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| - Fact Check: Woman posing next to a corpse is not an Israeli soldier
This photo is about two decades old and the woman is former US military personnel, Sabrina Harman.
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India Today Fact Check
This is an old photo from Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison. The woman in the photo is US soldier Sabrina Harman who was sentenced to six months in jail for abusing Iraqi prisoners.
Amid the Israel-Palestine conflict, a photo of a woman soldier posing with a corpse was widely shared on social media. In the image, the woman is seen smiling and giving a thumbs-up pose next to the corpse.
Allegedly, the woman is an Israeli soldier and the corpse is that of a Hamas militant.
India Today's investigation found that the photo is nearly two decades old, and the woman in it is an American soldier.
Our Probe
Through a reverse image search, we found the same photo in a 2008 report in The New Yorker. According to the report, the photo featured Specialist Sabrina Harman from Virginia, US. Part of the 372nd Military Police Company, Harman arrived with the company at Abu Ghraib, America's biggest military prison in Iraq, in October 2003.
According to the report, which contains interviews of Harman and her colleagues from the time, the soldier had taken numerous photos of corpses during her time in Abu Ghraib. In fact, she had said that taking pictures of dead bodies fascinated her. It featured multiple other photos of Harman posing in a similar fashion with corpses.
Additionally, we found several photos of Harman posing with detainees on the website of the International Center of Photography. In one such photo, she can be seen posing behind a pyramid of naked Iraqi prisoners, giving a thumbs-up in front of a corpse wrapped in plastic. Tattoos on both of Harman's hands were clearly visible in several of these images, including the one going viral.
Reportedly, the international publication of these photographs led to widespread condemnation of US practices in Iraq. According to a Guardian report, Harman was charged for her actions, which included ordering detainees to strip and then photographing and videotaping them. In 2005, she was found guilty of abusing Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib and was sentenced to six months in jail by a military jury.
In 2018, the same photo was circulated with false assertions. At the time, it was alleged that the woman in the photo was the then-newly appointed CIA chief Gina Haspel.
It is, hence, clear that the photo in question is almost two decades old and does not show an Israeli soldier.
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