IRIA News

A shocking new report published by The New York Times on December 18 revealed that thousands of previously hidden U.S. Department of Defense documents showed that the U.S. air wars in the Middle East were based on “deeply flawed intelligence” that led to the killing of thousands of civilians including children.

According to the publication, the report is based on a large number of classified documents of the Pentagon, which covers more than 1,300 civilian casualty reports, and records of airstrikes in Iraq and Syria from September 2014 to January 2018, containing more than 5,400 pages.

The documents further reveal that although the Pentagon has a highly codified civilian casualty inspection system, the promise of transparency and accountability has given way to opacity and impunity, only in a few cases the assessments were made public and none of the records included findings of wrongdoing or disciplinary action.

Although many survivors of those airstrikes were left disabled and required expensive medical care, only about a dozen condolence payments were made by the United States. Moreover, there were only a few documented efforts that identified learned lessons and root causes.

The newspaper claimed that the U.S. authorities have largely underreported the number of civilian deaths, and at least hundreds of innocent civilians were killed in the U.S.-led airstrikes. The newspaper also reviewed the cases of civilian killings and found that none of them resulted in an admission of wrongdoing.

One of the incidents cited a bombing by the U.S. in northern Syria on July 19, 2016, during which 85 fighters were reportedly killed by the authorities. But according to the reports 120 villagers and farmers were killed in that strike.

The report stated that, in many cases, poor or inadequate surveillance video led to fatal targeting failures. Another example cited was that the United States carried out an airstrike in November 2015 after the intelligence reported that a man was seen dragging “an unknown heavy object” into an Islamic State position. However, it was later revealed that the so-called “object” was the body of a child who died in the strike.

The report also stated that sometimes “men on motorcycles moving ‘in formation,’ displaying the ‘signature’ of an imminent attack, were just men on motorcycles.”

More recently in August, the U.S. retracted its claim that a vehicle destroyed by a drone strike in Kabul contained bombs. The airstrike victims were in fact 10 members of a family, including children.

In the last years of former President Barack Obama’s administration, U.S. airstrikes in the Middle East developed rapidly as public support for seemingly endless ground warfare gradually weakened. According to Obama, the U.S. often used unmanned aircraft controlled from far away, which represented “the most precise air campaign in history,” able to keep civilian deaths to a minimum. Moreover, the Pentagon stated that with the use of new technology it is possible to target a part of a house filled with enemy fighters while leaving the rest of the structure standing, the Pentagon said.

However, U.S. Central Command spokesperson Captain Bill Urban told the New York Times that “Even with the best technology in the world, mistakes do happen, whether based on incomplete information or misinterpretation of the information available. And we try to learn from those mistakes… We work diligently to avoid such harm. We investigate each credible instance. And we regret each loss of innocent life.”

“In many combat situations, where targeteers face credible threat streams and do not have the luxury of time, the fog of war can lead to decisions that tragically result in civilian harm,” Urban added.

According to the report, over the period of five years, the U.S. forces conducted more than 50,000 airstrikes in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan, which were far below the advertised precision. In compiling its report, the newspaper said its reporters had “visited more than 100 casualty sites and interviewed scores of surviving residents and current and former American officials”.