“It was not self-defense,” Sgrena said. “The soldiers were to the right of us on the side of the road, they started to shoot from the right and kept shooting from behind but most of the shots came from behind, Calipari was shot from the right and I was shot in the shoulder from behind. When we stopped, they were behind us. We could see that all the back windows of the car were broken from behind. If they are afraid, they can stop the car, they can ask it to stop, then you can shoot at the wheels but they didn’t do that. They didn’t try to stop the car and they shot at least ten bullets at the level of people sitting inside the car. If Calipari had not pushed me down they could have killed me.”

This case sheds important light on the culture of impunity surrounding the U.S. occupation of Iraq. If this is how Washington treats Italy, one of its closest allies in the so-called war on terror, when U.S. soldiers kill the country’s second-highest ranking intelligence official, imagine the struggle Iraqis face as they die in the tens of thousands.

No Checkpoint, No Self-Defense