Over the past two years, thousands of U.S.-led coalition airstrikes have targeted suspected Islamic State fighters in Iraq and Syria. That campaign had resulted in “45,000 enemies taken off the battlefield,” Lt. Gen. Sean MacFarland, the U.S. army commander leading the anti-ISIS fight, said in August. Despite a recent executive order requiring U.S. forces to investigate the deaths of civilians, the toll those missions have taken on civilian populations has been a subject of dispute.
Last week, the Pentagon released its second civilian casualty assessment from the ongoing conflict, covering 24 U.S. airstrikes. While providing little detail, the report states that investigators “thoroughly reviewed the facts and circumstances surrounding each report” of civilian casualties and found evidence of 64 civilian deaths, bringing the official total for the campaign to 119.
The new figure represents a fraction of the civilian deaths documented by journalists and outside monitoring groups. According to Airwars, a transparency project that tracks airstrikes in Iraq and Syria, at least 1,787 civilians have died in coalition airstrikes in the two countries since the beginning of the campaign. Just last month, Amnesty International called on the Pentagon to respond to evidence it gathered surrounding 11 suspected coalition strikes in Syria, which, the group claimed, killed an estimated 300 civilians. Neil Sammonds, Amnesty’s lead Syria researcher, said the Pentagon deserved credit for publishing its civilian casualty data. “It’s not easy to say you killed these civilians,” Sammonds told The Intercept. But he questioned why the Pentagon’s figures were so low. None of the 11 strikes documented by Amnesty investigators, Sammonds said, were addressed by the Pentagon’s release.
Discrepancies between government and independent counts of civilian casualties are not new. Over the past eight years, President Obama’s counterterrorism operations have killed thousands of people across the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia. At the low end of casualty estimates are the administration’s own figures: roughly 2,400 or so over seven years in Somalia, Yemen, Libya, and Pakistan, resulting in a very small number of “non-combatant deaths” — between 64 and 116. External estimates compiled by Micah Zenko (and covering a slightly longer period of time) are far higher — 4,189 militants killed, along with 474 civilians — more than four times as many as the White House estimate.
Zenko, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, has found that going by the government’s own numbers, U.S. strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia are more than 20 times as likely to kill civilians than those in Iraq and Syria. That may have to do with which agency is pulling the trigger. According to an NBC news report from March, only the Pentagon is authorized to use drones to kill ISIS fighters in Iraq and Syria, with the CIA confined to an intelligence-gathering role. Outside of conventional war zones, where civilian casualty rates appear to be much higher, the CIA has carried out its own strikes.
In July, when it released its estimates on civilian casualties outside of conventional war zones, the Obama administration addressed the issue of discrepancies in compiling such estimates, arguing that it had access to sensitive information NGOs and journalists did not, and making the case that misleading reports of civilian casualties produced by militant groups sometimes made their way into non-government counts.
“We have teams who work full time to prevent unintended civilian casualties,” Central Command spokesperson Col. John J. Thomas said in a statement last week. “We do all we can to minimize those occurrences, even at the cost of sometimes missing the chance to strike valid targets in real time.”
Marty Lederman, a professor at Georgetown Law and former Department of Justice official, said that he hoped the practice of reporting on civilian casualties is continued by the Trump administration. “It’s very valuable,” he said. “A better-informed republic can make better choices about the costs and benefits of war.”
Top photo: A U.S.-led coalition B1-b flies over the Syrian city of Kobane on Nov. 13, 2014, as seen from the Turkish border village of Mursitpinar.
The USPatriot Act defines “unlawful, illegal or unprivileged combatant/belligerent a person who directly engages in armed conflict in violation of the laws of war.”
The laws of war are wars between two sovereign states.
Definition of “engage’ is to occupy the attention or efforts, to attract or please. A belligerent is “someone hostile or aggressive”.
We need to remind ourselves that this includes anyone there, except maybe for children under 12yo.
There are no photos of white jewish cadavers piled up, nor of white vietnamese dead– they look quite white– “vanilla characterization” on a black&white news photo, so really america does not care.
