Given my government’s obsession with terrorists, and the media’s decades-long fixation with suicide bombings, I’m surprised to find the story of the world’s worst terror attack since September 2001 is one that’s difficult to piece together.
The open-source accounts agree on very few details, but the following is clear: On August 14, 2007, someone murdered the Yazidi towns of Khataniya and Jazeera in Northern Iraq.
There’s not even really a word for what happened, but if there was it might be poliscide – the destruction of an entire community.
Multiple bombs exploded in two mud-walled villages, and hundreds were killed. That, we know.
No accounts I’ve found agree on how many bombs detonated, nor do they agree in how they bombs were constructed, the quantity of explosives used, or whether they were initiated by someone committing suicide.
I’m searching for this story because it remains my biggest unanswered question from my 2007 combat tour in Iraq.
Who hated this group so much that they attempted to wipe them out in a single day? Could it be that this is the Iraqi genocide that compares to the 1994 massacre of Hutus in Rawanda?
The Yazidis are a pre-Islamic people. They worship a deity they call Shay-tan, which sounds very similar to the Arabic word for “Satan,”, a coincidence that has falsely led adherents of other faiths to label them as devil worshippers. Their religion incorporates elements of Zoroastrianism and Sufi mysticism, and their faith centers on the deity Shay-tan who is depicted as a peacock (and often referred to as “Peacock Angel”).
When the first reports of the attack filtered in to my battalion near Tikrit, my job as an Explosive Ordnance Disposal officer was to find out exactly what happened. The U.S. Army unit assigned to the area Khataniya and Jazeera occupied at first refused to respond.
Their reason: no Americans had been killed, so why bother?
My teammates and I raged and fumed. I prevailed upon that unit’s superiors to make them send a platoon in response. What they found was complete devastation.
The photos I remember seeing show an American soldier standing in the bottom of a blast crater. He was nearly six feet tall, but was dwarfed by his surroundings. That crater was nearly 50 feet across and 30 feet deep.
And that was just the first crater.
There were at least three more just like it.
So where to find information now? Where can I get those reports? The only archival source I’ve found with any reliable data is held by WikiLeaks, the anti-secrecy organization.
Al-Jazeera Media reported on WikiLeaks documents that revealed that these bombings were reported as SIGACT 360 and SIGACT 364. In the mundane accounting of the war, attacks like these were categorized as “Significant Activities” (or SIGACTs) and they were serialized starting at the beginning of each year. So, SIGACT 07:001 would be, essentially, 2007:(first attack). Following it would be 07:002, 07:003 etc. until it rolled over from 07:999 back to 001 again. Given the levels of violence we saw, this might happen in the summertime or early fall.
My search of WikiLeaks online hasn’t found the same documents that Al-Jazeera cited, so I’ll be contacting the reporters given in the AJ byline for guidance. It is possible that these files have been removed from WikiLeaks, or they are simply indexed in such a way that they are difficult to find.
Knowing those serial numbers will help in a future Freedom of Information Act request, and hopefully U.S. Central Command will release the files related to these attacks.
From what I can find, the death toll is likely somewhere between 790 and 1500 killed, with easily the same numbers of Yazidis wounded.
I’d like to tell the story of who killed these people and why. I think the world should know what happened there.