The Camp Speicher Massacre Happened

On June 12, 2014, 1,700 unarmed Iraqi military trainees were murdered by the “Islamic State.” This was done in the aftermath of the US withdrawal from Iraq in 2011, and arose from conditions created or aggravated by the US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Historical Backdrop

The massacre occurred in the context of a civil war, which in turn had its own broader sociopolitical and historical context. First, there is the Sunni-Shia divide, with its origins in the 7th Century. It is at least somewhat relevant to the ongoing string of calamities in Iraq because Saddam Hussein’s predominantly Arab Ba’athist government was most closely aligned with the Sunni faction of Islam. Indeed, the governments of most predominantly Arab states in the region tend to be aligned with Sunni Islam. The Shia faction, on the other hand, is more associated with Iran (a Persian, vice Arab, majority). Within this mix, not only are there a great many ethnic and religious minorities spread across existing state boundaries (such as the Kurds and the Yazidis), but, paradoxically, there are… “imperfectly representative” states (some of them at least nominal allies of the US) in which one faction (Sunni) holds power, but the majority or plurality of the population is more closely aligned with the other (Shia). This was the situation in Iraq prior to the US-led invasion: Shia Muslims (Arab or otherwise) made up a larger portion of the population, but Sunni Muslims (and particularly Arab Sunni Muslims) held the greater influence by far, even as the ratio of Shias to Sunnis was roughly two to one. When coalition forces overthrew Saddam Hussein and tried to push representative government (all well and good) on Iraq, this had the effect of relegating those accustomed to exercising power under the previous regime (including military leaders) to the fringes. One of the ways in which this manifested was the rise of the Sunni-backed “Islamic State” (which I will continue to refer to in quotes because it never was a recognized state, nor was it ever worthy of becoming one).

However, to say that Iraq’s civil war or any other recent conflict in Southwest Asia is attributable to the Sunni-Shia divide would be a gross oversimplification. No doubt an appealing one, as it would tend to absolve the United States and modern European governments of guilt if all such conflicts could be said to have their origins in a schism that formed a thousand years or more before the United States achieved independence, and while Europe’s borders were still highly fluid and even the crusades were still centuries away, but an oversimplification all the same. The United States and Europe have had their hands busy in Southwest Asia throughout much of modern history, to the point where they literally drew the map that set the stage for both the Iran-Iraq War and the invasion of Kuwait, and propped up or took down governments as they pleased.

Point being, the sociopolitical waters of the Middle East are muddy to say the least, and to the extent the Sunni-Shia divide may have formed part of the impetus for the Iraqi Civil War of 2013-2017 and the ensuing atrocities, it was the last hundred years or so of modern history culminating in the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq that flipped the tables and really set the stage for the “Islamic State” and its adherents.

But when it comes to the Camp Speicher Massacre itself, it was actors of the “Islamic State” that did the killing, and they appear to have been unguided by the hands of western powers when they did it.

The Camp

Camp Speicher was the name given to a Forward Operating Base established by US forces during the Iraq War. It was named for Michael Scott Speicher, a US naval aviator killed during during the Gulf War (1990-1991). He was originally classified as Killed in Action/Body Not Recovered, but for a period of time his classification alternated between Missing in Action and Missing/Captured. His remains were only finally recovered, and his status confirmed as KIA, years after the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, and years after his namesake FOB was established. Investigation of his remains, found buried not far from the original crash site, indicated that he most likely did not survive the crash. More recently, Camp Speicher has been known as the Tikrit Air Academy, and may be referred to as such in some sources.

The Massacre

I am not an investigative journalist–or any other kind of journalist for that matter. Fortunately, some actual journalists have done some actual investigating on the massacre, or at least talked to the relevant investigators, and so we can all learn in spite of my shortcomings:

• Exhumation of Iraq’s Camp Speicher victim mass graves begins (Reuters)
• UN team reports new evidence against Islamic State in Iraq (Associated Press)
• Camp Speicher massacre: Retracing the steps of Isis’s worst-ever atrocity (The Independent)

To sum it up, as Iraqi government forces collapsed in Northern Iraq (a predominantly Sunni region where mixed loyalties may have played a part) and the “Islamic State” approached Tikrit, senior officers at the Tikrit Air Academy (the former site of Camp Speicher) ordered trainees to depart for home and leave any weapons behind. On the face of it, this was perhaps not the worst thing to do with trainees in the path of an opposing armed force if they could not be properly trained and organized to defend against it, but there is reason to believe that some of the officers may have colluded with the “Islamic State” (again, possibly motivated by religious or ethnic factionalism) to facilitate rounding up the trainees as they were dispersed on foot and unarmed.

