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Published

February 22, 2022

Written by

Airwars Staff

As tensions mount over risks to civilians from Russia’s intervention in Ukraine, Airwars examines lessons from Moscow's seven year Syria war.

On February 21st Russian President Vladimir Putin announced he would recognise the independence of two separatist regions inside Ukraine, with Russian troops reportedly moving there – steps widely seen as edging towards a full conflict. If Russia does, as has been predicted, invade part or all of Ukraine in the coming days, there are reasons to believe it will be a particularly bloody conflict for civilians – as well as an opaque one.

Russian actions in Syria, which Airwars has tracked since they began in 2015, suggests the country’s military does little to mitigate civilian harm. And should any conflict intensify in Ukraine, local and international civilian harm monitoring is likely to be deeply challenged, an Airwars assessment has found.

Russia in Syria: bleak record on civilian harm

Moscow’s record in Syria offers insights into what to expect from any Russian intervention in Ukraine.

Since the first of tens of thousands of airstrikes in support of President Bashar Al-Assad’s government in September 2015, Airwars has recorded 4,621 incidents in which Russia is alleged to have caused civilian deaths or injuries.

From these, Airwars currently estimates that a minimum of at least 4,172 civilians have been killed by Russia alone – with at least 16,000 additional claimed civilian deaths occurring in events contested between both Russian and Syrian regime actions.

Overall, Russia has been linked to as many as 23,400 alleged civilian deaths in Syria. And more than 41,000 civilians have also allegedly been injured.

Russian involvement in Syria has been characterised by a heavy reliance on unguided munitions, including cluster bombs and thermobaric missiles. Videos uploaded by the Russian Ministry of Defence in the early years of the conflict demonstrated the low levels of accuracy achieved when using unguided munitions.

Moscow has also faced persistent and well-substantiated allegations that it deliberately targets health workers and medical facilities throughout Syria. Amnesty International has called this a “strategy of war” to push back rebels. Markets, civilian-only neighbourhoods and even refugee camps have also reportedly been targeted by Russian strikes.

More recently, Russia has been criticised for targeting civilian infrastructure, such as poultry farms and water treatment facilities in Idlib, which is the last opposition-held region in Syria. Rights groups say this may amount to war crimes. And Human Rights Watch has already raised concerns about the shelling of residential areas in Ukraine by Russian-backed groups, a tactic Russia has been repeatedly accused of pursuing in Syria.

Denial of casualties

Russia is far from the only foreign power that has killed civilians in Syria’s decade-long war – in fact four of the five permanent United Nations Security Council members continue to bomb the country.

Yet while there are deep flaws in the civilian harm policies applied by the United States, Britain, France and others, they do at least have known policies.

To date, Russia has not publicly accepted responsibility for a single civilian death during six and a half years of war in Syria. It is currently unclear if Russia has any comprehensive mechanisms in place for either preventing civilian harm from its air and artillery strikes, or for accounting for civilian casualties. Extensive reports of Moscow’s deliberate targeting of civilian infrastructure and hospitals suggests the opposite.

As #Putin maneuvers into position for serious hostilities in #Ukraine, let's bear in mind the recent record of the Russian military. As a baseline is one factoid:

– Russian 'actions' in #Syria since 2015 have killed 23,000+ civilians.https://t.co/JsrTI8kJKK pic.twitter.com/rL5duc9XqL

— Charles Lister (@Charles_Lister) February 22, 2022

Airwars has tried multiple times to engage with Russian authorities on civilian harm concerns, with no success. In 2018 President Putin was asked by Fox News about civilians killed by Russian airstrikes.  “You know, when there [is] warfare going on — and this is the worst thing that can happen [for] humankind – [victims] are inevitable, and there will always be a question of who’s to blame. I think it is the terrorist groups who are to blame who destabilized the situation in the country,” he noted.

Ukraine casualties: a challenge to track

Should war again come to Ukraine, a comprehensive review by Airwars suggests that ensuing civilian casualties risk being poorly documented.

A relatively low level conflict began in 2014, when Russia seized the Crimea Peninsula, and pro-Russian separatists later took over parts of the eastern Donbas region – areas internationally recognised as being within Ukraine’s borders.

Since then, even while fighting has continued at a low intensity, the quality of data about civilians killed and injured on both sides has remained poor. While the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights releases regular reports on human rights in Ukraine, it is not a comprehensive dataset. Estimates of civilian casualties are fragmented, and also do not focus on civilian harm resulting from both sides. The UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine (HRMMU) also documents and reports periodically on casualties. Its most recent report covers the period from February 1st – July 31st 2021.

Every Casualty Counts has also published a helpful update on Ukraine resources – including Summary versions in both Ukrainian and Russian of its important Standards for Casualty Recording.

Currently, official Ukrainian government sources only provide data on military casualties. Unfortunately, Ukrainian media and international organisations often then rely on UN and OSCE data in their reporting on civilian harm.

The Ukrainian Helsinki Human Rights Union – a network of 28 human rights NGOs in Ukraine – has been identifying and recording information on all casualties of the hybrid armed conflict in Ukraine since January 2014. This includes both Russian and Ukrainian military personnel and civilians. The data is available online in database and map format, at The Memorial Map.

The civilian death toll of the conflict since 2014 remains somewhat opaque. International media reports suggest that at least 10,000 people may have died to date, with some estimates as high as 50,000. Yet the latest OHCHR report counted only 3,092 civilian deaths up until July 31st 2021.

Overall casualty tolls include widespread reports of ongoing civilian harm in the Russian-backed separatist regions, resulting from Ukrainian actions. These have come via Donetsk Public Republic (DPR) Ombudsman on Human Rights reports; and Luhansk Public Republic (LPR) Ministry of Foreign Affairs updates. The latest aggregated data from DPR/LPR official sources was reported in November 2021 with estimates of nearly 9,000 civilians killed within DRP/LPR territory since April 2014.

Urban casualties

With dire predictions that tens of thousands of civilians could be killed in a full-scale conflict between Russia and Ukraine – particularly with its likely focus on urban areas – this would quickly overwhelm the capacities of casualty monitors at the United Nations and OSCE, as well as within Donbas, Airwars believes.

Other recent city battles – such as Mosul, Raqqa, Gaza and Tripoli – have seen sometimes extreme civilian casualties, even where some belligerents attempted to reduce harm.

John Spencer, chair of Urban Warfare Studies at West Point’s Modern War Institute, said he was concerned about large numbers of civilians potentially being killed in urban environments.

“Basically any possible Russian invasion route that has been discussed goes through heavily populated areas,” Spencer told Airwars.

“Hitting any target, no matter how important, in heavily populated neighbourhoods is likely to result in civilian harm”

Updated on February 23rd to include additional civilian harm monitoring sources.

▲ Russian and Belarus forces hold a joint live fire exercise, February 2022 (via Russian Ministry of Defence)

Published

February 9, 2022

Written by

Airwars Staff

Header Image

President Joe Biden in the Oval Office, November 2021 (Official White House Photo by Adam Schultz)

“For two decades, U.S. operations overseas have killed tens of thousands of civilians around the world – primarily from Brown, Black, and Muslim communities.”

On February 8th, Airwars joined its voice with 104 other organisations – including human rights, humanitarian, protection of civilians, peacebuilding, civil liberties, social and racial justice, government accountability, veterans, and faith based NGOs – to call for President Joe Biden to act urgently to overhaul US civilian harm policies and practises.

Recent New York Times investigations have documented significant shortcomings in how the US government – and its allies – monitors, investigates, and accounts for civilian harm as a result of its own military action. These have shown how the US military has routinely rejected civilian harm incidents, with decisions often riddled with basic errors, translation problems, or a lack of judgement and oversight. The Times reports echo years of similar findings by casualty monitors and human rights investigators.

There is now renewed attention within Congress and the Department of Defense on the vital changes needed, for example with the announcement of a Pentagon inquiry into how the military covered up civilian harm in Baghouz, and during recent sessions of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

“As an organisation committed to reducing civilian harm in the battlefield, we join our many partners in urging President Biden to publicly recognise systemic and structural flaws in the US military’s approach to civilian casualties,” says Airwars advocacy officer Georgia Edwards. “Fulfilling his earlier pledges on human rights and moral leadership, he must now set a new course for the US government and military which opens up pathways to justice and accountability for civilians affected by US military actions.”

▲ President Joe Biden in the Oval Office, November 2021 (Official White House Photo by Adam Schultz)

Published

January 28, 2022

Written by

Sanjana Varghese

Civilian harm reduction proposals cautiously welcomed by NGOs - but delivery will be key.

Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin has announced major proposals to overhaul how the US military monitors, assesses and documents when its actions kill civilians, a move warily welcomed by human rights and civilian harm mitigation NGOs.

Building on years of documentation by groups like the Syrian Network for Human Rights and Airwars, since late 2021 the New York Times has produced a series of deep investigations documenting systemic flaws in the way US military operations track casualties from their strikes. These revelations have prompted further scrutiny of the US military’s approach to civilian harm and raised pressures on the Biden administration to intervene.

In a directive released on January 27th, Austin announced a major shake-up of Department of Defense (DoD) policies on civilian harm reduction, including the establishment of a ‘civilian protection center of excellence’.

“The protection of innocent civilians in the conduct of our operations remains vital to the ultimate success of our operations and as a significant strategic and moral imperative,” Austin told reporters.

The directive gives the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, Dr Colin Kahl, 90 days to prepare a “comprehensive” Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Action Plan, or CHMRAP, that emphasises that “efforts to protect civilians are the responsibility of all leaders throughout the (DoD), always, and not only that of our commanders and personnel in the field in the execution of missions assigned.”

Austin’s directive also paves the way for the establishment of a new ‘civilian protection center of excellence’ which according to DoD, will enable it to “better expedite and institutionalize the advancement of our knowledge, practices, and tools for preventing, mitigating, and responding to civilian harm.”

And there are also plans to shake up how the Pentagon collects, shares and learns from casualty data; to re-examine the issue of condolence payments to victims; and to “Incorporate guidance for addressing civilian harm across the full spectrum of armed conflict into doctrine and operational plans, so that we are prepared to mitigate and respond to civilian harm in any future fight.”

The CHMRAP will then itself feed into a forthcoming Department of Defense Instruction, or DODI – a long awaited department-wide policy on civilian harm reduction. Airwars was among more than a dozen US and international NGOs which engaged extensively with the Pentagon on the DODI – which has been awaiting a signature since November 2020, when drafting was completed.

According to Austin, the DODI “should be informed by the CHMRAP and presented to the Secretary of Defense  for signature within 90 days of the CHMRAP’s conclusion” – meaning it should come into force by late July.

