In tears, Iraqis tell how their families died after Dutch bombardment: ‘Was covered in the blood of my family’ | Domestic

Abdallah Rashid Salih is a sturdy man of 52 years old. He wears a jacket with a blouse underneath, glasses above, a balding head and a characteristic dark black mustache. When he speaks for five minutes in the court in The Hague, his voice breaks. He looks at the judges, but his gaze is back in the year 2015. “I was covered in the blood of my family. I had to bury them one by one in the days after the bombing.”

Rashid Salih lost seven family members that night, including his wife, a daughter and a son. He holds up photos of them in court. “The explosion was so loud that I lost consciousness, when I woke up I started searching. Everyone was under the rubble of the house.” He ended up in an ambulance with his young, seriously injured daughter. “She said, ‘Daddy, I don’t think I can make it, can you hug me one more time?'” Once in the hospital, his daughter had died.

Kurdi Fahdil Mutlak also shows a large photo of his deceased daughter to the judges. Next to him his wife is sobbing softly. “The explosion was so loud that all the windows and doors were broken. My daughter was injured by a window.” The girl fell unconscious again and again and died a few days later. “That time was so hard,” says the Iraqi, crying.

Their Dutch lawyer Liesbeth Zegveld summarizes it this way: “Dutch soldiers talked that day about a perfect target and a perfect hit. It was indeed a perfect hit, but because of the clouds of smoke it was impossible to see how people on the ground were collecting the limbs of their deceased relatives.”

A total of eleven Iraqis have initiated substantive proceedings against the Dutch State. As a result of the Dutch attack, they lost eleven family members, including nine children. It is only a small part of the total number of victims.

On the night of June 2 to 3, 2015, Dutch F16s bombed a warehouse in the city of Hawija. The building was targeted because the terrorist group IS, which was then in control of part of Iraq, converted cars into moving bombs in the factory. These car bombs had been causing death and destruction among the soldiers of the international coalition against IS and among the Iraqi population for months. The Netherlands was part of that international coalition at that time; Dutch F16s carried out three thousand flights over Iraq between 2014 and 2018, dropping bombs 2,100 times.

However, it turned out that such a large quantity of explosives were stored in the bomb factory that night that the attack led to large secondary explosions. Not only the warehouse was destroyed, but there was also a lot of damage in the neighborhood around it. About seventy civilian casualties were caused by the Dutch attack.

The Ministry of Defense only admitted years later and after revelations in various media that the attack was carried out by Dutch F16s. “The civilian casualties disrupted the image of precision war that the coalition and the Netherlands painted,” said lawyer Zegveld. In 2020, the cabinet allocated 4.4 million euros for repairs to buildings in Hawija, money that is spent through the UN. However, a group of Iraqis now wants recognition that the Dutch attack was unjustified, and they want to be personally compensated for the loss of their family members.

Lawyer Zegveld states that the Netherlands made two mistakes in the attack: it did not sufficiently investigate how many explosives could be in the warehouse and the Netherlands should have better estimated how many Iraqis who had fled from elsewhere were sleeping in the buildings and houses around the factory. Without that detailed knowledge, the Netherlands should not have carried out the attack, she argues, because the risk of many civilian casualties would have been too great. To reduce that chance, it was already decided to carry out the attack at night instead of during the day.

The State Attorney argues that the warehouse was a legitimate target. According to the Netherlands, the bomb factory was indeed under observation for a long time. The international coalition could not have known that there would be so many explosives. And if you have to know in advance exactly how many explosives there are, you will never be able to attack a bomb factory again, according to the Netherlands.

In the meantime, more and more questions arise about the procedure followed. The Ministry of Defense always stated that a Dutch soldier, the so-called Red Card Holder, could stop any attack by its own aircraft at the last minute. That soldier would be located at the international headquarters in Qatar, where the targets are determined and all relevant intelligence is received. However, the court documents show that in 2015 the Red Card Holder was the boss of the Dutch F16 detachment, which was located 1,500 kilometers away at an air base in Jordan. According to the State, he had two liaisons in Qatar.

The Netherlands previously paid high compensation after a ‘mistaken bombing’ in Iraq. In 2015, a Dutch F16 dropped a bomb on the homes of Basim Razzo and his brother in the city of Mosul. Razzo’s wife, brother, daughter and cousin were killed. It later turned out that the Netherlands, based on incorrect American information, thought the house was an IS headquarters.