Two American Apache helicopters unload on a group of Iraqis. In just seconds, the men are lying on the ground. 12 have died, including two workers from the Reuters news agency. In the comments on the radio, it is heard to say: “Look at those dead bastards”. The soldiers later justified the attack by saying they thought they were armed insurgents.

The 40-minute video is one of the clearest and most flagrant examples of the thousands of war crimes committed in Iraq. According to John Hopkins University aAt least 655,000 people have died since the start of the invasion. Most civilians. The real data will never be known because many deaths were not documented. Other crimes such as torture or rape were justified. They were ‘collateral damage’ from an infamous war.

Yes, photos were taken of the American soldiers who abused and tortured prisoners in the Abu Ghraib prison: they stripped them, connected them to the current or threw feces on them. A scandal that irreparably damaged the credibility of the US military.

As summarized by Jesús A. Núñez, co-director of the IECAH in Al Rojo Vivo, one of the main consequences of the invasion of Iraq was “the destruction of the credibility of the US as guarantor of security for many countries in the region, beginning with the United States itself”.

Years later, denunciations of rapes of women and girls by soldiers have continued. In the case known as the ‘Mahmudiyah’ rape, several US soldiers – five were tried – raped little Abeer Qassim Hamza al-Janabi and then killed her, her parents and one of her brothers.

For other similar conflicts, special courts were created that condemned war crimes and those responsible. This is the case of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), created to try those responsible for war crimes committed during the Balkan conflicts in the 1990s. However, twenty years later, those of the Iraq war have still not been tried.