Iraq War Logs: US Army significant activity reports, 2004–2009

This record catalogues the Iraq War Logs as released: 391,832 'significant action' (SIGACT) reports from a US Army database, each describing an incident logged by US forces in Iraq between January 2004 and December 2009. Entries are classified by type – such as 'enemy action', 'explosive hazard', 'criminal event' or 'friendly fire' – and by category, and many record casualties divided into civilian, 'enemy', host-nation and 'friendly' deaths.

Reporting on the logs concentrated on three areas. On casualties, the reports record 109,032 violent deaths, including 66,081 civilians, and Iraq Body Count estimated that around 15,000 of the civilian deaths had not previously been recorded. On detainee abuse, the Guardian and the BBC described numerous accounts of prisoners mistreated by Iraqi security forces, with reports passed to Iraqi authorities rather than investigated by US forces. And on specific incidents, they highlighted killings at checkpoints and a February 2007 attack by an Apache helicopter, callsign Crazyhorse 18, on two men attempting to surrender – the same unit involved in the July 2007 attack shown in the Collateral Murder video.

The Guardian reported that we said we had removed names that might lead to reprisals before posting the reports online.

I published the logs on 22 October 2010, having shared them in advance with the Guardian, the New York Times, Der Spiegel, Le Monde, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and others; Iraq Body Count analysed the casualty data. The Pentagon condemned the release, and a spokesman told the BBC that the reports were raw observations by tactical units. The 2019 US indictment against me alleged that Chelsea Manning had downloaded some 400,000 Iraq war-related significant activity reports and provided them to WikiLeaks.

The source of this material was established in court. Chelsea Manning (then known as Bradley Manning), a US Army intelligence analyst, was convicted by a military judge, Colonel Denise Lind, on 30 July 2013 of offences including Espionage Act violations relating to the leak of the Afghan and Iraq war logs, the State Department cables and the Guantánamo files; she was acquitted of the most serious charge, aiding the enemy. Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison on 21 August 2013; President Barack Obama commuted the sentence in January 2017.