“Austin’s directive and the promised release of the DODI could be a crucial step towards standardising the US military’s approach to civilian harm assessments across US commands,” Emily Tripp, Airwars’ research manager, said.

Marc Garlasco, a military advisor at PAX and former civilian harm assessor with NATO, was among those cautiously welcoming the Pentagon announcements. “The memo sends a strong message that civilian harm mitigation (CHM) is not simply an issue for counterinsurgency. The US military is embracing CHM as it shifts to great power competition,” he said in a thread on Twitter.

🧵 on today's memo on "Improving Civilian Harm Mitigation & Response" by @SecDef. The memo is welcome focus from the highest level of @DeptofDefense showing leadership & taking ownership of the issue of civilian harm. Allow me to cover the salient points both pro & con 1/ #CIVCAS https://t.co/BJ83W6mXX9

— Marc Garlasco (@marcgarlasco) January 28, 2022

Critical study

On the same day that Secretary Austin announced his shakeup, the RAND Corporation also published a major Congressionally-mandated review of the US military’s approaches to mitigating civilian harm.

The deep-dive report, ‘US Department of Defense Civilian Casualty Policies and Procedures,’ argues that while the DoD may have made progress in some areas, “additional concrete steps are overdue.”

RAND points to several weaknesses in the DoD’s own policies and procedures – including that military officials often did not “sufficiently engage external sources” such as Airwars before they concluded investigations and designated them as non-credible; that investigations are often treated as independent of each other and so levels of detail between them vary widely; and that military assessments are often subject to long delays.

Several graphics in the report demonstrate the often extreme gap between US military estimates of civilian harm, and those of NGOs such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Airwars – noting that in Syria in 2019, more than 1,100 civilian deaths were locally alleged from US actions, yet with only 21 fatalities so far officially admitted.

The RAND report makes a number of recommendations, noting that many were called for several years ago. These include incorporating civilian harm assessments into intelligence estimates; reducing the eligibility conditions for those who can claim ex gratia payments; and implementing a standardised civilian harm reporting process across conflicts.

Airwars was among several stakeholders which met with RAND during the drafting of the report. “Many of the critical recommendations in this valuable study have long been requested by the NGO community and by Congress – and we urge the Biden Administration to now act swiftly,” Airwars director Chris Woods said.

▲ US Vice President Kamala Harris, President Joe Biden and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, tour the Pentagon on February 10th 2021 (Official White House photo by Adam Schultz)

Published

January 12, 2022

Written by

Airwars Staff

The longstanding Chair of Airwars Elizabeth Minor has stepped down due to ill health.

Elizabeth Minor, the longstanding voluntary Chair of Airwars, has sadly stepped down due to ill health, the organisation’s Board has announced.

Since joining the Airwars Board in summer 2016, Elizabeth has been a critical driver of the organisation’s many successes.

A leading conflict casualty recording expert, Elizabeth was a key contributor to Every Casualty Counts’ world first Standards for Casualty Recording; is a co-recipient of the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize for her work with ICAN in helping galvanize successful negotiations of a global treaty prohibiting nuclear weapons; and is a key adviser with Article 36, the international NGO focused on reducing harm from weapons.

Elizabeth Minor: stepping down due to ill health

Among many accomplishments during her time chairing Airwars’ volunteer Board, Elizabeth led on the development of the organisation’s secondary trauma reduction policy in partnership with the Dart Centre for Journalism and Trauma; and was a champion throughout of the highest ethical and research standards. She also chaired the Airwars Advisory Board.

“I’m very proud to have been able to contribute to Airwars’ Boards as the organisation has developed from a very small startup to the established, professional and widely respected organisation it is today,” Elizabeth said this week.

“Of the work we have done together, I’m particularly proud of our establishing procedures for trauma risk management within the organisation – which no similar NGO had comparable policies on at the time we did this work.

“I’m looking forward to seeing where Airwars goes next and collaborating in other capacities, and wish the team and Boards all the best. It has been wonderful to work with such an excellent group of people.”

Speaking about Elizabeth’s departure, Airwars’ outgoing Director Chris Woods described her as “a wonderful, passionate and expert Chair who along with her volunteer colleagues has made an immeasurable contribution to our successes as an organisation. Elizabeth will be very much missed, and we wish her the very best.”

New Board member announced

A new Chair is expected to be appointed at Airwars’ next Annual General Meeting in the Spring. In the meantime, Aditi Gupta has been seconded to the Board with the warm support of staff, volunteers and other Board members.

Director for the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Drones and Modern Conflict, Aditi is also Deputy Director for the UK Chapter of Women of Color Advancing Peace and Security. She previously managed the Freedom Online Coalition Secretariat, through her role at Global Partners Digital where she worked on strengthening civil society advocacy in cyber policy processes.

“I’ve closely followed Airwars’ vital work since their inception, and I’m so proud to work with them officially as a member of the Board. Over the years, the team at Airwars has built an unignorable evidence base of allegations, putting the experience of and impact borne by civilians in conflict firmly at the door of those who need to take accountability,” Aditi said this week.

“I wholeheartedly support this important work, and hope my experience in parliamentary engagement, organisational management, and efforts working on intersectional justice and equality issues will bolster their strength further.”

Aditi Gupta has now joined the Airwars Board

Update on Director recruitment

In a further update this week, the Board said that it has unfortunately not yet been successful in its efforts to appoint a successor to Chris Woods, the founding Director of Airwars who announced he would be stepping down after more than seven years in the role.

Brexit and COVID between them have made for a very challenging UK jobs market at present, and the Board says it is determined to ensure the best possible appointment as Director to take the organisation forward. In the meantime the Board has asked Chris Woods to stay on temporarily as Director.

“The Board is immensely grateful to Chris for agreeing to delay his departure for a few months while we complete our process to find the right leader to build on his incredible work, and ensure a smooth transition once they are appointed,” notes Airwars Treasurer James Hirst.

Further updates on the recruitment process are expected in the weeks ahead.

Published

December 9, 2021

Written by

Airwars Staff

Population density is greatest driver of civilian casualties from strikes in Gaza, Israel and Syria, new study shows.

In just eleven days in May 2021, Israeli air and artillery strikes on Gaza killed up to 10 times more civilians than the country’s eight-year bombing campaign against Iranian-linked forces in Syria, new Airwars research has found. The study raises critical concerns about the use of explosive weapons in populated areas.

The report – ‘Why did they bomb us?’ Urban civilian harm in Gaza, Syria and Israel from explosive weapons use’ – comprehensively documents the civilian toll of recent Israeli actions in Gaza and Syria, as well as from Palestinian rocket fire into Israel during May. Published jointly in Arabic, Hebrew and English, the 16,000 word report employs Airwars’ standard methodology to examine how, when, and where civilians are killed in urban conflicts.

The report chronicles civilian casualties from two very different military campaigns by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).

Among the report’s key findings are:

    Across the three conflict areas, both the targeting approach and the population density of those areas bombed were critical drivers of civilian harm, leading to profoundly different outcomes for civilians. In Gaza between 151 and 192 civilians were likely killed as a result of IDF actions in May 2021, mostly in densely populated areas. At least a third of those killed were children. Between 15 and 20 civilian deaths in Gaza were additionally likely to have resulted from Palestinian misfires. 10 civilians were directly killed in Israel in May 2021 resulting from Palestinian militant actions – with most casualties occurring when rockets penetrated Israel’s ‘Iron Dome’ defence system and reached cities and towns. In Syria, an extensive IDF air campaign since 2013 has had a far smaller impact on civilians. Israeli strikes have likely killed at least 14 and up to 40 Syrian civilians, with attacks mostly focused on exclusively military targets, away from population centres. Airwars has produced an interactive map showing its findings for Gaza, which can be viewed here. The map allows users to navigate through 128 individual assessments of civilian harm in Gaza, and provides a lasting testimony to the civilian victims of the conflict.

 

Israel’s longtime rival Iran has been active within near neighbour Syria since civil war erupted a decade ago, with Tehran helping to prop up President Bashar al-Assad’s regime. Beginning in January 2013, Israel has periodically carried out attacks within Syria to counter Iranian entrenchment. Strikes have targeted Iranian and Syrian troops, as well as militias from multiple countries aligned with Tehran.

Airwars has tracked Israeli strikes in Syria for several years as part of its long running monitoring of actions there by all foreign actors. It has now published interactive mapping of all locally reported allegations against Israel in Syria. It’s believed to be the first comprehensive assessment of the civilian toll of an extensive but secretive air campaign.

Airwars researchers also recorded civilian harm from Israeli military strikes during the May 2021 eruption of violence in Gaza, alongside harm caused by rockets fired into Israel by Palestinian militants.

An image from Airwars’ interactive map of civilian harm in Gaza

Choice of targets

Since 2008 Israel and Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip have fought four major combat operations. Airwars researchers looked at the latest conflict in May 2021 in order to provide comparative data with the more limited civilian harm events being reported from Israeli strikes in Syria.

After compiling all community-reported civilian harm events in the conflicts in Syria and Gaza, Airwars researchers found that one of the critical explainers behind the dramatically different outcomes for civilians was where the IDF chooses to bomb.

According to local reports, the great majority of Israeli actions in Syria have targeted military assets such as air bases, troop convoys and weapons stores, away from major cities and towns. Hundreds of militants were killed in these operations, for the most part in military settings.

In Gaza, the picture was very different. Strikes routinely hit residential neighbourhoods, and militants were frequently targeted in non-military settings: Airwars identified 17 locally reported incidents in which militants were targeted in residential buildings and in which civilians were killed or injured nearby. In those incidents, local reports found that between 27 and 33 civilians were killed, with more than 100 injured. One third of those killed in the Gaza Strip were children.

Airwars also identified between 56 and 68 civilians killed when the IDF targeted what they said was a Hamas militant tunnel network beneath heavily populated areas in Gaza City, leading the buildings above to collapse. Most of the deaths came from a single incident: in the early morning of May 16th, at least 41 civilians were killed in strikes on the residential al-Wahda street, of which up to 18 were children.

Riyad Ishkontana, 42, lost his wife and four of his children in the al-Wahda street attack. He had spent the days leading up to the bombing reassuring the young family they were safe: their building was in an area of professionals and shops, he told them. But in the early hours of the morning, as Ishkontana was out getting snacks, the building was hit. Only one of his children survived. “I wish I never left,” he told The New York Times.

Population density mapping

Airwars also mapped all civilian harm allegations in Gaza, Syria and Israel against population density, and found a second clear driver of civilian harm: the more heavily populated an area, the more civilians were killed.

