(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 says that a military lawyer immediately “flagged the strike as a possible war crime”, but that “the military took steps which covered up the catastrophic strike.”
The US Army Central Command said in a detailed statement on Sunday that a military investigation had determined that the strikes were “self-defense”, “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 nevertheless 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.
Bypassed directives
According to New York Times, these strikes were carried out despite the presence of civilians at the request of this special forces unit, “Task Force 9”, and ignoring the directives that had been given by the American army precisely to avoid civilian casualties on this conflict ground.
Each bombing, explains the daily, had to be preceded by meticulous checks: drone surveillance, “sometimes for days or weeks”, examination by analysts to differentiate combatants and civilians, presence of jurists to ensure respect for the right to the war…
“Sometimes, when the special force did not meet these requirements, the commanders in Qatar (where an American air base is located) and elsewhere refused to give the green light for the strike”, details the investigation.
But on March 18, 2019, Task Force 9 circumvented these precautionary instructions by reporting an imminent danger and invoking the right to self-defense, as in many other strikes during this conflict, explains the New York Times.
“A position of the SDF (Syrian Democratic Forces, led by the Kurds and supported by the coalition, Editor’s note) wiping out heavy fire and threatened with being overwhelmed has called for defensive air strikes on positions of IS fighters,” explains for its part, the central command, which also ensures that at the time of the events, it did not have a drone equipped with a high-definition camera above the battlefield.
“It is important to understand that IS had decided to put their own families in danger” when evacuation possibilities “had been offered to them,” said the military statement.
The investigation, he adds, determined that no disciplinary action was required.
The SDF and their allies in the US-led coalition announced the defeat of the IS “caliphate” at the end of March 2019 after they had overcome the last jihadist stronghold of Baghouz.
the New York Times had already been the source of revelations in early November of an American strike that killed ten Afghan civilians, including seven children, in Kabul on August 29 as the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan was drawing to a close.
The US military considered that in this case a tragic error, while ensuring that it had not broken the laws of war.