An Iraqi mother surrounded by her dead children in the family bedroom, where everyone on the bed was shot and killed by U.S. Marines. The only survivor was an eleven-year-old girl, Safa, who hid in a corner next to the bed during the shooting.

On the morning of November 19, 2005, a squad of Marines was travelling in four Humvees down a road in the town of Haditha, Iraq, when their convoy hit an I.E.D.

The blast killed one Marine, Lance Corporal Miguel Terrazas, and injured two others.

What followed would spark one of the largest war-crime investigations in the history of the United States.

During the next several hours, Marines killed twenty-four Iraqi men, women, and children.

Near the site of the explosion, they shot five men who had been driving to a college in Baghdad.

They entered three nearby homes and killed nearly everyone inside.

The youngest victim was a three-year-old girl.

The oldest was a seventy-six-year-old man.

The Marines would later claim that they were fighting insurgents that day, but the dead were all civilians.

The killings came to be known as the Haditha massacre.

Four Marines were charged with murder, but those charges were later dropped.

General James Mattis, who went on to become Secretary of Defense, wrote a glowing letter to one of the Marines, dismissing his charges and declaring him innocent.

By 2012, when the final case ended in a plea deal with no prison sentence, the Iraq War was over, and stories about the legacy of the U.S. occupation rarely got much attention.

The news barely registered.

The impact of an alleged war crime is often directly related to the horror of the images that end up in the hands of the public.

The abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison became an international scandal when graphic photos were published.

The Haditha killings had no similar moment.

A few of the images that the Marines had made ended up in the public domain, but most have never been released.

In an oral-history interview for the Marine Corps, in 2014, General Michael Hagee, who was the commandant of the Marine Corps at the time of the Haditha killings, bragged about keeping the Haditha photos secret.

“The press never got them, unlike Abu Ghraib,” Hagee said.

The interviewer, Fred Allison, a Marine Corps historian, interjected, “The pictures. They got the pictures. That was what was so bad about Abu Ghraib.”

“Yes,” Hagee replied. “And I learned from that.”

He said, “Those pictures today have still not been seen. And so, I’m quite proud of that.”