Airwars’s new landing page comparing Israeli actions in Syria and Gaza

In Gaza, one of the most heavily populated places in the world, more than 1,500 declared Israeli air and artillery strikes hit the territory in just 11 days. This dramatically increased the likelihood of civilian harm. Even within Gaza, there was a clear trend – the more heavily populated a neighbourhood, the more civilians died there.

The trend was also noticeable in Syria. While the scale of civilian harm from IDF strikes was much lower than in Gaza, it is still overwhelmingly located in heavily populated areas. Around 45 percent of estimated civilian casualties from Israeli strikes since 2013 occurred in the capital Damascus. In Israel, 17 of the 33 reported civilian harm incidents resulting from Palestinian rockets also took place in more densely populated areas, Airwars found.

Population density in Gaza may have given some a false sense of security. On May 12th in Gaza, airstrikes killed Reema Saad, who was four months pregnant, alongside her two children and husband. The family had decided to stay in their apartment because they believed the densely populated neighbourhood would be immune from targeting, Reema’s mother Samia told Middle East Eye.

Airwars mapping of population density and reported civilian harm for Gaza, May 2021

Urban deaths part of a global trend

The new findings support what Airwars has found across all conflicts it monitors: that using wide area effect explosive weapons in populated urban areas leads to high levels of civilian deaths and injuries.

This phenomenon is certainly not restricted to actions by the IDF, or by Palestinian militant groups. Indeed, the Gaza campaign in particular can be seen as part of a profoundly worrying trend in which nations and others conduct intensive military actions in urban areas, often with devastating results.

High civilian casualties in Gaza are symptomatic of an escalating and troubling global military trend in the use of wide area effect weapons in populated areas (sometimes known as EWIPA) – seen from Gaza to Mosul, Aleppo to Raqqa, and Tripoli to Kabul. These latest findings lend further urgency to an ongoing international push to restrict their use in a United Nations-brokered Political Declaration by nations, expected to be finalised in early 2022.

“Our latest study corroborates what we have found with other large scale conflicts in Iraq, Syria and elsewhere: even technologically advanced militaries kill large numbers of civilians when attacks focus on urban centres,” Chris Woods, director at Airwars, said. “Despite repeated assurances to the contrary, it’s clear that ‘precision warfare’ cannot sufficiently mitigate civilian harm.”

“Stark differences in civilian deaths and injuries from Israeli actions in Syria and in the Gaza Strip clearly illustrate that the most significant driver of civilian harm remains the use of explosive weapons in populated areas. The single most effective way to reduce the number of civilians dying in warfare would be to restrict the use of such dangerous wide area effect weapons on urban centres.”

How the new research was carried out

The Airwars report is the result of months of meticulous research carried out by a team of local language researchers, geolocators and specialist assessors.

Thousands of local media, social media and official sources documenting civilian harm as it happened were identified and archived by Airwars’ team of Arabic-, Hebrew- and English-language researchers in relation to the May 2021 conflict in Gaza and Israel. Researchers also continue to monitor and archive all civilian harm allegations in Syria resulting from Israeli strikes since 2013.

Airwars has then assessed the civilian harm from each incident in Gaza, Syria and Israel using the same standard methodology it applies across all conflicts it monitors. Its approach can best be described as remote, original language hyperlocal monitoring of casualty claims by affected communities – along with a review of broader reports and claims by belligerents, media and other investigators. All assessments are viewed as provisional – that is, any credible new information relating to an event will be subsequently added, potentially affecting our understanding of the incident.

Full resource list

The full report available in English, Hebrew and Arabic

Interactive mapping of civilian harm in Gaza

Video documenting key findings

Full dataset for civilian harm from Israeli strikes in Gaza and Syria

Full dataset for civilian harm from Palestinian rocket fire in Israel

▲ A child uses his mobile device in the ruins of a building in Beit Lahia, Gaza Strip on May 26th 2021. © Mohamed Zaanoun

Published

December 3, 2021

Written by

Georgia Edwards and Megan Karlshoej-Pedersen

Official Sorgdrager Commission is reportedly not functioning as intended - with doubts over a planned trip to Hawijah

More than six years after much of the Iraqi city of Hawijah was devastated following a Dutch airstrike against ISIS, fresh revelations point to major ongoing problems for those seeking answers to the disaster in which at least 70 civilians died.

Speaking at the annual PAX for Peace conference on the protection of civilians in conflict on December 1st, the Mayor of Hawijah, Subhan Al Jabouri, gave a moving talk on the continued lack of recovery in the city. He also revealed that there is so far no sign of the Dutch Government’s promised recovery fund and that he was not aware of the Sorgdrager Commission – the official Dutch review expected to learn lessons from Hawijah.

“The disappointment is great,” Mayor al-Jabouri told delegates. Aid has been promised via two UN agencies, yet there appears to be little contact with city authorities: “I don’t know who they are in touch with, but it’s not with us. I don’t know what they’re going to do either.”

Mayor of #Hawija: My expectations are the same as my people. We want an ethical conversation with the Dutch government. And an official apology.

Join the conversation: https://t.co/aU0qqskGMN#PAXPoC2021 #Hawija #Iraq #CivilianHarm pic.twitter.com/iksxsqX5HG

— PAX Protection of Civilians (@PAXPoC) December 2, 2021

 

In the same week, Dutch news organisation NOS revealed that the Sorgdrager Commission is experiencing major challenges in fulfilling its own mandate, with two out of three members of the commission apparently no longer able to give time on a regular basis. There are major doubts too about whether a proposed Commission trip to Hawijah in January might go ahead, with the Dutch defence ministry saying it is concerned about safety.

The head of the commission, Winnie Sorgdrager, has herself acknowledged the importance of speaking to Hawijans directly. In response to the Dutch MoD apparently refusing to allow members of the commission access to Hawija, she told NOS: “If you want to investigate something closely, you must also have spoken to people there. But if it’s said ‘it’s too dangerous there,’ we need to reconsider our request.”

In June 2015, the Royal Netherlands Air Force launched an airstrike on an ISIS IED factory in Hawijah. The huge explosion that followed killed more than 70 civilians, destroyed hundreds of homes and businesses, and deprived thousands of civilians of their long term livelihoods. Six years on, Hawjiah remains a shadow of what it once was. Take the wrong turn at the roundabout at the entrance to the city, and you will face a crater several meters deep.

While the Sorgdrager Commission continues to prevaricate about visiting the city, a joint research project by the University of Utrecht and PAX For Peace has done just that. The independent Hawijah investigation has now revealed some of its own provisional field findings at the recent PAX conference.

New PAX/ University of Utrecht research undertaken this year in Hawijah, expected to be released in full next year, interviewed 119 civilians in the city who either lost their loved ones or sustained injuries or material damage; and looked at the reverberating effects of the strike. The study also examines how – six and a half years later – civilian lives are still impacted heavily, with chronic issues from physical injuries to psychological trauma and damage to livelihoods. When the PAX/ UU team asked civilians on the ground what they most wanted, the response was clear: “Everybody wanted an apology from the Dutch – a formal apology by the Dutch government and by the parties who carried out the strike”.

“This is neither meaningful transparency nor accountability and the Dutch Ministry of Defence, the Parliament and the Sorgdrager Commission know it. Everyone involved must do better in the name of the 70 civilians the Netherlands killed more than six years ago in Hawijah – and take meaningful lessons forward centring civilian protection in future missions,” says Jessica Dorsey, the chair of Airwars Stichting.

The long string of cities destroyed by Western militaries in recent years, with great human loss as a result, are not unusual mistakes, Professor Lauren Gould from the University of Utrecht asserted at the recent PAX conference. They form a pattern, which undermines the very premise of remote warfare as being “[the most] precise and careful campaign in the history of warfare on this planet.” Yet instead, “War is inherently about destruction. There will never be such a thing as clean, precise war.”

Hawijans meet with PAX investigators during a recent visit in 2021 (Image courtesy of Roos Boer)

▲ PAX team view wreckage and destruction still affecting the city of Hawijah in 2021 (Image courtesy of Mustafa Aljanaby Al Ghad)

Published

November 4, 2021

Written by

Georgia Edwards and Megan Karlshoej-Pedersen

Airwars speaks to PAX about their recent visit to the still-devastated city of Hawijah in Iraq, and interviews with 119 survivors.

Airwars’ Netherlands-based advocacy partner, PAX for Peace, is currently undertaking research in the Iraqi city of Hawijah, where a 2015 US-led Coalition strike against ISIS led to the deaths of at least 70 civilians and the injuring of hundreds more. On the night of June 2nd-3rd 2015, Dutch F-16s bombed an ISIS Vehicle-Borne Improvised Devices (VBIED) factory in Hawijah. Secondary explosions then destroyed a large area of the city. After withholding its role in the deadly event for more than four years, the Dutch government eventually took public responsibility in November 2019.

PAX’s new research will examine many of the questions that came from the joint report that Airwars and PAX released in October 2020, ‘Seeing Through the Rubble’. We conducted a Q&A with the PAX team to hear more about their recent visit to Hawijah and upcoming report.  As you’ll read from eyewitness reports in this article, the Dutch must urgently hold themselves truly accountable to civilian harm caused from their tragic actions in Hawijah, and other incidents with the US-led Coalition in Iraq and Syria.

The Airwars’ Advocacy Team spoke to Roos Boer, Project Leader for Humanitarian Disarmament at PAX, and Saba Azeem, Project Leader for the Human Security Survey (Iraq). 

Airwars: Thank you very much for taking the time to talk to us. To start off, can you describe for someone who doesn’t already know the details of the story, what happened in Hawijah on June 2nd, 2015?

Roos: So on this particular night, a Coalition airstrike targeted an ISIS munitions factory in Hawijah, which was located in the industrial area. The strike was conducted by the Dutch. In this factory, a very large supply of TNT [dynamite] was stored, which detonated after the first impact. When we were talking to people there, people described that it felt like a nuclear attack in terms of the destruction.

Saba: It is also important to understand that there is no clear demarcation such as ‘this is solely an industrial area’, and ‘this is solely a residential area’ – they are often quite intertwined. So to say that it only targeted the industrial area and that there were no residential areas around would also be a very narrow description of the context.

Secondly, there was about 18,000 kilos of TNT in the munitions factory which exploded. It left a crater 11 meters deep and 20 meters wide. And apparently in Kirkuk, which is 50 kilometers away, the shock was measured at 4.3 on the Richter scale. That’s how big it was.

What were the immediate consequences for the local population, and how did the Dutch government and military initially respond to the high number of civilian casualties resulting from this strike?

