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Governments the US has overthrown since the end of World War II:
- Iran 1953
- Guatemala 1954
- British Guiana 1953-64
- Iraq 1963
- Cambodia 1955-70
- Laos 1958,1959,1960
- Ecuador 1960-63
- Congo 1960
- Brazil 1962-64
- Dominican Republic 1963
- Bolivia 1964
War criminals like George W. Bush (and the rest of the architects of the war) should be in prison instead of running around free while Iraqis continue to suffer the consequences of the war.
US military bases produce an enormous amount of toxic trash & US military burned it all in huge open air pits. The result has been 1000s of US troops & Iraqi’s living near US bases have become seriously sick or developed cancer.
After the war, Iraq suffered major destruction of its rich cultural heritage, which included looting and burning of the Iraq National Museum & a large number of mosque bombings. https://www.cemml.colostate.edu/cultural/09476/chp04-12iraqenl.html …
The brutal US-run prisons in Iraq became Jihadi Universities where future terrorists became radicalized & built a network. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of ISIS, was held for 10 months in a US-run prison in Iraq.
US forces regularly targeted civilians in Iraq. This was demonstrated by the “Collateral Murder” video leaked by Chelsea Manning, in which a US Apache fires on unarmed Iraqis & then again on the 1st responders. 12 ppl were killed & 2 children were wounded. https://collateralmurder.wikileaks.org
The war in Iraq was launched as part of the US war on Terror, however the war drastically increased incidents of terror. Jihadis from around the world came to fight the Americans. The first ever suicide bombing in Iraq took place in 2003, after the US invasion.
US relied on vicious mercenaries like Blackwater, which routinely engaged in murder and earned millions to help the US brutal occupation. The most infamous of their crimes was the Nisour Square Massacre, which killed 17 Iraqi civilians & wounded dozens more.
The US tried, in every possible way, to prevent elections in Iraq. The US was finally forced to allow elections by mass outpourings of people demanding elections. When the US/UK finally allowed elections, they did their best to subvert them.
The most egregious allegation at Abu Ghraib are that US soldiers raped Iraqi women, beat people to death & that there was a videotape, apparently shot by US personnel, showing Iraqi guards raping young boys.
The US engaged in routine torture of Iraqi prisoners, most infamously at Abu Ghraib, where Saddam’s security forces had notoriously tortured prisoners. The US troops at Abu Ghraib engaged in physical, psychological, and sexual abuse, torture, rape, sodomy, and murder.
Due to the enormous US firepower used on Fallujah, the city has been left w/ a toxic legacy. One study shows incidents of infant mortality, cancer and leukemia exceed those reported by survivors of the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
The US siege of Fallujah involved cutting off water & blocking food/medical supplies into the city for 3 weeks. Many women/children took their chances & fled, despite the danger. However men were prevented from leaving & were ordered back into the kill zone.
The US troops in Iraq fired tens of thousands of rounds of radioactive depleted uranium, often in close proximity to civilian areas. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/19/us-depleted-uranium-weapons-civilian-areas-iraq …
This and other heavy metals used in US bombs have caused widespread birth defects in Iraq.
The US fueled the civil war in Iraq by funding sectarian death squads. The US brought in Jim Steele, who had advised US-backed death squads in El Salvador in the 1980s. At the height of the Iraqi civil war 3,000 Iraqis were dying a month.
The war, which is one of the greatest crime of last half of 20th century, killed over 1 million people, displaced millions more, brought unknowable depths of suffering to the Iraqi people & gave birth to ISIS.
To mark the 15th anniversary of the US war in Iraq, here’s a thread on some of the war’s darkest moments.
Suha Khalid Gharab, 60, lost 20 relatives in the explosion, including a 1-year-old. "It's a crime, killing civilian people," she said. In total, at least 9,000 people were killed during the US-led attack on ISIS in Mosul.
Munatha Jasim lost 9 of her relatives in the bombing, including her 7 year-old son & her 4 year-old daughter. "We recovered half his body," she said of the 7-year-old. "The rest is still there. Just because one ISIS [fighter] was on our house, the aircraft bombed us," she said.
After the bombing, the streets “reeked of death” with “bodies pinned under houses; blackened hands and pairs of feet protruding from the rubble.” Citizens & civil defense workers worked for weeks to try to recover the buried bodies.
The use of such powerful bomb in such a crowded civilian area is clearly a war crime. The bomb hit a building filled with civilians, who had been told to stay in their homes by the US/Iraqi forces & who were also trapped by ISIS.
This week in 2017, the US dropped a 500 lbs bomb on a crowded residential area of West Mosul, Iraq, unleashing a massive explosion, which killed nearly 300 civilians, many of them children. The strike was the US’s most deadly air strike for civilians in 25 years.
"The explosion was so intense that people were thrown everywhere, wedged between the dirt and the stones. You could barely see them. We could hear screams from under the rubble."
Another witness said, "As we moved closer we started hearing people screaming, pleading for help. So we ran into the mosque compound. There was widespread destruction. The building was completely ripped to pieces..."
A witness said, “Everything happened so quickly, in under one minute. We didn’t hear a plane but, suddenly, we heard something fall. There was a faint sound of something falling, and then an explosion. It seemed like the whole mosque fell on our heads.”
At least 200 people were gathered in the mosque and a nearby building when the powerful blasts shook the ground and sent civilians fleeing, many of them dazed and bleeding.
The attack involved two US Reaper drones, which fired over 4 Hellfire missiles & dropped at least one 500-pound guided bomb. The strikes killed one woman, 5 children and buried dozens of people in the rubble.
This week in 2017, the US committed a major war crime by bombing a mosque packed full of civilians in al-Jinah, Syria. Then moments later, US drones bombed the site again, hitting civilians fleeing the mosque. The strikes killed 48 people and injured 100, all civilians.
