The silence is ghostly only a moment after 10.40 am, when the roar has already devastated the sky and the land of Nassirya. The bodies of those who have been saved are kneeling on the ground, with their hands clasped on their heads. The eyes are fiery, unable to look at the massacre that still burns in the most torn desert ever, the Iraqi one. It is November 12th eighteen years ago. In the Italian headquarters, on a theoretical peace mission in Iraq, hell never knocked, it broke through the entrance directly with a tanker loaded with explosives, capable of blowing up all hope of life. The gazes, when the eyes still wide open, shatter in the void. The bodies, those gutted without a tomorrow, are spilled among a tangle of bent metal sheets like a stick tormented by a hurricane of dynamite. 12 Carabinieri, 5 Army soldiers, two Italian civilians leave their lives in a distant and foreign land. Nine Iraqi citizens also reach the bloody sky with them.

Marshal Silvio Olla

Silvio Olla, 32, a Sardinian non-commissioned officer of the 151st Regiment of the Sassari Brigade will not return to Sant'Antioco, his hometown. The massacre is complete. Carved in history as the most violent. Every year, on that day, the tears of memory are reunited with the words of memory. The truth about that moment of hell that shocked Italy and beyond remains, however, still today, shrouded in state silence. The ceremonies dispense grief, but are silent on justice and truth. Yet, a truth, the judicial one, is already written. Bitter, cruel and nefarious. Those 28 dead are not only the victims of an attack on the “Mistral” base in the land of oil and uranium. The sentence is from the Court of Appeal of Rome, the judgment is civil, but the conclusions are harsher than a criminal conviction. It is in that sentence, the excerpt of which we reproduce in the central photo, that one of the most disturbing facts of that massacre emerges. On November 5, 2003, or just seven days before the attack, in the so-called “situation point”, it emerged from the dispatches of the secret services that the Italian bases in the city of Nassirya were at risk of attacks. Not an alert like many others in a war scenario, but a detailed and detailed warning of danger. The sentence condemning the compensation of the victims for the commander of the Italian contingent is explicit: "The real warning of concrete danger against the Italian bases in Nassyrya, given by the" situation point "of November 5, cannot fail to be reiterated. known to the commander, according to which a group of Syrian and Yemeni terrorists would have moved to Nassirya, a tragically truthful ex post result, see the statements of the terrorist SMAH about the Italian base chosen, as a target, after inspection, for its obvious vulnerability ". It was the SISMI, the body of the military secret services, that circumscribed the danger. The sentence writes openly condemning the underestimation of the alarm: «We must, then, also remember the messages of the SISMI of 23 October: an attack on a target within two weeks at the latest. And October 25, with precision down to the colors of the vehicle: a Russian-made truck with a darker cab than the rest. Here we must point out the evident underestimation by the Stano, commander pro tempore, of such a timely and immediate alarm ».

Secret services

So the secret services had foreseen everything, informed the military leaders who, however, according to the sentence of the commander in chief, did nothing to avert the cursed attack. It is always the judges of the Court of Appeal who engrave it in the final decision: «This alarm - they write - is placed, temporally, a week before the tragic event: there was well the possibility, therefore, to usefully prepare some greater conflict, even temporary. With regard to the aspect of the overall insufficiency of passive defenses, the data is certain and sensational ». The confirmation was already recalled in the first instance sentence: "It was there for all to see (on this point the sentence unfairly - write the appellate judges - demeans the precise and correct statements of Colonel Burgio, but also of Colonel Perrella): the situation on the ground was even more serious than it already appeared on paper. Lack of an area of respect, non-existence of a serpentine, "hesco bastion" (barriers) too low and filled with gravel instead of sand, thus being clearly insufficient and liable to be transformed into bullets (as for the ammunition of the reservoir) rather than having protective effect ". Very serious aspects that emerge in the silence of the state: it did not escape the judges, in fact, that some of the victims were not killed by the explosion but hit by bullets that exploded but not fired. In practice, the reservoir full of ammunition was positioned just behind the soldiers, becoming a real "friendly" fire with the impact.

The serious mistakes

The judges write it without subterfuge: "Even with regard to the reservoir (ammunition depot, ed) the previous sentence appears inadequate, ignoring the question with a generic statement of concrete irrelevance, failing to confront - not to say erring on the point - with the outcomes of the medico-legal investigations which revealed that some victims had been hit by bullets that had exploded but not fired, which refers precisely to the reservoir that exploded due to the trigger caused by the explosion of the truck-bomb. On this specific point, even a stranger to the military arts will have to point out the irresponsible absurdity of the location of an ammunition depot thus exposed ”. The Italian military leaders are accused by the Court of Appeal: "virtuous behavior - which is required of those who chair a position of guarantee - would certainly have, according to rules of common and shared experience, reduced the risk in itself or reduced the results of damage, because the truck bomb, forced to stop earlier, would not have caused the massacre then actually caused ». Silvio Olla, the young Sardinian overwhelmed by that barbarian horde loaded with explosives, is gone. Yesterday commemorations were wasted, everywhere. Families of the victims and veterans of that attack, however, are still awaiting justice, truth and compensation. The state denies everything and more, despite the fact that eighteen years have passed since that massacre, announced with a "pizzino" by the secret services, which no one listened to.

Mauro Pili

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