News 2020

Three times winner of the Guardian Media Group Award for Nuance

American troops in Mosul have discovered yet further evidence of baby-eating by the insurgents, it was reported today. A squad of soldiers on a routine patrol in the recently pacified city entered a large building which, to their shock and horror, contained vast numbers of children's corpses, many with pieces missing.

"We all know war is hell," said US Marine corporal Malvern Slobbage, "but even in war there's no excuse for this kind of thing. If you ask me, the people who did this are just evil pure and incarnate."

The building, which was almost in ruins despite the 100,000 tons of smart bombs dropped on the city in the past two weeks, contained several hundred bodies. Almost all of them were children, whose ages were estimated at between seven and twelve. Many of the bodies had been seated at small desks by the insurgents in a macabre parody of a schoolroom.

Some of the rooms even had blackboards in them, claimed Corporal Slobbage. "It looks as though they had lots of different recipes to try," he said.

It is not known whether the few adult bodies found were those of insurgents or of ordinary men and women who had been captured along with the children. Several dozen insurgents were found by the Marines in nearby houses, however. They put up no resistance, but refused to tell the soldiers where they had hidden their weapons, and irritated the Marines by referring to the cannibalistic slaughterhouse, with chillingly twisted humour, as a "school".

After six hours' futile search for the weapons, the Marines sent the captured insurgents back to the correction centre at Negroponte Towers. "It's partly for their own safety," said Corporal Slobbage as his men fastened perpetrator restraint attachments to the prisoners' wrists, ankles, necks, waists, elbows, knees and eyelids.

"The natives around here aren't quite up to western ideas of justice," he said. "They haven't caught up to trial by jury just yet, and we can't allow any lynching however emotional the circumstances. We're here to nation-build, not dispense rough justice."