We’ve all seen the video. The black and white images are washed out, almost solarised, by the heat and glare of a Baghdad morning in 2007. As the men walk and mingle on the street, we can make out the length of their hair, pick out the skinny from the stocky, and identify what they are wearing, loose trousers, casual shirts – one with distinctive broad stripes. Mercifully, we cannot discern their individual features. All the while, the Apache helicopter hovers, unseen and unheard, its cameras trained on the men below. The crew exchange terse messages with US troops in the area and their commanders back at the flight line. Having identified weapons that the men carry and confirmed that they are not coalition forces, the crew request and receive permission to engage, manoeuvring the gunship to get a clearer shot.

Suddenly, shockingly, the ground around the men erupts as the Apache deploys its 30mm Cannon Chain Gun. This weapon is not a ‘gun’ like a rifle, shotgun, or other small arm, but ‘a combat-vehicle mounted war cannon engineered to take out enemy vehicles, convoys or troop concentrations’. It fires 300 rounds per minute. You can imagine, but probably shouldn’t, what it does to a human body. Most of the men fall where they are hit, some manage a few paces before they are cut down. Through the cloud of dust and debris that has been thrown up by the hail of fire, those still twitching or crawling are shot again. When a minivan driver taking his two children to school stops to help the wounded, his vehicle is riddled with fire, the driver is killed, and the children injured. Besides the driver of the van, Saleh Matasher Tomal, two more of the victims are civilians, both employees of Reuters, one a twenty-two-year-old photographer, Namir Noor-Eldeen, the other a driver and fixer, Saeed Chmagh, a forty-year-old father of four. The Apache crew had mistakenly identified the telephoto lens on Namir’s camera as an RPG – a rocket propelled grenade launcher.