The Video They Didn't Want You to See: Revisiting "Collateral Murder" 19 Years Later

On July 12, 2007, a pair of U.S. Apache helicopters carried out a series of devastating air to ground attacks in the New Baghdad district of Iraq. The incident remained hidden from public view until April 2010, when the transparency organization WikiLeaks released 39 minutes of classified gunsight footage under the title "Collateral Murder." The graphic video exposed the helicopter crew opening fire on a crowd of Iraqi men, killing a dozen people, including two Reuters journalists, photographer Namir Noor-Eldeen and driver Saeed Chmagh. The footage further captured the crew launching a second strike on an unarmed civilian minivan that had stopped to rescue a wounded survivor, severely injuring two children inside. The release sparked intense global outrage, particularly due to the audio of the pilots laughing, celebrating their hits, and displaying a callous disregard for civilian life. While the Pentagon maintained that the pilots mistook a camera lens for an RPG and cleared the crew of wrongdoing, the video became a defining symbol of the lack of accountability in modern warfare.

The individual responsible for bringing this footage to light was Chelsea Manning, then known as Bradley Manning, a 22 year old U.S. Army intelligence analyst stationed in Iraq. Disturbed by the graphic nature of the video and what he perceived as a systemic cover-up stored inside a military legal database, Manning transferred the encrypted video alongside hundreds of thousands of classified battlefield logs and diplomatic cables to WikiLeaks. He was arrested in May 2010 after an online acquaintance turned government informant alerted authorities. In 2013, a military court-martial convicted Manning under the Espionage Act and sentenced him to 35 years in a maximum-security military prison. Though his actions were heavily condemned by the U.S. government as treasonous, human rights organizations hailed him as a historic whistleblower exposing war crimes. After serving seven years in prison, Manning's sentence was commuted by President Barack Obama in 2017.

Below is the 13 minute excerpt of the classified gunsight footage released by WikiLeaks. It shows the initial Apache helicopter attack on a group of Iraqi men, followed by the second strike on the civilian van that stopped to rescue the wounded.

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This is the longer 39 minute version released by WikiLeaks, offering the fuller context of what became known around the world as “Collateral Murder.”