Roos: The explosions directly led to at least 70 civilian deaths and hundreds of civilians being injured. In addition to that direct impact on civilians, 400-500 buildings were reportedly destroyed; this includes homes and schools, factories and shops.  The electricity transmission station was located in the area, but also many damaged roads, et cetera. So there was a lot of immediate harm but it’s also leading to longer term impacts where services are disrupted.

It’s also very important to mention that it was a really big chaotic event. People didn’t know what was going on, they couldn’t see anything, there was dust everywhere, bodies and body parts everywhere, and this led to a lot of trauma for people. The psychosocial harm has been immense.

You also asked how the Dutch government responded and that is a very interesting question because they didn’t. It was not until 2019, so that’s four years after the attack, following publications by the NOS and the NRC, who are part of the media in the Netherlands, that the Dutch Ministry of Defense publicly took responsibility for the air strikes. So there has been a big lack of transparency. They assessed in their CDE [Collateral Damage Estimation] that the secondary explosions would not extend beyond the industrial area, which was not purely an industrial area, as was already mentioned.

After the attack in September 2015, it was announced that they will increase the scrutiny of targets in populated areas which have the expected potential for secondary explosions.

It sparked, of course, a very intense debate in the Netherlands because the Parliament also was not informed about the events. So there were a lot of questions being asked in Parliament about transparency and accountability. As a result, the then-Dutch Minister of Defense, [Ank] Bijleveld, announced greater transparency in informing Parliament about investigations into civilian casualties. The Dutch government also announced that they would contribute $4 million US dollars to rebuilding the infrastructure. They very clearly were not interested in giving individual compensation, but just in giving a more general contribution to the reconstruction of Hawijah. This was promised 10 months ago, and we understand the money is being contracted through the UNDP/FFS [United Nations Development Programme’s Funding Facility of Stabilisation] , and the IOM [International Organization for Migration]. However, we haven’t seen much of the money being spent – yet – or contributing to the people we spoke to in Hawijah.

Saba: And linking to what Roos already said, the Dutch have claimed responsibility, but they have not apologized, which is quite appalling. In terms of the destruction, we have seen eight car showrooms completely destroyed, the Hawijah municipality department building, the electricity department building, the civil defence department [building and vehicles], four ice factories, at least five or six brick factories, one flour mill all have been destroyed. An estimated 1,900 people have lost their livelihoods. Also the [Dutch] scope of calculating the casualties has been very narrow. The area was besieged, and the general hospital was under ISIS control. So they were not treating any civilian injuries or deaths. So where does this number come from?

Large areas of civilian infrastructure are still destroyed (Image via Roos Boer)

You mentioned that the Dutch government only started talking about this in 2019 after journalists exposed the story. But do you have a sense of when they knew about the civilian harm that had occurred?

Saba: From what we’ve heard, the Minister of Defense knew within a few weeks. We did see that after the strike quite a lot of news channels reported it, even the ISIS news channel at the time, released footage which European channels then used. There was also a press conference by a US General saying that there was a munition factory in Hawijah that was hit. So I think it was within days of this happening, the Coalition and the international community knew of the airstrike. Whether the Dutch knew that they were behind it, that’s a different question.

Roos: Regardless of whether they did or didn’t know; if they knew, then it’s rather problematic that they didn’t report it, if they didn’t know, to me that is very problematic too because they are responsible for assessing the impacts of their weapons. So just as a separate remark about this.

In October last year, PAX and Airwars released our report, ‘Seeing Through the Rubble’. What were the main findings from this report?

Roos: ‘Seeing Through the Rubble’ was a joint report of Airwars and PAX. We examined the longer term effects on civilian populations of the international military campaigns in Mosul, Raqqa, and Hawijah. We especially looked at the use of explosive weapons in populated areas, because we know there is a worldwide pattern of how these weapons in populated areas impact civilians. The longer term effects and reverberating effects are often under-reported. But we know that when explosive weapons are being used in populated areas, nine out of 10 casualties are civilians. So that’s a very alarming number.

And [‘Seeing Through the Rubble’] painted a rather grim image of how the destruction was still there, how difficult it is for people to pick up their lives if their cities are destroyed by our militaries. And then I think it was a good snapshot of the situation. But when we started researching, it only created more questions, so I was very happy that we could continue our research into Hawjiah, and visit the location. And now Saba is leading on a much more in-depth piece of research interviewing many of the survivors in Hawijah. I am sure she can tell you more about it.

Roos Boer presents the PAX/ Airwars report ‘Seeing through the Rubble’ to Subhan Al Jabouri, the Mayor of Hawijah (Image via Roos Boer)

You’ve recently been engaging in this research on the ground in Hawijah. It would be great to hear about what you’re currently researching and how you’re going about investigating this, in a bit more detail.

Saba: The research, which started in February this year, is being done by a consortium led by PAX, with the Intimacies of Remote Warfare at Utrecht University and al-Ghad League for Woman and Child Care as partners.

Out of the 119 civilians interviewed thus far, 62 lost their loved ones, whereas the rest either sustained injuries or material damage.  The research is looking at these reverberating effects and examining how – six and a half years later – civilian lives are still impacted heavily by the airstrikes. Because this was a besieged area, those who were injured were either not treated in a timely manner or not treated properly, which have resulted in very, very chronic issues.

The psychological trauma cannot even be measured. For instance, there is a gentleman we met, who lost seven members of his family including five of his children. How do you rebuild your life from there? Or the child who has had his face burned off and he is being bullied in school and has been forced to drop out because of this bullying – how can you even compensate for that? So it was heartbreaking hearing these individual stories, and meeting the people in person was quite overwhelming. But it also showed us how we failed as the humanitarian community in actually addressing these issues, which were caused by Dutch actions.

Roos: One of the interviewees asked me directly, “Are we less human than you are? If this factory was located in a Dutch city, would you have done it in the same way?”  And those, I think, are very spot on questions and very rightfully asked.

Saba: And to say that civilians are not aware, that is a complete understatement. Every person we met, whether they were authorities or civilians on the ground knew exactly what happened. We were asked how long it took for victims of Srebrenica to get their compensations, so they could calculate how long it would take them. So these are very well-informed people. Everybody wanted an apology from the Dutch – a formal apology by the Dutch government and by the parties who carried out the strike, as well as individual compensation.

Thank you for that. So did your findings confirm the conclusions from ‘Seeing Through the Rubble’?

Saba: This research confirmed the findings and then also added a very direct civilian voice to it. I think so far, most of the studies that have been taking place are usually looking at data from a distance, or maybe interviewing three to five civilians. But now we have the voices from over 119.

Does Hawijah continue to be affected by the strike, and is it still obvious when you visit the city today?

Saba: For us, that was one of the most appalling, for lack of a better term, aspect; that six and a half years later, you still see the rubble on the ground, which until now has not been cleared. You see that the hospital is still – a very major part of it – in prefabricated containers. We met a woman whose daughter was injured in the attack. She was 14 then, so about 20 now. And she was also worried that now that she has these prominent scars because of the injuries, who would marry her? Children, because their parents died or were injured, now can’t go to school, because they have to earn a livelihood. We got reports, which are yet to be confirmed, of children in primary schools, who are suffering from chronic diseases, like heart issues, high blood pressure and diabetes, because they’re so stressed by their trauma that happened six and a half years ago. So the city is very much completely at a standstill and it is still suffering from these aftershocks of what happened in June 2015.

Roos: You see a wounded city. It’s not like a huge city, but it’s a city with this roundabout, and if you take the wrong turn, you are in a pile of rubble. If you take the other turn, you see so many small commercial activities taking place. It is a wounded city with multiple faces. And the people that were affected, that were injured, they sold everything that they still had, to be able to pay for this first [medical] treatment [after the strike], including shelling injuries or amputations. They had nothing before, then they sold their jewellery or whatever they had to pay for this treatment and after that they were left with nothing. And they basically live off what other people are giving to them. It’s a very hopeless feeling if you talk to these people.

Saba: Like the hospital, for instance, it used to have a surgical wing, and now they don’t have the capacity for conducting surgeries anymore. They do not even have medicines for chronic diseases like diabetes or high blood pressure. People now have to travel 50 kilometers to Kirkuk, or have to spend their own money to get medicines [from private hospitals or pharmacies] that they need on a daily basis. They had 5,400 teachers before, and now there’s only 3,200 left. So you see these, these very visible sort of things as well. Giving numbers is one thing, but then when you meet the humans and you can paint a very clear picture of how these civilians feel. We met this gentleman who tried to commit suicide twice, because he used to be one of the richest people in Hawijah and then he lost everything.. And when we asked him, so all of this has happened and how would you like to sort of address it all? And he said, “All I want is death because I am done living.” How do you respond to that?

PAX are shown around the wreckage and destruction still affecting the city of Hawijah (Image via Roos Boer)

Thank you for depicting these long lasting effects and very human tragedies. So finally, I know you’ve touched on this a little bit, but I thought maybe you could just tell us about how the people of Hawijah think of the way that the Dutch have held themselves to account over this incident.

Saba: Well, as Roos already mentioned one of the questions we were asked was if the Dutch had different definitions of human rights? They were saying that you expect things like that from ISIS, which is a terrorist entity, but you don’t expect things like this from the Dutch, who are champions of human rights.

We have also had statements saying that they do not trust the Dutch government, however they do trust the Dutch justice system. So if they’re not given the justice that they deserve, then they will go to court and they will try and get their rights through the formal legal system. But then, across the board, whether it is authorities or whether it’s civilians, they do name the Dutch very outwardly and very clearly.

For instance, in the debate in the Netherlands, we heard that the intelligence was given to the Dutch by the Americans. So when I asked them why not blame the Americans and they actually had a very interesting answer, which we do not disagree with: They said the American intelligence was flawed during the Gulf war, the American intelligence was proved wrong in 2003, when they said there were weapons of mass destruction. So why are the Dutch still trusting the Americans? The person or entity carrying out the airstrike, they also have their own own minds and their own eyes. So why aren’t they trusting their own facilities for that measure?

Thank you very much for sharing this incredible research with us. Those are all our questions. Do you have anything final to add before we end?

Saba: The research report will hopefully be out in January. Hopefully we can add a lot more to the debate and also show multiple entities around the world, whether it’s NATO states or other nations joining international coalitions, or take part in this kind of warfare, to not only take the direct casualties or the direct harm into account. These reverberating effects often are even worse [and longer lasting] than the direct effects. So in the targeting process we firmly believe that this also needs to be integrated.

It will be on our site and on the Intimacies of Remote Warfare website. And there will also be a public launch.

And we will definitely share it widely on our social media as well. So it should be readily available to anyone looking for it. Thank you very much both of you for your time!

Saba: Thank you for, for touching on this important subject. Thank you.

