Fourteen years after Iraq, we still don't know the truth of what happened

Donald Rumsfeld was right, says Faisal Al Yafai. After all these years, there are still many unknown unknowns in Iraq

An Iraqi family flees the fighting in Basra in March 2003. Years later, the full story of what happened during the war has yet to be told. (AFP Photo / Odd Andersen)

After all, Donald Rumsfeld was right. In Iraq, there were known knowns and known unknowns. But the hardest of all for Iraqis to deal with are the unknown unknowns: the things they don’t know, either because, frankly, no one has cared to look or because the facts have been actively hidden.

The United States is still investigating an air raid in Mosul last week that killed over 200 civilians. The facts have yet to be established, but that air strike, while the US has admitted responsibility, is very different from the air strikes that started the US invasion of Iraq 14 years ago last week.

Today, the US and Iraq are partners in the war against ISIL, and the devastation that the US wrought in Iraq has been forgotten – at least officially – by the Iraqi government.

But for Iraqis there are still so many unknowns. So many things that happened during the war that are simply off-limits to them.

Where to start? How about with the most startling fact: that, today, more than a decade later, no one knows the number of Iraqis who died during the war.

Of course, every one of those killed has been mourned many times over by their families, friends and communities. But in terms of overall figures, none exist. Was it 650,000, as The Lancet put it in 2006? Or was it over 1 million Iraqis, as the NGO Physicians for Social Responsibility put it 10 years later?

We don’t know, not because of any oversight, but because of a specific decision by the US in every recent war – Iraq in 1991, Afghanistan in 2001, Iraq in 2003 – not to count civilian deaths.

As early as April 2, 2003 – just 14 days into the war – The New York Times reported that no one in the US military was counting the dead. “It is not,” wrote the paper, “a statistic that interests [US officials]. They count destroyed tanks and artillery pieces and missile launchers. They do not count people.”

Such disregard for the lives of ordinary Iraqis – lives that the US had ostensibly gone into Iraq to liberate from Saddam Hussein’s rule – was merely the beginning.

Later cases, such as the massacre in Haditha in 2005, when US soldiers killed 24 unarmed Iraqis, or the gang-rape of 14-year-old Abeer Al Janabi and murder of her entire family in Mahmudiyah in 2006, only perpetuated a belief that US soldiers were acting with impunity.

Both of those crimes finally came to court, after painstaking journalistic investigation and tireless efforts by family members. They exposed more about the conduct of the war than about one specific crime.

The killings at Haditha were not “remarkable”, an official US report said. Iraqi civilians being killed was the “cost of doing business”, according to a US commander in Iraq.

Nor was such a reprehensible attitude confined to the lower rungs of the US military. When the horrors of Abu Ghraib were finally exposed, they showed entire parts of the military were complicit in the dehumanisation of the very people they should have been protecting. After all these years, can we be sure those were the only cases?

Those were merely the “active” suffering caused to Iraqis. In Fallujah, scene of a long-running insurgency against US soldiers, researchers are still seeking to pinpoint the exact cause of dramatic increases in rates of cancers and birth defects after 2003.

Elsewhere, there are questions of air pollution and environmental contamination. The US military simply set fire to huge quantities of military waste – including batteries, explosives and human waste – in open-air pits in the middle of populated cities. Since 2003, 85,000 American Iraq war veterans have been diagnosed with respiratory diseases and cancers after returning from Iraq. How many thousands of Iraqis also suffered the effects of these burn pits? We may never know. No one, either in the US or Iraqi governments, seems interested in finding out. Some will point to ISIL or militias in Iraq that have committed horrific crimes and ask, “What about them?”. But crimes by one group do not negate crimes by another. And the US is a state, bound by laws, that argued the Iraq invasion was both necessary and would be beneficial for Iraq.

Certainly, once the ISIL threat is over, a complete accounting of its crimes must take place, including the failures of the Iraqi government that allowed ISIL to remain and expand.

For Iraqis today, though, there are still no answers for the majority of what happened in the fog of war and the fire of its aftermath.In some ways, the true cost cannot ever be known. The psychological trauma of an entire population is immense. Like the vastness of space, it is impossible to conceptualise.

We can only imagine it individually: the fear of air strikes and the chaos of darkness and roaming militias. The tragedy of losing a wife or daughter. The bewilderment of seeing a father or son handcuffed and taken away by soldiers speaking a foreign language.

The immense scars of the 2003 invasion will be with Iraqis for many years to come.

These scars defy accounting. But others do not. The reality of what happened in Iraq is unknown, but not unknowable. Yet 14 years on, no one, neither the US military nor the government in Baghdad, wants to know.

On Twitter: @FaisalAlYafai