The government should just quit putting out these figures.
I don’t know anyone who believes them.
In those cases where civilian deaths were counted( as in this article) there should also be an estimate of fighter deaths. If you had ten such cases it could be a reasonable indication of the average percent of civilian to fighter deaths in US air strikes.
That would be a better way of estimating total civilian deaths than the imaginary numbers provided by the pentagon. In the Iraq war there were 2 academically sponsored teams using trained staff and rigorous methods that did appropriately scaled samplings to estimate non combatant casualties.The findings were published in the lancet( medical journal) There were no other peer reviewed studies. Those teams estimated civilian deaths between 600,000 and something close to 1.2 million . The pentagon said 30,000 max( though I think that was before the largest purges of the shia sunni civil war. No methodology was reported. The pentagon provided zero evidence of any attempt to get real figures. The pentagon does not want to know the truth about their wars and they don’t want taxpayers to know the truth either.
If anything like 45,000 people were killed by the Pentagon in the war on Isis, that figure should be related to other air wars over areas with high levels of civilians. The number of combatants in a large region is always smaller than the number of noncombatants. In Gaza, Vietnam, Iraq, Nazi bombing campaigns etc. the numbers of civilian deaths were very high. I would be very surprised if anything less than a 3rd of the deaths were non-combatants.
Marty Lederman- “A better-informed republic can make better choices about the costs and benefits of war.”
The benefits of war sure deserved a follow up question.
I would love to see his cost/benefit analysis for any of our recent wars.
A professor at Georgetown and a former Justice official would surely be able to find all sorts of benefits worthy of mass carnage, expense, failure and ongoing consequences.
Is it too late to update the article?
Or was the intention to just leave readers with the idea that there are benefits… trust us?
It is understandable that Pentagon claims to civilian casualties are less than independent estimates. The blank check underwriting Pentagon funding could be endangered if killing civilians is perceived by citizens to be casual.
Secretly, though, the Pentagon can take pride in civilian casualties. The job of the Pentagon is to kill on command and concomitant civilian casualties are worth it to get the job done. That is the reality of modern war by state and terrorist alike.
Ah yes, the classic strategy of under reporting or otherwise “misinterpreting” information concerning the murders of innocent civilians along with the wonderfully convincing “thorough review” that just happens to little to no detail. Sooner or later, people are going to have a say for once and when that happens businesses and government officials better be convinced of peace if they ever want to keep office.
“A better-informed republic can make better choices about the costs and benefits of war.”
No doubt. The problem is that none of our “leaders” , including the president-elect, want to make that happen.
One of the problems with CENTCOM’s Casualty Assessments is that they don’t explain their methodology: how they winnowed the number of strikes down to 24, a list of the strikes reviewed that they claim didn’t result in any casualties, how they specifically determined the number of casualties.
Therefore, you cannot really perform a detailed comparison of days like March 5, 2016 when Airwars said a strike near a Mosul factory killed at least 21 civilians and CENTCOM says that figure was 10 civilians.
In CENTCOM’s defense, it has reported several casualties that were previously unknown by Airwars. For example, on March 24, 2016 in Qayyarah, Iraq, it admitted one casualty.
Getting the definition of civilian from them would tell us much about their attitude and methods of counting, which is why we will never get it barring a leak.
Iirc the US labelled anyone opposing the occupation of Afghanistan “unlawful combatants” despite the illegality of the invasion itself and the nonexistence of such a term in international law. Anyone who worked against the invasion in any way is therefore not a civilian according to them.
Methodology:
“When we eliminated from the count all the strikes that killed civilians, we found that the number of civilian deaths for which the drone attacks were responsible, was zero”
Your headline would be worthy of notice if it was the opposite. We can rely on the Pentagon to always underestimate the adverse effects of their activities, just as we can count on them to exaggerate their claims of success. The Pentagon, like the White House and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence [sic] and Fox News find their primary utility as reverse barometers: it is far more accurate to assume that the negation of their statements contains the most truth.