The PAX team vist the destruction in Hawijah (Image via Mustafa Aljanaby, Al Ghad ©)

▲ Six years after a Dutch airstrike devastated Hawijah, damage and destruction remains widespread (Image via Roos Boer, PAX)

Published

October 14, 2021

Written by

Airwars Staff and Center for Civilians in Conflict (CIVIC)

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U.S. Army soldiers watch from an observation post in Nangarhar province, Afghanistan (Image via U.S. Army)

Last week marked twenty years since the US-led invasion of Afghanistan began, following which the UK, Netherlands and other NATO members began their own presence with the declared aim to install “security, stability and the rule of law.”

This anniversary happens after last month saw a wave of resignations by senior Ministerial staff and frank debate across Parliaments in Europe, including in relation to the sudden and chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan. 

Airwars and Center for Civilians in Conflict (CIVIC) urge the new ministers to take a frank look at the mistakes of their predecessors, and understand what could have been done differently. The public and political criticism surrounding the withdrawal of the United States and its allies from Afghanistan and the devastating humanitarian crisis unfolding in Afghanistan, sends a strong message about the urgent need for stronger approaches to civilian harm mitigation, transparency and accountability policies in future military operations.

We encourage the new ministers in the Netherlands and in the UK to learn about the risks to civilians caught in armed conflict in planning phases for any military operations, so they may work towards their protection. We also call on them to commit to improving transparency and accountability for civilian harm, including by consistently tracking, investigating, publicly acknowledging, and amending harm through compensation payments, apologies, and other offerings in accordance with victims’ needs and preferences.  We extend the same call to the United States and other NATO nations. This is especially important because the risk to civilians in Afghanistan is not unique. In fact, in the 20 years since the terrorist attacks of 9/11, we have seen risks to civilians multiply and deepen in many parts of the world. War is now increasingly fought in urban environments with long-lasting and lethal effects. NATO members, increasingly hesitant to deploy “boots on the ground,” have relied instead on supporting local forces through air support – even when local partners may lack the capacity to protect civilians. And multiple countries have claimed the power to use force anywhere in the world, including outside recognized war zones and including through the use of armed drones, sometimes devastating civilian communities in the process.

As risks to civilians have increased, transparency and accountability for harm is diminishing.  In Iraq and Syria, the UK still only admits one civilian death over the course of its operation, despite declaring thousands of UK airstrikes and despite Airwars’ own assessment showing that at least 8,300 civilians have likely been killed by the US-led Coalition.

We urge all NATO nations to take heed of these past mistakes, which had devastating and continuing consequences on the lives of civilians. As Liz Truss starts as the new UK Foreign Secretary, and as the new Dutch Minister of Defence, Henk Kamp, and Foreign Minister, Ben Knapen, begin their tenure, we urge them to immediately take the following steps:

    Recognise publicly and through a revision of doctrine, the imperative of civilian harm mitigation, transparency, and accountability in all aspects of defence and foreign affairs, including in their nations’ own operations as well as “train, advise, and assist” missions. Prioritise resourcing for the monitoring and tracking of civilian harm in current and future military deployments. Commit to investigating, publicly recognizing, and amending legacy civilian harm from Afghanistan and other operations over the past 20 years, including by issuing compensation or solatia payments; and commit to applying these policies and practices in all future operations. Adopt and implement clear policies for civilian harm tracking, mitigation and response through consultation with civil society experts, which are adequately resourced at all areas of deployment. Incorporate open-source information from civil society, the media, and other external sources into civilian harm assessments and investigations. Publish the specific date; location; munition type used; and nature of target for all weapon deployments in the anti-ISIS Coalition from 2014 to the present day and in all future operations. Publish regular reports on civilian harm allegations from past and current missions. Engage with conflict-affected civilians (including civil society groups and communities) on issues pertaining to civilian protection and civilian harm mitigation, both at the capital level and in countries of deployment. This includes the establishment of a regular dialogue with civil society, as well as establishing safe channels of communication with conflict-affected civilians to discuss protection concerns. As part of all lessons learned processes around the war in Afghanistan, withdrawal, and evacuation, identify gaps in civilian harm mitigation as well as gaps in civil-military coordination that may have hampered the capacity of civil society and at-risk Afghans to access safe and secure air evacuation options.
▲ U.S. Army soldiers watch from an observation post in Nangarhar province, Afghanistan (Image via U.S. Army)

Published

October 12, 2021

Written by

Georgia Edwards

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The UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office

Open letter from Airwars calls on new UK Foreign Secretary Liz Truss to work collaboratively with Ministry of Defence on the protection of civilians affected by UK military actions.

Last week marked 20 years since the US-led ‘War on Terror’ began. The conflict has been defined by a series of major military actions in which the UK has supported the US and allies in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. The recent chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan saw the reshuffle of Dominic Raab from the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, amid widespread criticism for the way millions of Afghans were left in uncertain – and concerning – situations.

The UK continues to operate in Iraq and Syria with the US-led Coalition against ISIS to this day – yet refuses to hold itself truly accountable for civilians harmed by its actions in these countries, nor in historical incidents in Afghanistan.

Despite various commitments from the UK government to “investigate any credible reports that the UK actions may have caused civilian harm”, there have been insufficient efforts to work with civil society organisations; to ensure transparent cross-departmental work to make this feasible; nor to put legislation in place to truly offer change.

As Britain’s new Foreign Secretary, Rt. Hon. Liz Truss now has the opportunity to respond to the urgent need for stronger approaches to civilian harm mitigation and monitoring policies which will allow the UK to catch up with its allies, and become more accountable for its actions. 

Airwars this week sent the Foreign Secretary an open letter outlining key improvements we believe are needed now. The full text of our letter is reprinted below.

 

October, 8th  2021

Rt. Hon. Liz Truss Secretary of State for the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office King Charles Street Whitehall London SW1A 2AH

cc. Rt. Hon. Ben Wallace, Secretary of State for Defence

RE: Open letter from Airwars to the new Secretary of State for the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, calling for the FCDO and MoD to work together and improve protections for civilians resulting from UK military actions. 

Dear Rt. Hon. Liz Truss,

We would like to congratulate you on your promotion to Foreign Secretary. We look forward to working with you to improve UK policy to protect civilians in conflict.

This year marks the 20th anniversary of the US-led so-called War on Terror. This conflict has been defined as you know by a series of major military actions in which the UK has supported the US and other allies, in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. These countries have been among those consistently most dangerous for civilians over the last two decades, with military actions involving explosive weapons increasingly taking place in urban environments.

Airwars recently found, for example, that at least 22,679 and potentially as many 48,308 civilians have likely been killed by US-led strikes over the last twenty years.

In light of the recent chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, we are concerned about the UK government’s potential shift to remote warfare in that country, noting the Defence Secretary’s comments on 7th September that “I’ll do whatever I have to do to protect citizens’ lives and our interests and our allies, when we’re called upon to do so, wherever that may be.”

We reiterate our calls for robust and transparent mechanisms to mitigate, monitor, and investigate all instances of civilian harm potentially resulting from UK actions, before these actions are considered. As it stands, the UK is systematically failing to hold itself accountable for  civilians harmed by its own actions in the War on Terror; and there have been insufficient efforts to adequately investigate historical instances flagged by monitoring organisations such as Airwars.

The most striking example of this is the UK’s insistence that there is only evidence of a single civilian casualty from the entire campaign against ISIS within the US-led Coalition in Syria and Iraq. Our own independent monitoring suggests that at least 8,300 and as many as 13,000 civilians have likely been killed so far by the US-led Coalition, including from thousands of British airstrikes. The failure of the MoD to more accurately understand and account for civilian harm on the ground from its own actions places the UK dangerously behind key allies, including the US and Netherlands.

Below we note our main concerns, and reiterate our urgent call for a more open and collaborative approach from the FCDO on civilian harm mitigation. We would very much welcome a meeting to discuss these issues at your earliest convenience.

Improving transparency and accountability

As conflicts have changed over the past two decades, the UK has focused increasingly on assisting local forces through airstrikes, rather than through large-scale deployment of ground forces. Yet such airpower-focused conflicts  are much less accountable to civilians on the ground, we and our partners believe.

UK policies to protect civilians have fallen behind other allies such as the US Department of Defense and the Dutch Ministry of Defence, which have made significant legislation-driven improvements. For example, since 2018, the US DoD has been legally obliged to report annually to Congress on all civilians it deems have been killed by US actions in the past 12 months. No such legislation exists in the UK; and key recommendations from the Chilcot report, “to make every reasonable effort to identify and understand the likely and actual effects of its military actions on civilians,” have yet to be implemented.

We are also concerned that the current MoD review methodology used to determine only one civilian casualty from its ongoing seven year campaign against ISIS in Iraq and Syria is in part a result of the exceptionally high ‘proof’ threshold currently applied within the Department when assessing civilian harm claims. In other words, this low estimate of civilian harm is a reflection of poor evidence gathering and analysis, not of effective strategies to protect civilians.

The FCDO leads the UK Approach to the Protection of Civilians in Armed Conflict. Yet despite commitments made to “investigate any credible reports that the UK actions may have caused civilian harm,” there has yet to be any published evidence of change in its approach.  There was no mention of how the MoD and FCDO intend to protect affected communities in the recent Integrated Review, nor how the “Conflict Centre” will work cross-department, or be resourced for these areas.

1. Will the MoD consider assessing its current methodology to determine civilian harm and publish the results of these assessments?

2. Will the FCDO publish its most recent assessment to show how it plans to meet commitments in the UK Approach to the Protection of Civilians?

3. Will the FCDO and MoD publish a document showing how they both intend to work together on civilian harm mitigation, including with the Conflict Centre and conflict strategy?

 

Meaningful collaboration with civil society organisations using open source data

The MoD and FCDO commitment to work with civil society organisations to better protect civilians in regions where the UK is operating has decreased to concerning levels. Airwars has been keen to offer meaningful feedback on policies and operations and to work together with MoD to investigate and re-investigate instances of potential civilian harm when it has been flagged from our monitoring and investigations. For example, the UK still admits evidence of only one civilian casualty from its actions as part of the US-led Coalition. We note with concern that recently, the Pentagon wrongly claimed responsibility to Congress for civilian harm from a series of historical strikes, that were actually carried out by its allies, including the UK.

Airwars remains the primary public reference for locally reported reported civilian harm events from international and domestic military actions tracked across Syria, Libya, and Iraq,  involving air delivered munitions – and is therefore a critical reference point for affected local communities, for media and analysts, and for both the Pentagon and US combatant commands. There has never been the same level of engagement with the UK and MoD.  We feel that this is a wasted opportunity; meaningful dialogue between the MoD and civil society organisations could contribute significant value to the planning, design, implementation and evaluation of military operations and security partnerships, while reinforcing effective governance and oversight.

