Battle for Haditha

The fate of two cultures becomes locked on a tragic collision course in director Nick Broomfield's dramatization of the events that led to the massacre of 24 Iraqi men, women, and children by American Marines. A squadron of American soldiers goes speeding across the Iraqi desert in a convoy of armored Humvees, eventually stopping at a local store where the soldiers jump out to stretch and browse the DVD selection. Meanwhile, as the Marines strike up a conversation with the young male clerk behind the counter, two Iraqi men climb into the back of a pick-up truck to get a crash course in IED mechanics. Both the Marines and the Iraqis are simply going about their daily business as usual, just doing their best to survive in a land where war is just another fact of life. For the Marines it's all about patrolling the desert and waiting for the next bomb to go off. When a roadside IED kills one Marine and wounds two others, the vengeance with which the American soldiers strike back at the locals may cause even the most hard-line warhawks to take pause and consider the true cost of a war which has no end in sight. ~ Jason Buchanan, All Movie
Battle for Haditha (2007)

Although the movie is quite balanced overall of the motives in the movie, it does not tell of the large number of civilians killed by terrorists. The reactions by the locals to noticing the bombs being placed feels real and gives the balance to the story that I was pleasantly surprised by. Others of course can wonder about the brutality of the marines but since they were mostly acquitted and standard procedure is to plant false flags by Al-Qaeda then not likely we will ever know the real story of those tragic deaths of civilians.

This film is a good companion with the "Hurt Locker" as showing the tensions and anguish of events before the marines supposedly went off the ranch. I found the Hurt Locker to be much more realistic in the actions of the Marines and Army. For example after the IED exploded and killed one, they just seem to stand around in the open thinking about what to do and when they do decide to attack it forgets about back alleys that the true killers were retreating from. The one portion that seems to be true is that the killing of the civilians in the vehicle had no justification and was most definitely the work of the Marines from my reading of the news reports.

Battle for Haditha (film) From Wikipedia