War propaganda

This is an old picture, but I've just come across the explanation for it.

The Slovene magazine Mladina has an interview this week with Damir Sagolj, a photographer originally from Sarajevo working for Reuters in Iraq. Sagolj took the photo of an American Marine cradling a young Iraqi child in his lap which was published widely in the American media and got Sagolj nominated for a Pulitzer.

[...]

Here's a translation from the Slovene of the caption below the photograph as published in Mladina: The photo by Damir Sagolj which was nominated this year for the prestigious Pulitzer prize, something which has been awarded only once to a non-American. "An Iraqi family happened to come to a checkpoint. Shooting began–no one knows who started it. It was a war zone. The family's car was caught in the crossfire, and the Americans raked it with gunfire for about ten minutes, using every weapon they had. In the process the mother was killed, several daughters were wounded or killed, and the father sustained multiple wounds. It's possible that the shooting began from the car behind this family's. There were a number of moving, shocking photos in the series that I took–for example, the father looking at his dead wife and embracing his wounded daughter, whose eye had been shot out.

This photograph of the child was taken out of context and published on the covers and front pages of American national and local media, as if to say, see how our soldier tenderly holds an Iraqi child in his arms. I got a phone call from People, the largest American magazine, with a circulation of 22 million. They wanted to know whether this American soldier had any children of his own, what he was feeling at the time, and so on. They weren't interested in what had happened to the child in the picture, whose mother had been killed and whose father had been riddled with bullets by American soldiers.
  article

Update 02/06: Thanks to reader Jean, I see that I didn't get the article link URL placed in this post. I've corrected that now - my quote was from a PRWatch page. In trying to relocate that page, I came across another page from the PR Watch forum that has another photo which was shot at that same time, with a very poignant quote.

The website where I found the photograph above included the following text below the picture: "Photo by Hayne Palmour/North County Times:

Navy Corpsman Richard Barnett of Camarilo, Calif. checks the heart of a young Iraqi boy as other Navy medics treat the boy's older sister, right, after the two children and their family were caught in a crossfire between US Marines and Iraqi soldiers just outside of a Marine encampment in central Iraq on Saturday, March 29, 2003. The boy was not injured. His sister, who received gunshot wounds, was expected to survive. The father was wounded and the mother was killed in the gun battle. "If anything good comes from this nonsense, I haven't seen it yet," said Barnett after the two children and their father were taken away for a medivac helicopter.

Jean also sends the link to the Mladina article (in the Slovene language).