As the new Foreign Secretary, we reiterate our calls to you for the UK to create and institutionalise systematic engagement with civil society organisations, where civil society can play an essential role in fostering accountability and transparency in the conduct of operations and civilian harm monitoring.

4. Will the MoD consider investigating and re-investigating where necessary specific instances of civilian harm caused by UK airstrikes with the US-led Coalition in Iraq and Syria flagged by civil society monitoring organisations, and publish the results?

5. Will you recommend MoD and FCDO officials to meet with Airwars to discuss better practise recommendations and to encourage a meaningful relationship between civil society organisations and your Departments?

Thank you for taking the time to note our concerns, and we wish you the best in your new role, while looking forward to working with you on these issues.

Yours sincerely,

Chris Woods,

Director, Airwars

▲ The UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office

Published

October 1, 2021

Written by

Megan Karlshoej-Pedersen

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A F-16 Fighting Falcon from the Belgian Air Force refuels

Open letter from Belgian and international organisations calls on the Defence Minister to increase transparency and accountability for civilian harm.

October 1st marks the anniversary of Belgium relaunching its participation in Operation Inherent Resolve – the international campaign against so-called Islamic State.

Throughout its engagement in this coalition, Belgium has been one of the least transparent – and least accountable – countries when it comes to acknowledging civilian harm. In fact, the Government has refused to publicly concede any civilian harm from its own actions. While the Parliament called for changes last year, urging the Government to introduce transparency and engage with civil society organisations, we have seen no tangible improvements. 

Together, we are publishing a joint open letter to Minister of Defence Dedonder with our Belgian and international partners. We ask the Belgian government to urgently take concrete steps to improve its transparency and accountability for civilian harm resulting from its own military actions. The full text of the letter is reprinted below.

 

Dear Minister Dedonder,

October 1st marks one year since Belgium re-joined Operation Inherent Resolve, the US-led war against ISIS in Iraq and Syria. However, while Belgium has made significant contributions to this conflict for more than 7 years, conducting well over 1,000 missions, there remains a severe lack of transparency over the harm to civilians from Belgian actions; in fact, Belgium stands out among allies in its blanket refusal to acknowledge casualties. This refusal persists even when the US-led Coalition have conceded Belgian involvement in specific strikes which killed and injured civilians.

On June 25, 2020, the Belgian Parliament adopted resolution 1298. Among other things, it asked the federal government to ensure; “maximum transparency (…) with regard to the prevention, monitoring and reporting of possible civilian casualties as a result of our military deployment”. In addition, the government was asked to enter into a dialogue with its counterparts in the Netherlands about the lessons learned from the disaster of Hawija, in which dozens of civilians were killed as a result of a bombing raid carried out by the Dutch army. Finally, the resolution also called for public communication about possible civilian casualties and active cooperation with external monitoring groups and human rights organisations.

Yet it is unclear to us whether (and if so, how) these recommendations were implemented in any way during the deployment of the last year. No interim mission reports were published and the MoD continues to fail to provide data on the number of strikes and civilian casualties in a meaningful way.

Engagement with civil society

Since Belgium relaunched its participation in Operation Inherent Resolve, we have had some promising engagements with the Ministry of Defence. In May 2021, for instance, some of us were able to meet with officials and shared key lessons from the last decade of counting civilian harm. Nonetheless a more sustained approach is needed. We would encourage Belgium to draw inspiration from the processes set up by some of Belgium’s allies, in particular those in the Netherlands and the US. We stand ready to engage and share our lessons and key findings in a constructive way, to ensure that past civilian harm can lead to improvements in future protection of civilians.

We understand that recent events in Afghanistan may have delayed follow-up to our concerns. Those same events, however, should make it abundantly clear that a sustained, institutional, and consultative discussion about how to prevent civilian casualties is needed. We urge the minister to react to this, and relaunch discussions with civil society groups on this topic. We further urge the minister to do so with urgency so that experts from  civil society organisations may feed into Belgium’s update of the Strategic Vision 2030:  the need to address civilian harm and the protection of civilians in this document is crucial.

Recommendations

The undersigned organisations call upon the Belgian government to do the following, at minimum:

–      Engage in a sustained, systematised debate with civil society organisations in Belgium, who hold specialist knowledge on lessons that can be learned on how to best protect civilians and which are keen to share such knowledge;

–      Publish the exact date and near location of all Belgian air raids carried out in the fight against ISIS;

–      Launch an evaluation of claimed civilian harm that has occurred from suspected Belgian strikes in Iraq and Syria over the last year, including strikes which were IHL compliant, covering lessons which can be learned from this, and how civilians can better be protected in the future;

–      Publish the results of all investigations into civilian casualties – including the date, location, targets and number of civilian casualties of military action – even if the Ministry of Defence’s own investigation concludes that there has been no violation of international humanitarian law;

–      Draft guidelines for proactively publishing this information (in the future) as open data in a machine-readable overview that enables use by independent parties;

–      Work together with external parties, including NGOs, by drawing up standards for the minimum criteria that external claims for civilian victims must meet in order for the Ministry of Defence to be able to assess them;

–          Provide capacity at the Ministry of Defence so that officials can focus on monitoring and actively publishing data on airstrikes and civilian casualties in armed conflict, including in future military interventions, so that the consequences of military intervention are systematically monitored and published;

–      Introduce or support a mechanism where potential victims of Coalition bombardments can come forward and report issues of concern;

–      In line with the clear wishes of the Belgian Parliament, support a strong political declaration against the use of explosive weapons with wide-area effects in populated areas – with a clear commitment to data collection and transparent reporting.

Signed,

11.11.11

Airwars Stichting

Amnesty Belgium

Agir pour la Paix

CNAPD

Humanity & Inclusion

Pax Christi Flanders

Vredesactie

Vrede vzw

▲ A F-16 Fighting Falcon from the Belgian Air Force refuels

Published

August 27, 2021

Written by

Megan Karlshoej-Pedersen

Assisted by

Georgia Edwards

As the international war against ISIS enters its eighth year, the UK must urgently improve its approach to the protection of civilians and civilian harm monitoring, reports Airwars' advocacy team.

Over the last decade, warfare has undergone significant changes. Countries such as the UK and US have increasingly done their best to avoid large-scale ground deployments of their own troops, focusing instead on supporting local forces, for instance by providing air power.

Through the monitoring of nearly 60,000 locally alleged civilian deaths caused by belligerents across multiple conflicts, Airwars has documented the risks to civilians that this form of engagement can pose in nations like Iraq and Syria, with heavy uses of explosive weapons in urban environments often leading to very significant civilian casualties and major destruction of civilian infrastructure.

Despite acknowledging the potential risks from recent actions, which saw “the most significant urban combat to take place since World War II”, the UK has failed to improve its approach to the Protection of Civilians (POC). In fact, the UK remains hesitant to openly acknowledge harm from its own actions. Leaving behind this current approach, by introducing public transparency and accountability for identification, review and admissions of casualties is vital to reduce present and future civilian casualties.

This article will assess current UK government action with regard to developing and updating its protection of civilian policies.

The Ministry of Defence

One of the most comprehensive reviews of UK military action in recent times, the 2016 Chilcot report, repeatedly emphasised that the MoD has failed to accurately estimate possible civilian harm that would arise from the 2003-2011 war in Iraq. In fact, the report states the MoD mistakenly estimated the war would ‘only’ cost civilian lives in the “low hundreds”. In reality, Iraq Body Count estimated that more than 114,000 civilians died as a result of violence in Iraq between 2003 and 2011.

The Chilcot report called for the UK to improve how it reaches pre-conflict estimates of civilian harm, declaring that a ‘government has a responsibility to make every reasonable effort to identify and understand the likely and actual effects of its military actions on civilians.’ It also said governments should make ‘greater efforts in the post-conflict period to determine the number of civilian casualties’ and to understand the broader impact of these actions.

In response, MoD officials pledged to improve the protection of civilians in the future. Nevertheless, the key challenges to effective POC identified in the Chilcot report persist to this day, including a lack of accountability; a lack of understanding of the impact of British airstrikes on the ground; and a false belief that the use of ‘smart’ guided munitions might automatically lead to fewer casualties.

This is highlighted by the MoD’s continued claim that it has evidence of only a single civilian casualty from its ongoing seven-year campaign against ISIS in Iraq and Syria. This does not mean, as the MoD has repeatedly emphasised, that they believe their actions have only caused a single civilian death, but only that they claim to have the evidence of one casualty.

However the US-led Coalition has itself concluded that fifteen additional civilians were killed in at least three actions in Iraq and Syria which are known to have been British airstrikes.

Airwars, along with other monitoring organisations, humanitarian organisations, and news outlets, have demonstrated that their own mechanisms to capture civilian harm reports are often far more accurate than those of militaries. For the past two years for example, the majority of officially declared civilian harm reports by the US-led Coalition originated with Airwars, rather than internal military reports. The UK government must therefore reflect on why it has consistently failed to incorporate adequate civilian casualty monitoring mechanisms into all recent operations.

As Airwars’ ‘Europe’s Shame’ investigation highlights, the UK’s allies are often better able to understand and report on the harm that comes from British actions than the UK itself. This was reaffirmed by the recent publication of a Pentagon report to Congress in which they detailed civilian casualties known to have been caused by allies, including Britain.

Library picture: A RAF Typhoon lands in Cyprus hours after UK voted to extend airstrikes to Syria (UK MoD)

This is not to say that there has been no progress at the MoD since the findings of the Chilcot report. When it comes to responding to requests for information regarding specific alleged civilian harm events during the war against ISIS, the MoD has been quick and responsive – at least compared to allies. Yet a number of key changes are required within the Ministry of Defence to ensure that the UK consistently and effectively protects those on the ground when it goes to war, and is transparent when things do go wrong.

Improving the MoD approach

To improve the UK Defence Ministry’s approach to POC, the following key steps must be taken. Firstly, the UK must learn from its allies and independent organisations by establishing a permanent civilian harm tracking cell within the Ministry with strong local understanding and relevant language skills, while conducting site visits and witness interviews for assessments where possible.

The UK must also review the exceptionally high bar it sets for determining civilian harm. Senior British defence officials have confirmed to both the BBC and to Airwars that the UK presently requires what it calls ‘hard facts’ when assessing civilian harm claims – an apparently higher standard even than the ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ used by UK courts. Civilian casualty assessors within the US military instead use a ‘balance of probabilities’ approach, Airwars understands – allowing them to consider local credible reports of civilian harm in their own investigations.

