Sand

You know my intention is to do nothing and say nothing.

I had a thought, maybe you feel guilty.

The video mentions the number 20k, which I assume is the number of young people killed in the recent fighting. Of course, young people were also killed in the last round of fighting in 2014, and I thought of the 2009 war, and that made me think of something else.

This was in the 'memories from the war' email that I sent to Hime.

It's basic: a civilian car, with an Iraqi family, hit a pressure-plate IED and was blown up. It was on a road on the western outskirts of Baghdad. I think it was marked as a minor, relatively unused route on US military maps. The people I will call "fighters" would try to put IEDs on roads that would be used by the US military. For example, I think it was roughly this location, on a road joining the main highway, that a civilian vehicle being used by private military contractors to escort diplomats or something hit a pressure-plate IED in the dust of the road, killing several or all occupants, around the first half of 2009. It was a road used by military convoys that were detouring around Fallujah, and so the PMCs must have chosen the route for the same reason. Normal Iraqis would have no reason to avoid Fallujah. (In the convoy briefings I gave that mentioned this incident, I contrasted the destroyed civilian vehicle with the tire damage that a military vehicle sustained from a similar IED in the same location.)

So this family was presumably on a road that didn't get a lot of traffic, so some fighters must have thought it was a good place to target US military vehicles. Again, I think it was labeled as a minor supply route for the US military. But instead the IED killed an Iraqi family.

I just remember the shoe. I think there was a photo of it, taken at night, in the incident report uploaded by the unit that investigated the scene. A young person's shoe had been blown off their foot by the explosion, ending up away from the rest of the scene.

With the young Palestinian female whose image has been used as a symbol of the victims of war, some people might say that Israel intended to kill her, or at least didn't care if she died. That wasn't the case for this young person who died when their family's car hit an IED in Iraq. Neither the US, nor the fighters who planted the IED, wanted civilians to die. (This is in contrast to events like a suicide bomb attack on a recruitment center near the so-called triangle of death that killed 50+ people; it was different people planting pressure-plate IEDs like this one.)