(Washington) The US military invoked “self-defense” for a 2019 airstrike in Syria that killed civilians, after the publication of an investigation by the New York Times accusing the Pentagon of having sought to cover up the presence of non-combatant victims.
According to this investigation published on Saturday, an American special force operating in Syria – sometimes in the greatest secrecy – bombed three times on March 18, 2019 a group of civilians near Baghouz, the last stronghold of the Islamic State (IS) group, killing 70 people, including women and children.
The New York daily claims that a military lawyer “flagged the strike as a possible war crime”, but that “the military took steps that covered up the catastrophic strike.”
The US Army Central Command said in a detailed statement on Sunday that a military investigation had determined that these were “self-defense strikes,” “proportional,” and that “appropriate measures had been taken to exclude the presence of civilians ”.
The investigation launched by the Pentagon after the presence of civilian casualties was reported established that the strikes, in addition to 16 IS fighters, killed at least 4 civilians and injured 8 others.
“We take full responsibility for unintentional loss of life,” Central Command spokesman Captain Bill Urban said in the statement, adding that the military “hates the loss of innocent lives.”
However, the military investigation did not make it possible to “determine with certainty the status of more than 60 other victims” of these strikes, the statement said.
Certain women and certain children, “whether it is following an indoctrination or a choice, have decided to take up arms. […] and as such, could not be strictly identified as civilians ”, underlines the central command.
The Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and their allies in the US-led coalition announced the defeat of the IS “caliphate” at the end of March 2019 after overcoming the last jihadist stronghold of Baghouz.
the New York Times had already been the source of revelations in early November about an American strike that killed ten Afghan civilians, including seven children, in Kabul on August 29.
The American army considered in this case that it was a tragic error, but assures not to have broken the laws of war.