(Washington) The drone strikes favored since 2014 by the US military in its wars against jihadist groups in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria have been insufficiently prepared and poorly executed, resulting in the deaths of thousands of civilians, according to a new investigation by the New York Times published on Saturday.
Based on 1,300 Pentagon reports on incidents that resulted in civilian casualties, obtained by the American daily within the framework of the Law on Transparency in Administrations (FOIA), this investigation undermines the image of a “clean” war being carried out. with “precision strikes” regularly presented by the US military.
“The US air war was marked by flawed intelligence, hasty and imprecise missile fire, and the deaths of thousands of civilians, including many children,” the newspaper concludes. “Not a single report concludes with a fault or a disciplinary sanction”.
The documents show that civilian deaths were often due to “confirmation bias,” the tendency to draw conclusions consistent with what one thinks likely, according to the New York Times.
People running to a bombed site were seen as ISIS fighters, not rescuers. Simple motorcyclists were considered to be moving “in formation”, which was interpreted as the “signature” of an impending attack.
The promises of transparency of the time of Barack Obama, who was the first American president to favor drone strikes to spare the lives of American soldiers, have been replaced by “opacity and impunity”, adds the daily who had to file several lawsuits against the Pentagon and the US Army Central Command (Centcom) to obtain these documents.
Several of the cases mentioned were already known, but the investigation shows that the number of civilian victims admitted by the Pentagon is “clearly underestimated”.
Since the start of its operations in Syria and Iraq against ISIS in the summer of 2014, the international coalition admitted in a report published in August that “at least 1,417 civilians were accidentally killed as a result of the raids by the coalition since the beginning ”of its operations in the two countries.
Cited by the New York TimesCentcom spokesman Commander Bill Urban noted that “even with the best technology in the world, errors do occur, whether due to erroneous information or a misinterpretation of the information available.”
“We do everything to avoid doing harm. We are investigating all credible cases. And we regret every loss of innocent life, ”he said.