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Bombed building in the Iraqi city of Mosul (archive)
Photo: ZAID AL-OBEIDI / AFP
According to a report in the New York Times, the United States accepted devastating consequences for the civilian population in its drone war in the Middle East. As the "NYT" reports, a series of confidential government documents with more than 1,300 reports on civilian casualties refute the government's portrayal of a war with "precision strikes" against jihadists. According to the Pentagon documents, numerous mistakes were made in air strikes and there were thousands of civilian deaths.
In early 2017, a US fighter plane destroyed a dark vehicle in Iraq, which was stopped at an intersection in the west of the city of Mosul.
It was thought that a car bomb was hidden in it, according to the NYT report, according to the secret documents.
But there was no bomb in the car, but a man named Majid Mahmoud Ahmed, his wife and their two children.
She and three other civilians were killed.
In November 2015, the US military bombed a building in the Iraqi city of Ramadi after a man was observed carrying an "unknown heavy object" into an "ISIS defense post".
The object turned out to be "a person of small stature" - a child.
It died in the attack.
"Simple motorcyclists" identified as driving "in formation" and misinterpreted as a sign of attack
"The American air war was marked by inadequate reconnaissance, hasty and imprecise rocket launches and the deaths of thousands of civilians, including many children," reports the newspaper.
The transparency promises from the time of Barack Obama, who was the first US president to prefer drone strikes in order to save the lives of US soldiers, have been replaced by "opacity and impunity."
"Not a single report came to the conclusion that there was misconduct."
In five years, the US Army has carried out more than 50,000 air strikes in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan.
The military admitted that it has accidentally killed 1,417 civilians in air strikes in Syria and Iraq since 2014.
In Afghanistan, the official number is 188 civilians killed since 2018.
The newspaper's research showed, however, that the figures published by the Pentagon were "clearly understated".
Accordingly, the US armed forces were often wrong in their assessments of the targets of air strikes.
People who ran to a bombed place were seen as fighters of the group "Islamic State" and not as helpers.
"Simple motorcyclists" were identified as riding "in formation", which was interpreted as a "sign" of an imminent attack.
According to official Pentagon documents, misidentification only made up four percent of cases involving civilian victims.
Research by the New York Times showed, however, that there were errors in 17 percent of the incidents investigated and that almost a third of the civilian deaths and injuries were attributable to them.
Cultural ignorance also apparently plays a role.
For example, the US military believed that "no civilians" were present in a house they were monitoring on a day of the fasting month of Ramadan.
But several families slept in it during the day to protect themselves from the heat.
Poor image quality or observation times that were too short also contributed to misjudgments when reviewing reports from civilian casualties.
Of the 1,311 cases investigated by the New York Times, only 216 were rated "credible" by the Pentagon.
Reports of civilian casualties were rejected because the videos did not show any bodies in the rubble or because the footage was said to be inadequate to allow conclusions to be drawn.
A spokesman for Central Command told the newspaper that "even with the best technology in the world, mistakes happen, whether through incorrect information or misinterpretation of the information available."
The military do "everything to avoid damage."
It investigates every suspected case.
"We regret every loss of an innocent life".
kry / AFP