The massacre began on June 12th, 2014, and may have proceeded for some days. Evidence indicates that Shi’ite trainees were specifically targeted as groups were taken along the roads, either making their way home on foot or awaiting transportation. They were then brought to the site of the massacre in truckloads, often past the bodies of their recently murdered fellow trainees, and killed in a variety of ways, but mostly by being lined up and shot. High definition video distributed for propaganda purposes, along with uncovered mass graves and survivor statements, provide irrefutable evidence that the massacre occurred, but its full scope is difficult to determine as those who escaped or were not picked up along the road may have come to other ends as the civil war progressed. The current estimate of the number killed is 1700, but it may be higher as there were 10,000 recruits in training at the Tikrit Air Academy at the time. It is also conceivable that some recruits may have been pressed into service by the “Islamic State” or volunteered. Again, along factional lines, as with some of their officers.

A Personal Stake

I chose to write about this incident because it fundamentally altered my worldview, and I wanted to try and parse out why and what to make of it.

The thing is, I suspect it’s no more news to you than it is to me that people do terrible things to each other–far worse and on a grander scale than even the atrocities carried out by the “Islamic State.” But with that, having grown up with the knowledge that the Holocaust, the enslavement of Africans and their descendants, Stalin’s purges, Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, and so many other terrible things happened, I never really had a “visceral” reaction to anything like I did the Camp Speicher Massacre. All those things happened, yes, and they were terrible, yes, but viewed through the lens of history, the lesson–or what I always came away with, perhaps inferred as the lesson–was not so much that such things don’t still happen, but that at the very least, nowadays, with our unprecedented level of interconnectedness and ease of information transfer, that when such things happen again, people find out and there is a call for action. Not that it always lasts, mind, or that the people calling for action will necessarily have the means to bring about change and hold the guilty accountable, but that there will at least be some level of outrage, a response beyond those immediately impacted. That was (part of) my “worldview” up until I found out about the Camp Speicher Massacre. In order to explain why (and how) it altered that worldview, I’ll need you to travel back in time with me…

It’s mid-2014 to early 2015. The “Islamic State” is doing all kinds of terrible things and they’re just so proud of what they’re doing that they’re recording it all on video and putting it online for the world to see. I never watch any of these videos because none of it is really “news” to me–we’ve already established that you and I both are aware that people do terrible things to each other, so it’s not much of a world-shattering revelation to learn that more of the same is going on–but I know that such videos are out there because it’s all over the news and there are cries of outrage in response every time. Some guy with an English accent narrates as hooded men slowly cut off the head of an aid worker, and then they do the same thing again to a different aid worker. Terrible. Then, one day, perhaps to break the monotony, or maybe inspired by a different line of scripture, they burn a downed pilot alive in a cage. Still, to me, and not to be too glib, it’s all so much more in the vein of, “People do terrible things to each other… what else is new?” I still have no intention of actually clicking on a link and viewing a video–even an edited down version hosted by a news organization–because I know it’s a mix of propaganda and psychological warfare and that’s what the “Islamic State” wants.

Fast forward a couple years, circa 2016-2017. The “Islamic State” is well on its way to the dustbin of history, having been swept up and expelled from almost all the territory it claimed in Iraq and Syria. It’s around this time that I find out about this thing called the Camp Speicher Massacre through a bit of googling one day. The website I make my way to isn’t hosted by one of the major news organizations, but it’s in English, and it makes a pretty extraordinary claim: hundreds, maybe thousands dead in this one massacre of unarmed prisoners. My initial reaction is along the lines of, “This can’t have happened–can’t have happened at anywhere near the scale suggested–because if it had I wouldn’t just be learning about it now. It would have been all over the news when it happened.” So just this once, I go and click on the damn video.

Back to the present (but still talking about the past, that damn video). Without getting into too much detail, and just going from what I can remember, there were bodies in a long, shallow grave, and young men being pulled down out of the back of a truck, and… I think some of them were shot on camera. Honestly, I don’t remember precisely because I only viewed it once, in part and not in whole, and it was kind of blurry–maybe it was blurred in editing, maybe the camera wasn’t in focus, or maybe I was crying. Needless to say, I was fairly well satisfied, on viewing the video, that this thing, this massacre, had happened on something like the scale intimated, but as to what provoked that reaction in me, something that archival footage from things like the Holocaust and other historical atrocities hadn’t… I think it was the sudden realization that not only could such a thing happen (not worldview-altering by itself), but that it could be known to have happened and go largely unnoticed, as if it didn’t really matter. As if it didn’t really matter…

It’s also worth noting (possibly relevant to my reaction) that I served as an advisor in Iraq from 2010 to 2011. Down south, with the Navy, but still… it hit a bit too close to home.

