In the New York Times Magazine, Azmat Khan offers a stunning, on-the-ground look at what America's never-ending set of air wars in its Global War on Terror has meant for civilians living under our bombs and missiles. What a genuine nightmare this country created and sustained in these years. It's long (well worth reading) and here's how it begins. Tom
“No civilian presence”
For Ali Fathi Zeidan and his extended family, West Mosul was in 2016 still the best of many bad options. Their longtime home in a nearby village, Wana, had been taken by ISIS, then retaken by Kurdish pesh merga forces, and — as if that were not enough — it stood just seven miles below the crumbling Mosul Dam, which engineers had long warned might soon collapse, creating a deluge that would kill everyone in its path. The family had avoided the camps for internally displaced people, where they would have faced a constant risk of separation, and found their way instead to the city, to a grimy industrial neighborhood called Yabisat. They moved into a storage facility, divided it up into separate rooms, brought in a water tank, built a kitchen and a bathroom. Though ISIS had taken Mosul, parts of the city were still relatively safe. Now it was home.
Family was everywhere. Zeidan’s daughter Ghazala was married to a man named Muhammad Ahmed Araj, who grew up in the neighborhood. Araj’s brother, Abdul Aziz Ahmed Araj, lived nearby in a small, crowded apartment. Zeidan’s other daughter moved into an apartment on the other side of Mosul with her husband and their six children, but one of them, 11-year-old Sawsan, preferred to spend her time across town in Yabisat: She was attached to her grandparents and loved playing with her cousins.
Sawsan had been staying with her grandparents for a week when the whole family sat down to dinner on March 5, 2016. All told, there were 21 people around the table. None of them knew that their Iraqi neighborhood was at that moment in the cross hairs of the American military.
Weeks before, Delta Force commandos had captured a high-ranking operative in ISIS’ burgeoning chemical-weapons program, and the information he provided interrogators led military officials to a chemical-weapons production plant in Yabisat; observers had been studying the site for weeks, by way of surveillance flights.
On March 2, military officials presented their findings for validation, as part of the Pentagon’s “deliberate targeting” process, which — as opposed to the rapid process of targeting in the heat of battle — required vetting at multiple levels and stages across the U.S.-led coalition. It had all the makings of a good strike. Unlike with so many other targets, military officials had human intelligence directly from the enemy and video surveillance that showed clear target sites.
They had also concluded that there was no civilian presence within the target compound. Though the surveillance video had captured 10 children playing near the target structure, the military officials who reviewed this footage determined the children would not be harmed by a nighttime strike because they did not live there: They were classified as “transient,” merely passing through during daylight hours.
But as investigators later documented, during the target-validation process one U.S. official disputed this conclusion: A “representative” with the United States Agency for International Development said that the children and their families most likely lived at or around the target compound. In the current environment, she argued, parents would be unlikely to let their children stray far from home. In her view, the determination that there was “no civilian presence” at the target was wrong, and authorizing the strike could lead to the deaths of these children and their parents and families. Military officials dismissed her concerns and authorized the strike.
Three days later, on the evening of March 5, Abdul Aziz heard the explosions, maybe a dozen in all. They came from the direction of his brother’s house. He wanted to see what happened, but because bombings were often accompanied by a second round of missiles, he waited. Later, when he approached the block, he saw the flames and fire consuming what was once his brother’s home. “The place was flattened,” he told me when I first met him, nearly four years later. “It was just rocks and destruction. There was fire everywhere.” They returned at dawn, with blankets to carry the dead. “We searched for our relatives,” he told me, “picking them up piece by piece and wrapping them.”
Across town, Ali Younes Muhammad Sultan, Sawsan’s father, heard the news from his brother. Everyone at the dinner had been killed: Zeidan and his wife, Nofa; Araj, Ghazala and their four children; Zeidan’s adult son Hussein, Hussein’s wife and their six children; Zeidan’s adult son Hassan, Hassan’s wife and their two children; and Sawsan, their own beloved daughter. Sultan and his wife went to the hospital where Sawsan’s remains were taken.
“If it weren’t for her clothes, I wouldn’t have even known it was her,” he later told me. “She was just pieces of meat. I recognized her only because she was wearing the purple dress that I bought for her a few days before. It’s indescribable. I can’t put it into words. My wife — she didn’t even know whether to go to her daughter, or the rest of the family first. It is just too hard to describe. We’re still in denial and disbelief. To this day, we cannot believe what happened. That day changed everything for us.”
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2.
