Hamed Chapman

The United States military has admitted killing dozens of people in Syria, including women and children, in airstrikes conducted during the final days of its declared war against the so-called Islamic State but hid details of its attacks for over two years.

The strikes on Baghouz, along Syria’s border with Iraq, were carried out during the Trump presidency on March 18, 2019, and details of the cover-up that as many as 64 women and children were killed among 80 people were pieced together by The New York Times.

The findings of one of the worst civilian killings in Syria by the US and could represent a war crime were sent to Central Command, which acknowledged the strikes for the first time but insisted the attacks were justified. “It said the bombs killed 16 fighters and four civilians. As for the other 60 people killed, the statement said it was not clear that they were civilians, in part because women and children in the Islamic State sometimes took up arms” the paper reported.

In a subsequent lengthy statement, Central Command said the attacks were “legitimate self-defence”, proportional, and that “appropriate steps were taken to rule out the presence of civilians”.
“We abhor the loss of innocent life and take all possible measures to prevent them. In this case, we self-reported and investigated the strike according to our own evidence and take full responsibility for the unintended loss of life,” it said.

The US portrayed the air war against the Islamic State as the most precise and humane bombing campaign in its history, claiming every report of civilian casualties was investigated and the findings reported publicly, creating what the military called a model of accountability. But the New York Times said the strikes on Baghuz tell “a different story,” and that the details suggest that “while the military put strict rules in place to protect civilians, the Special Operations Task Force repeatedly used other rules to skirt them.”

Nearly 1,000 strikes hit targets in Syria and Iraq in 2019, using 4,729 bombs and missiles. The official military tally of civilian dead for that entire year is only 22, and the strikes from March 18 are nowhere on the list. This contrasts with Airwars, headquartered in the UK, which suggests between 8,306 and 13,174 civilians have been killed during the latest 7-year US-led war in Syria and Iraq. The coalition has estimated only 1,417 civilian deaths.