I’ll close this section by noting–because I do think it’s relevant, my contempt for the “Islamic State” notwithstanding–that the Human Rights Watch and the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq, in investigating the Camp Speicher Massacre, have noted that several dozen alleged adherents to the “Islamic State” have been tried by the government of Iraq and executed for participating in the massacre, and that many of them may have been tortured and/or denied fair trials in the process, which I have to say I am not okay with: injustice is not a proper remedy for injustice.

The Takeaway

I do not offer this merely as an informative piece. I think it’s worth recalling that the US had a hand or two in Iraq before, during, and after the 2003 invasion, that an entity like the “Islamic State” must surely have been foreseeable–perhaps even was foreseen–prior to its achieving prominence in 2014, and that its early successes, to include those that led to the Camp Speicher Massacre, came about due to a failure of US foreign policy and military action. Speaking as an American, I won’t say we “found” Iraq in very good shape (there are limits to what we can fix through our actions, but also limits to what we can claim to have broken), but then we didn’t exactly leave it in the best possible shape either.

So how could we have left Iraq in the best possible (or at least better) shape? Specifically, how could US forces have transitioned out of Iraq so as to avoid the civil war that followed? Well, that last bit may be an example of question begging (and I may even have constructed the question specifically for that purpose, like maybe as a “rhetorical” device), because it presumes that the problem with US forces transitioning out of Iraq was… US forces transitioning out of Iraq, as if there was necessarily some other way US forces could have transitioned out and not left behind a country ripe for civil war and various attempts at genocide.

The truth is, writing now as someone who was on the ground during the withdrawal time-frame, the government of Iraq (and its people, too, for the most part) didn’t want us there: not then, not ever, but to an extent we were perhaps tolerated as a necessary evil, particularly in the aftermath of the invasion. But part of the pretense of not being “occupiers” during the latter stages of the war (the Coalition Provisional Authority that served as an occupying government of Iraq was dissolved in 2004) was that the US and remaining coalition partners had to reach agreements with the nominally independent government of Iraq to sanction their continued presence and clarify the status of forces (hypothetically, if a US soldier kills an Iraqi, regardless of what the US chooses to call it, can Iraq arrest that soldier on suspicion of murder and hold trial in one of its courts like it would for a tourist who did the same? Would the US permit such a thing?). By 2011, what the US wanted in a Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) diverged so significantly from what Iraq’s government and a significant portion of its population was willing to put up with, that US military forces simply could not remain. For instance, and among other things, the people and the government of Iraq wanted the answer to that hypothetical scenario in which a US soldier kills someone to be, “Yes, he can be tried for murder in the local courts just like anyone else who kills someone within our borders,” not unlike if a US soldier was to kill someone in, say, Japan. It might have been “nice” or “preferable” from a strictly military standpoint to keep a US military presence in Iraq beyond 2011, but that simply wasn’t an option–not one the US could achieve unilaterally and according to its desires, anyway. Because the US government—and probably its people too—was, among other things, not super interested in the idea of US soldiers being tried by Iraqi courts.

So rather than, “How could US forces have transitioned out of Iraq so as to avoid the civil war that followed? ” perhaps the question should be, “Was there ever a way into Iraq that wasn’t bound to result in a country primed for civil war on the back end?” At the risk of invoking a cliché, I think the answer to that must be “no,” because sometimes the only winning move is not to play. To the extent one might say we “lost” in 2011 (what do you mean by lost?), I would say it’s more because we erred in 2003 than because there was an outcome in 2011 that wasn’t likely to end in further tragedy for the people of Iraq.

Bottom Line

Over the course of three wars and thirty years, the name “Speicher” went from an American servicemember killed in action, to a site occupied by US forces and named in his honor, to a massacre perpetrated in the aftermath of the US withdrawal. In a sense, the Camp Speicher Massacre is both the best and worst possible metaphor for America’s failure to navigate the difference between interventionism and isolationism. As the US withdrawals forces from Afghanistan and elsewhere, it should be careful not to divorce itself too readily from those parts of the world where it can still exert positive influence, particularly through intelligence sharing, diplomatic engagement, and economic aid, and most of all in locations where it has had a hand in bringing about or perpetuating instability. Withdrawal, but do not abandon.

June 12, 2014.

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