“Pattern of life”
In the immediate aftermath of the strike, Defense Department officials lauded it as an intelligence coup. But doubts quickly began to surface. A series of ISIS videos taken at the hospital and the strike site was posted online, showing the burned and bloody corpses of children. The coalition opened a civilian casualty review.
The Pentagon’s review process is one of the few, if indeed not the only, means by which the U.S. military holds itself to account with regard to civilian casualties as it executes its air wars. The coalition has conducted at least 2,866 such assessments since the air war against ISIS in Iraq and Syria began in August 2014, but little more than a dozen of the resulting reports have ever been made public until now. Instead, each month, the U.S.-led coalition publishes a summary report, often a series of sentence-long synopses of the findings with little more than the date of the allegation, the general location and what the assessment concluded: that the allegation is “credible” — that is, military investigators deemed it “more likely than not” that an airstrike caused civilian casualties — or that it is “noncredible.”
As I previously reported in The Times, over the past three years, I obtained more than 1,300 of these credibility assessments through the Freedom of Information Act. The reports cover allegations surrounding airstrikes that took place between September 2014 and January 2018. What I saw after studying them was not a series of tragic errors but a pattern of impunity: of a failure to detect civilians, to investigate on the ground, to identify causes and lessons learned, to discipline anyone or find wrongdoing that would prevent these recurring problems from happening again. It was a system that seemed to function almost by design to not only mask the true toll of American airstrikes but also legitimize their expanded use.
Capt. Bill Urban, a spokesman for U.S. Central Command, said the Pentagon worked diligently to prevent the loss of innocent life. “Mistakes do happen,” he said, “whether based upon incomplete information or misinterpretation of the information available. And we try to learn from these mistakes.” But he contested the idea that the Pentagon acted with impunity, noting that “the lawfulness of a military strike is judged upon the information reasonably available to the striking forces at the time of the decision to strike.”
The documents reveal how unreliable that information often was. “White bags” of “ammonium nitrate” at a “homemade explosives factory” were most likely bags of cotton at a gin. A supposed ISIS headquarters was the longtime home of two brothers and their wives and children. An “adult male associated with ISIS”’ was actually an “elderly female.” A man with a weapon “on his left shoulder” actually had no weapon. Males on five motorcycles driving “quickly” and “in formation” — displaying the “signature” of an imminent attack — were just guys on motorbikes. A “heavy object” being dragged into a building was in fact a child.
The documents also offer a window into the process by which strikes are authorized and examined after the fact. The Pentagon’s assessment of what happened at Yabisat, for instance, makes clear that one official who reviewed the intelligence, the U.S.A.I.D. “representative,” warned that there could be civilian casualties. But it nonetheless states that “intelligence associated with the target did not reveal civilian pattern of life” at the target and that video taken before the strike did not reveal “any obvious sign of human activity” in the vicinity. (A spokesman for U.S.A.I.D. declined to comment and referred questions about the case to the Pentagon.) The report also found that the Yabisat strike “fully complied” with the law of war and even “went beyond what is required in terms of harm mitigation” by being conducted at night. Finally, the report recommended that a full investigation be conducted into the “target development and intelligence process” used to determine the “pattern of life” of civilians.
But the records can show us only so much. They tell us what the air war looked like from above, to the officials carrying it out. I knew that to fully understand what was happening, I also needed to see it from the ground. That is the subject of this article. I have spent the past five years traveling throughout the theaters of war in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, trying to gain a clear picture of the ground reality created by the air campaign. Starting in 2016, as the U.S. effort against ISIS intensified, I was in cities and towns including Mosul and Hawija, Raqqa and Tokhar. In 2019, as airstrikes occurred at a record pace in Afghanistan, I was meeting families from Helmand, Kandahar and Nangarhar, who gave testimony of night raids and airstrikes that turned even supporters of the embattled Afghan government away.
On the ground, I found a pattern of life that was very different from the one that the military described in its credibility assessments, and documented death rates that vastly exceeded U.S. Central Command’s own numbers. I also came away with a grim understanding of how America’s new high-tech air war looks to civilians who live beneath it — people in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan trying to raise families, earn a living and stay away from the fighting as best they can. For them, the sight of aerial surveillance drones patrolling the sky overhead is common. It might even provide comfort, suggesting that they were being carefully observed before any action was taken. But they also have come to understand that on occasion, and with no warning, a bomb might pierce the sky, inexplicably targeting their homes, killing their families and neighbors in a terrifying instant.
And they knew that if this were to happen, it was unlikely anyone would ever tell them why....."
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