Transparency must then follow. Information about incidents that may have harmed civilians should be publicly disclosed, investigated and fed into internal lessons mechanisms to inform broader approaches to civilian harm mitigation. As outlined by Mike Spagat from Every Casualty Counts: “Transparency about operations can help build positive relations with the public, improve the quality of field data and, ultimately, improve military performance.”

By better understanding the negative impact of its military actions on the ground and communicating the findings in clear ways, the UK will become more accountable both to its own citizens and to those who live where the UK’s armed forces or close partners engage overseas. This would also place the UK in line with allies like the US, which have made a conscious effort to acknowledge at least some instances of civilian harm, as seen for example in Airwars’ investigation of  “The Credibles”.

As a key step towards this, we urge the British government to follow many allies, primarily European, who are increasingly implementing presumptions against the use of explosive weapons in populated areas (EWIPA) in the planning and conduct of operations. As Rachel Hobley from Humanity and Inclusion emphasises: “When explosive weapons with wide area effects are used in populated areas, 90 percent of those killed or injured are civilians. This compares to just 25 percent in non-urban areas.

“These statistics, which have remained the same for the last 10 years, show the systematic humanitarian harm that arises from these practices. Not only are people killed and injured – families’ homes are also destroyed, health clinics decimated, and key services like water and electricity wiped out.”

The aftermath of a confirmed Coalition airstrike two years on. (via Amnesty)

The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office

The MoD is only one actor among many within the UK government which is responsible for protecting civilians on the ground. The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) is also vital, as it leads on the UK’s official Approach to the Protection of Civilians.

It is particularly concerning that commitments made in the UK’s 2020 Approach to the Protection of Civilians policy, to “investigate any credible reports that UK actions may have caused civilian harm”, have yet to lead to any tangible changes in the UK’s approach.

At the same time, there is a lack of guidance on how the UK will respond when harm does occur. This reflects a broader trend in which cornerstone policies for the UK’s engagements abroad too often fail adequately to address the importance of protecting civilians. For example, while the government’s recent Integrated Review of Security, Defence, Development and Foreign Policy, which was published earlier this year, is broad in its scope – covering everything from cyber warfare to terrorism – it fails to mention the protection of civilians once. This reveals a significant lack of prioritisation of POC, despite such protections being identified time and time again as a key to obtaining strategic goals in wars.

In collaboration with partner civil society organisations, Airwars has held positive discussions with Lord Ahmad, Minister of State for the Commonwealth, in attempts to better understand how the FCDO intends to improve its approach. At the same time, several statements from government officials, including Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab, have promised to create a ‘conflict centre’. Yet, despite concerted efforts to gain more information, we are left with a long list of questions on what this will focus on; to what degree it will allow for engagement with civil society actors; and how much it will prioritise the protection of civilians.

Finally, in addition to changes that both the MoD and FCDO must implement to be accountable and protect civilians, we urge the Government to ensure that these departments also coordinate with each other as they are jointly responsible for delivering protections on the ground. As it stands, the two departments often do not even use the same terminology, with the MoD focusing on ‘Human Security’ and the FCDO pursuing ‘Protection of Civilians’. While the two agendas are implicitly connected, it remains unclear why the departments have chosen different approaches, and how they will work together to ensure delivery.

Making the UK’s approach to the protection of civilians more accountable and transparent is not going to be a quick or simple process. Yet it is a vital one; not only for the sake of the civilians who find themselves caught in conflict, but also to ensure that UK actions abroad contribute to stability.

▲ Ministry of Defence Main Building, Horse Guards Avenue.

Published

August 18, 2021

Written by

Joe Dyke

Focus will now turn to whether UK, France and Belgium will finally admit culpability

When the Department of Defense withdrew a key part of its annual report on civilian harm earlier this month, it all but confirmed something long suspected – that France, Britain and Belgium know they likely killed civilians in Iraq and Syria in specific events, but refuse publicly to accept it.

The original Pentagon report to Congress, released on May 28th, initially claimed responsibility for the deaths of 50 civilians in eleven airstrikes against the so-called Islamic State (ISIS) in Iraq and Syria in 2017 and 2018.

After Airwars pointed out significant errors, the DoD withdrew and reissued the report along with an addendum, removing nine of the eleven incidents in which civilians died. This amounted to the Pentagon’s effective confirmation that those strikes were carried out by its allies, including the UK, France and Belgium.

Of these nine incidents, two were in fact the same event – seemingly a clerical error. Two more have been publicly claimed already by Australia, which has accepted responsibility for the deaths.

That leaves six events in which the Coalition’s own investigators concluded that 18 civilians had died.

What are the six strikes?

Three of them were British airstrikes. We knew this before due to in-depth reporting by Airwars and the BBC but the Pentagon’s withdrawal of the data all but confirms it.

In the most deadly individual case, on August 13th 2017, 12 civilians were killed, including a young girl, in an airstrike targeting an ISIS mortar system. A further six were injured. In February 2019 the US-led Coalition accepted that civilians were killed and the UK later confirmed it was a British strike – yet without accepting anyone died.

In a second case, the Coalition publicly confirmed the deaths of two civilians in a strike near the Iraqi city of Mosul on January 9th 2017. Again the UK confirmed it was a British strike but without accepting that civilians were killed. This contradicted a Coalition whistleblower, who earlier told the BBC that civilians had likely died in the British attack.

The third British incident occurred in Bahrah in eastern Syria on January 20th 2018. The Coalition’s military assessors admitted the death of one civilian. The BBC and Airwars published an investigation showing it was a British strike and the UK accepted this, but again refused to accept responsibility for any civilian harm.

The reason for the gap between the Coalition and British statements is that London applies a different – and critics would say unrealistic – standard for assessing civilian harm. Whereas the Coalition and the US assess whether they caused civilian harm on the ‘balance of probabilities’, the UK demands overwhelming evidence – described as ‘hard facts.’ In the context of an airstrike from thousands of feet and with no Coalition civilian casualty investigation forces on the ground, such overwhelming proof is near impossible to come by.

To date, the UK has accepted just one civilian death in Iraq and Syria, despite 8,000 declared flight sorties over seven years.

Gavin Crowden, Executive Director of Every Casualty Counts, said that when it came to civilian harm, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) was pretending the “absence of evidence is evidence of absence.”

“The Pentagon has shattered the MoD’s already implausible claim that British forces have caused only one civilian death across Iraq and Syria. This is statistically almost impossible.”

“The [Chilcot] Report of the Iraq Inquiry made clear that the MoD had failed to account for civilian casualties following the invasion in 2003. Almost twenty years on, the MoD is still failing to take even basic steps to identify and record harm caused to civilians.”

French and Belgian strikes

The other three incidents the Pentagon insists were not US actions are believed to be either Belgian or French strikes.

On February 27th 2017 a Coalition strike on an ISIS vehicle near the Iraqi-Syrian border killed at least one civilian and injured another. Local sources said the death toll could have been as high as three. The Coalition accepted causing the harm, and a senior Belgian government official unofficially informed Airwars that the strike was Belgian, though the government has never publicly confirmed this.

On March 21st 2017 a civilian was killed in a Coalition strike in the Iraqi city of Mosul. Again a senior government official unofficially informed Airwars that the strike was Belgian, though the government has never publicly confirmed this.

The final incident, which took place on February 8th 2018, killed one civilian near Al-Bahrah village in Syria. Airwars identified it as a likely French strike, though Paris has always publicly refused to comment.

To date, neither France nor Belgium has publicly accepted killing any civilians in years of bombing Iraq and Syria.

Marc Garlasco, a military advisor for PAX and a former US senior Department of Defense intelligence analyst, said the Pentagon errors would increase pressure on European militaries to stop hiding behind the anonymity of the Coalition.

In 2015 a devastating strike in the town of Hawijah in Iraq led to the deaths of more than 70 civilians. The Coalition eventually accepted responsibility, but no member state did. It was only in 2019, after investigative reporting, that the Dutch government finally admitted responsibility.

“It is time for European MoDs to stop hiding behind American statistics and take responsibility for the harm they cause and provide appropriate amends,” Garlasco said.

“One central issue for civilians is the problem coalition warfare causes for strike attribution, and therefore amends. Too often we have seen war victims unable to make claims or even get answers for why they were targeted because they just don’t know who dropped the bombs. It is unreasonable to put the onus of proof on the victim.”

He pointed out that in the wake of the Hawijah massacre the Dutch Ministry of Defence has opened a review of its civilian harm mitigation policies, working alongside organisations like PAX and Airwars.

“We see a real opportunity in the wake of the lessons we have learned by working with the Dutch MoD. There are now positive examples to follow if Belgium, France, the UK, and any other military intends to take civilian harm seriously.”

Every Casualty Count’s Gavin Crowden said the US civilian casualty monitoring process, though far from perfect, was a clear example for other countries to follow. So far the US has admitted killing more than 1,300 civilians in the war against ISIS.

“If European militaries claim they can fire smart missiles straight into the bedroom of a specific target, they should surely be able to compile basic data about where and when they have conducted operations that may have harmed civilians.”

“The US has shown that this is both logistically, militarily and politically possible. Therefore, we have to conclude that the obstacle among European militaries is simply a lack of will.”

Airwars asked the British, French and Belgian militaries for comment on the Pentagon’s report. None said they intended to review their earlier assessments of no civilian harm, in light of the DoD revelations.

▲ File footage: A U.S. Air Force KC-135 Stratotanker refuels a British Tornado fighter over Iraq, Dec. 22, 2015. Coalition forces fly daily missions in support of Operation Inherent Resolve. (U.S. Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. Corey Hook/Released)

Published

July 1, 2021

Written by

Airwars Staff

Coalition of civil society organisations issues joint recommendations to Defence Minister, for improvements to Dutch policy on transparency and civilian harm mitigation

Airwars and our Dutch partners, who are involved in ongoing discussions with the Dutch military on practicable improvements in the protection of civilians, have published a Joint Statement outlining the progress so far, and our collective hopes and expectations moving forward.

In October 2019, it was revealed that the Dutch military had been responsible for a 2015 airstrike in Iraq on an ISIS IED factory, leading to the deaths of at least 70 civilians and hundreds more being injured. The Government had then withheld that fact from the public for more than four years.

As PAX and Airwars later noted in our joint report, Seeing Through The Rubble,  estimates are that the secondary explosions triggered by the Dutch airstrike damaged between 400 and 500 buildings in the area, including many shops, homes and schools. Sources also reported that the airstrike caused major damage to crucial infrastructure, including roads and water pipelines. Six different sources, including Hawijah’s mayor, were interviewed for the report on the recent state of the city after the devastating Dutch airstrike.

