to leak.

Manning was identified after confiding in Adrian Lamo, a former hacker who reported her to the Army’s Criminal Investigation Command. She was arrested in May 2010, held in conditions that the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture described as “cruel, inhuman, and degrading,” and tried by court-martial in 2013.

She was convicted of violations of the Espionage Act and other charges, acquitted of “aiding the enemy” (the most serious charge), and sentenced to 35 years in military prison. President Obama commuted her sentence on January 17, 2017, and she was released in May 2017.

Legacy

The Collateral Murder video accomplished something that years of anti-war reporting had failed to do: it showed the American public, in unedited real-time, what a routine military engagement in Iraq actually looked like. Not the sanitized Pentagon briefing version. Not the correspondent-in-a-flak-jacket version. The actual thing — the crosshairs, the casual commentary, the bodies, the children.

Whether the crew committed a war crime or made a tragic but understandable error in a combat zone remains debated. What’s not debatable is that the military concealed the footage, denied Reuters’ requests for it, and would have kept it classified indefinitely if Chelsea Manning hadn’t leaked it.

The video established WikiLeaks as a force in global journalism and set the stage for the much larger releases — the war logs and Cablegate — that followed in the months after.

Timeline

Sources & Further Reading

• WikiLeaks. “Collateral Murder.” Video and transcripts, April 5, 2010.
• Finkel, David. The Good Soldiers. Sarah Crichton Books, 2009. (Describes the July 12 incident from a ground unit’s perspective)
• Madar, Chase. The Passion of Bradley Manning. OR Books, 2012.
• Reuters. Statements regarding deaths of Namir Noor-Eldeen and Saeed Chmagh, 2007-2010.
• U.S. Central Command. Investigation findings, 2007.

Related Theories

• WikiLeaks — The organization that published the video
• Chelsea Manning — The source who leaked the footage
• Cablegate — The diplomatic cables released alongside the war materials
• Iraq War Lies — The broader context of deception surrounding the Iraq War