Meanwhile, credible evidence to the contrary poured out of Iraq and Syria, in the form of tragic videos, Facebook posts, and testimonials from inside ISIS territory. Indeed, for the first 15 months of the war, the United States only publicly admitted that two civilians could have been killed. military, no civilians were killed in Kafr Daryan, even as their families held funerals and mourned their dead on Facebook. Despite video evidence of the attack, and numerous testimonials on the ground, a declassified internal Pentagon document reveals the military didn’t deem these accounts credible. The incident was reported by Human Rights Watch, and followed up on by a string of outlets including GlobalPost and BuzzFeed. Tomahawk missile slammed into the village of Kafr Daryan in Idlib, Syria, most likely killing seven civilians in a strike intended to take out a group of al-Qaeda fighters.

Sure enough, on the very first night of airstrikes, September 23, 2014, a U.S. Still, the Obama administration insists that to execute drone strikes, commanders must feel “near certainty” that civilians will not be killed.Īt the beginning of the air campaign in Syria, in the fall of 2014, President Obama relaxed the “near certainty” requirement for strikes in the Iraq and Syrian theatres. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which tracks drone attacks, calls the number a “fraction” of the civilian deaths it had logged for the same period. In a report released in June, examining drone strikes “outside areas of active hostilities” (meaning Yemen, Pakistan, and Somalia), the Obama administration says it killed between 64 and 116 civilians from 2009–2016. Yet, the administration’s official line is that strikes rarely, if ever, kill civilians. Whistleblowers managed to pass along data to The Intercept showing that over a five-month period in 2013, 90 percent of casualties from drone strikes in Afghanistan were civilians. The Obama administration has been similarly opaque, even as it has exponentially expanded the use of drone strikes in countries where the United States is not technically at war. military to force the disclosure of internal documents from the Bush administration detailing payments to families killed by U.S. In 2008, five years into the Iraq War, the ACLU had to sue the U.S. military doesn’t “do body counts,” when pressed on the metrics that would be used to keep track of casualties in the war against the Taliban. Since late 2014, the United States and its allies have dropped more than 50,000 missiles and bombs on Iraq and Syria-a bomb nearly every 20 minutes for two years.Īfter the United States invaded Afghanistan in 2002, General Tommy Franks famously quipped that the U.S. But even while there’s no evidence the United States targets civilians in the now 15-year-long War on Terror, accounting for civilian harm has not been a priority either. military’s attitude toward civilians-and its technical capacity to avoid collateral damage-have both evolved significantly since the Vietnam War, when civilian populated areas were designated free-fire zones, and commanders came under pressure to maximize the body count. “For years and years now we’ve been fed this line by the military that they don’t kill civilians, that our weapons are so smart we only kill the bad guys,” Air Wars director Chris Woods told me. The UK-based group Air Wars, which employs a team of researchers to track casualties in the war on ISIS, estimates that at a bare minimum 1,660 civilians have been killed so far, or about one civilian for every 10 strikes. military insists it has a nearly perfect record of avoiding civilian casualties: only one in around 300 airstrikes, the Pentagon says, results in civilian death.īut independent monitoring groups are certain civilians are dying in much greater numbers than the United States is willing to admit. But these strikes against ISIS are rarely covered in the English-language media at all. or European city, the fallout would dominate the news cycle, spawning introspective Facebook posts and global calls for solidarity. If even one of these bombs detonated in a U.S. That’s a bomb nearly every 20 minutes for two years. Since 2014, when President Barack Obama announced his intention to “degrade and ultimately destroy” the Islamic State, the United States and its allies have dropped more than 50,000 missiles and bombs on Iraq and Syria in over 15,000 separate strikes.

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