TITLE: ‘They stole our future’: 20 years on, Abu Ghraib prisoners are still awaiting compensation from the United States
EXCERPT: According to a report by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), based on statements by U.S. military intelligence officers, between 70 and 90% of people detained by the international coalition in Iraq in 2003 were arrested by mistake. This was the case of al-Majli, who was released without charges in March 2005. “We were completely powerless. I was tortured by police dogs, sound bombs, live fire, and water hoses,” he told HRW.
To this day, al-Majli remains physically and psychologically scarred by this abuse, which included sexual violence. In prison, he began biting his hands and wrists from stress and continues to do so to this day, as HRW researchers were able to verify. “It destroyed me and it destroyed my family,” he said. “They stole our future from us.”
For two decades, al-Majli has sought some form of redress. First he went to the Iraqi Bar Association, but they did not accept his case, then he went to the Iraqi High Commissioner for Human Rights, but was also turned away. The prisoner explained that he did not know how to contact the U.S. military to raise a claim. In June 2023, HRW wrote to the U.S. Department of Justice, but did not receive a response nor could he find any legal pathway for al-Majli to make a formal complaint.
“We are asking the U.S. government to open a pathway for these survivors to bring their case to the appropriate authorities, in total transparency, and to access compensation,” said Sanbar.
TITLE: ‘A Toxic Legacy: What America Left Behind In Afghanistan
EXCERPT: AMERICA’S 20-YEAR MILITARY OCCUPATION devastated Afghanistan’s environment in ways that may never be fully investigated or addressed. American and allied military forces, mostly from NATO countries, repeatedly used munitions that can leave a toxic footprint. These weapons introduced known carcinogens, teratogens, and genotoxins — toxic substances that can cause congenital defects in a fetus and damage DNA — into the environment without accountability.
Local residents have long reported U.S. military bases dumping vast quantities of sewage, chemical waste, and toxic substances from their bases onto land and into waterways, contaminating farmland and groundwater for entire communities living nearby. They also burned garbage and other waste in open-air burn pits — some reported to be the size of three football fields — inundating villages with noxious clouds of smoke.
Afghanistan has suffered more than 40 years of rarely interrupted war. The evidence is everywhere, some of it static and buried, some of it still very much alive. The chemicals of war poisoned the land in ways that are still not well understood. Before the U.S. military arrived in Afghanistan, Soviet forces had been accused of deploying chemical weapons, including napalm. Their bases were then repurposed by the Americans. Left behind today are layers upon layers of medical, biological, and chemical waste that may never be cleaned up.
From its first post-9/11 airstrikes aimed at the Taliban and al-Qaida in 2001 through its chaotic withdrawal from the country two decades later, the U.S. military dropped over 85,000 bombs on Afghanistan. Most of these contained an explosive called RDX, which can affect the nervous system and is designated as a possible human carcinogen by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Attributing specific illnesses to contamination in the air, water, and soil is often extremely difficult, but villagers who lived in close proximity to major U.S. bases — and the Afghan doctors and public health officials who treated them — say the Pentagon’s unwillingness to employ even minimal environmental protections caused serious kidney, cardiopulmonary, gastrointestinal and skin ailments, congenital anomalies, and multiple types of cancer.
TITLE: A memorial to the war on terror is coming. Here is why you should care.
EXCERPT: The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are over. Yet today, too many American veterans remain mired in those wars. Our rates of suicide and homelessness exceed those of the general population. The veterans community has struggled to reintegrate into the society we served. In the two decades since the start of the Global War on Terrorism, veteran service organizations, in partnership with the Defense Department and the Department of Veterans Affairs, have, through myriad programs, worked to heal the wounds of the roughly 1.9 million Americans who served in it, and their families, particularly the Gold Star families of the more than 7,000 war dead.
The reintegration of the veteran into society isn’t the job of the veteran alone. It’s the job of society, too. This is particularly true for a war that has played quietly in the background of American life for decades. It was not a war that affected the entire country, like World War II or Vietnam, during which massive demonstrations disrupted daily life and dominated the news. Mostly, life went on as normal for most Americans, with neither the nation nor its veterans reconciled to the war’s enduring costs.
In the past, the memorialization of wars has proved an important tool in reconciling those experiences. This is why our national memorials are epicenters of healing.