As a result of the national scandal and numerous Parliamentary debates on the issue, in June 2020 the Dutch Minister of Defence, Ank Bijleveld, promised to Parliament improvements towards transparency and accountability regarding civilian harm as a result of Dutch military actions. Coupled with other steps taken in the months after the Hawijah scandal, the Netherlands appeared to be shedding its reputation as one of the least transparent members of the international Coalition fighting so-called Islamic State.

One measure adopted by Defensie had recently been proposed by Airwars, Amnesty Netherlands, the Center for Civilians in Conflict (CIVIC), Open State Foundation, PAX and the Utrecht University Intimacies of Remote Warfare Program. This called for a “Roadmap for the Ministry of Defence to review the way in which the Netherlands deals with, reports on, evaluates and accounts for civilian harm as a consequence of Dutch military efforts”.

The starting session of the Roadmap Process took place virtually on November 12th 2020, attended by senior Dutch defence officials, including the Deputy Chief of Defence Lt General Onno. In 2021, a consortium of civil society organisations then participated in four interactive sessions with the MoD. The key objective of these sessions was to share joint perspectives and expertise on how to enhance military transparency and accountability, while also creating conditions for a stronger integration of civilian harm evaluation and mitigation approaches into Dutch military deployments.

MoD staff have committed to using the outcomes of these sessions to inform policy recommendations to be presented to the Minister of Defence. The recommendations centred around improving transparency, as well as aiming to improve broader Dutch policy and practice in order to achieve better protection of civilians in future military deployments generally.

The civil society consortium has welcomed the open manner in which Defensie has engaged during the “Roadmap“ process, and has now issued a joint statement laying out our own thoughts on the way forward for the Dutch Ministry of Defence. The statement includes recommendations to the Minister of Defence for improvements to Dutch policy on transparency and civilian harm mitigation when engaging in military missions.

Read the statement in full here

Published

May 25, 2021

The research, based on a decade of work by Action on Armed Violence, strengthens calls for restrictions on explosive weapons

Nine out of ten people killed and injured by explosive weapons in cities are civilians, a new report has found, in stark findings likely to increase pressure on governments to curb the use of explosive weapons in urban areas.

In total the Action On Armed Violence (AOAV) report, which surveyed explosive violence across the globe over a ten-year period, found that 91 percent of those killed and injured when explosive weapons were used in cities were civilians. In other, less densely populated areas, the rate fell to 25 percent.

“The evidence is absolutely clear and unequivocal,” Iain Overton, the executive director of AOAV, said. “When explosive weapons are used in towns and cities, civilians will be harmed. (That is) as true as it is today in Gaza as it was a decade ago in Iraq and beyond.”

The report tracked 238,892 civilians killed and injured by explosive weapons over the past decade in 123 countries and territories, using open-source monitoring of English-language media.

It found that improvised explosive devices were responsible for more than half of all civilian casualties, while airstrikes and other aerial assaults were responsible for 23 percent and ground-launched explosive weapons 21 percent.

 

The most deadly single incident occurred in Somalia in October 2017, when more than 500 people were killed in twin bomb blasts in the capital Mogadishu. The Islamist militant group Al-Shabaab was believed to be behind those explosions.

The most deadly air strike came in 2016 when the Saudi Arabian-led coalition struck a funeral procession in Yemen, killing nearly 140 people and wounding a further 600.

Reducing civilian harm

Overton argued the report would strengthen efforts to restrict the use of explosive weapons in populated areas (EWIPA).

Ireland has spearheaded efforts in recent years for action on EWIPA, releasing a draft document earlier this year. It stresses that even when militaries try to limit the impact of their strikes in urban areas, the closely populated nature of cities makes civilian harm inevitable.

Belgium last month became the first country to adopt a resolution against the use of EWIPA after a vote by the federal parliament’s National Defense Commission.

In October Airwars, together with Dutch organisation PAX, released a joint report examining the dire and long-lasting effects of explosive weapons on civilian populations in urban areas in recent international military campaigns in Mosul, Raqqa and Hawijah. The report was launched in a virtual event by Ambassador Michael Gaffey of Ireland.

Beyond the civilians directly harmed, military campaigns can leave the infrastructure of cities devastated for years.

 

During the 2016-17 campaign by the US-led coalition to remove the so-called Islamic State from Mosul an estimated 9,000 civilians were killed, while up to 80 percent of buildings in the centre of the city were destroyed.

In June 2019, the UN International Organisation for Migration reported that entire neighbourhoods of Mosul had yet to be rebuilt and that a lack of essential services and poor sanitation were still threatening public health. Additionally, unexploded bombs, missiles, rockets and shells prevented civilians from returning to the city.

“The negotiation of the political declaration (on EWIPA) is an opportunity to set new standards against the use of heavy explosive weapons in towns and cities, to better protect civilians and vital civilian infrastructure located in cities,” said Laura Boillot, Coordinator of the International Network on Explosive Weapons.

The AOAV report also found a decrease in civilian harm in 2020, a trend also noted by Airwars’s recent annual report. Factors that explain this include significant breakthroughs in conflicts in Libya and Syria, as well as the knock-on implications of the COVID-19 pandemic.

▲ Raqqa has been described by the United Nations as the most destroyed city in Syria (Image courtesy of Amnesty International)

Published

April 8, 2021

Written by

Airwars Staff

Despite receiving comprehensive findings on 38 civilian deaths five months ago, CENTCOM has yet to respond says human rights group.

The Yemeni human rights group Mwatana has accused US Central Command of being “very disrespectful to victims”, after it emerged that CENTCOM has still not publicly responded to a major investigation into civilians killed by US airstrikes and ground raids. Given five months’ advance notice of the findings of the investigation, which comprehensively detailed the deaths of at least 38 civilians in twelve likely US actions in Yemen during the Trump presidency, Mwatana says that CENTCOM has still not responded.

The 124-page report from Mwatana, ‘Death Falling From The Sky’, was eventually published in late March without input from CENTCOM. It presents a grim view of an intensive campaign by the US military under President Trump to target alleged Al Qaeda fighters in Yemen, part of a long-running counterterrorism effort begun by Barack Obama in 2009.

In total according to Airwars monitoring, a record 327 US airstrikes and ground actions in Yemen were alleged during the Trump presidency, of which 181 were officially declared. As many as 199 civilian deaths were locally alleged, with Airwars presently estimating that, based on the available public record, between 76 and 152 civilians were likely killed by the US in Yemen under Trump in 26 incidents.

Mwatana’s own report focuses on just twelve of these events – recording in meticulous detail the devastating effects of some US actions on local communities. Dozens of family members, survivors and eyewitnesses were interviewed in person. Comprehensive paperwork including hospital records and university and workplace documentation was gathered, confirming the civilian status of victims. Photographs and videos detail injuries to victims and damage to homes.

“The standard of information, and what we were able to get from the ground, is built on years of Mwatana work,” says Bonyan Jamal, an accountability officer at the Yemeni human rights organisation. “Thanks to our incredible researchers, and high quality work, we are able to speak directly to families and gain their trust.”

All twelve events documented by Mwatana were already publicly known – though civilian casualties have only been admitted by CENTCOM in one case. A detailed review by Airwars of ‘Death Falling From The Sky’ found it to be meticulously researched and documented; and conservative in its estimates of civilian harm from US actions. Victims were only identified, for example, after being explicitly named by witnesses and surviving family members. In any case where the combatant status of a casualty was less than clear, they were excluded from the potential civilian tally.

A disastrous US raid on the village of Yakla in late January 2017 killed up to 12 civilians, CENTCOM itself has confirmed. Others have placed the toll far higher. In its own estimate, Mwatana conservatively says that at least 15 civilians died that day. “For the Yakla event, we respect that others have reached different findings,” says Kristine Beckerle, legal director, accountability and redress at Mwatana. “We never say ‘these are all the people killed that day’. What we can say is that we are confident in those victims that we name.”

That conservative approach makes the investigation’s conclusion all the more damning. “This report raises serious concerns about the extent to which the United States is complying with international law in its use of lethal force in Yemen,” Mwatana asserts. “It finds that the United States is failing to investigate credible allegations of violations, to hold individuals responsible for violations to account, and to provide prompt and adequate reparations.”

Mwatana’s list of fifteen named fatal victims of a US raid on Yakla, Yemen in January 2017.

US silence on deaths of women

Each of the twelve events detailed in the Mwatana investigation provides such compelling evidence of civilian harm that CENTCOM’s continued silence appears inexplicable.

More than three weeks after the incident itself, a public US Central Command statement had for example confirmed that a US strike had taken place in the Yemeni province of Bayda on December 15th 2017, which it indicated had resulted in the death of Miqdad al-Sana’ani, described in the press release as an “external operations facilitator” for Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). CENTCOM made no mention of civilian harm.

The only locally reported action in Bayda that December day was again in the village of Yakla – where all local sources agreed that a likely US drone strike had killed Hajera Ahmed Saleh Al Taisi, 33 years old and pregnant, and her 63-year old aunt, Dhabia Ahmad Al Taisi.

According to Mwatana, “On the day of the strike, Dhabia was visiting Hajera’s home, about 90 meters from Dhabia’s own small house. At about 6pm, as Dhabia was leaving the house, the strike occurred. The strike hit right next to the entrance of the house, killing Dhabia, who was standing by the door. Hajera was in her kitchen. She was hit by shrapnel in the neck, which ripped through her back. The surrounding homes suffered varying degrees of damage from the strike.”

According to one report, a man was also killed in the attack who may have been the AQAP suspect al-Sana’ani. Yet there is no dispute locally that two women died that day. As Hajera’s husband told Mwatana, ‘My wife was expecting a child; the shrapnel killed her and her fetus … The life of people and their movements are almost paralyzed by fear.”

Kristine Beckerle says this was one of the events she had expected CENTCOM to concede: “Maybe, I thought, they would admit the case of these two women – one pregnant, killed in their house. There is no advantage I can see to their not engaging on this case. Yet we have had no response until now.”

The #UnitedStates has never fully investigated the civilian cost of its operations in #Yemen, and has never taken sufficient steps to review the efficacy of these operations.

Read #DeathFallingFromTheSky report: https://t.co/ASqTtoyYlZ

— Mwatana for Human Rights (@MwatanaEn) March 31, 2021

CENTCOM: lack of accountability

US Central Command was first provided full details of the Mwatana investigation on November 4th 2020, says accountability officer Bonyan Jamal. “They have had more than five months to respond. We even delayed publication several times to give them the opportunity to respond. That CENTCOM didn’t even take the time to write a proper response to express their position on these findings is very disrespectful to victims.”

This echoes other recent experiences with the US’s largest combatant command. As this organisation recently noted in its own recent Yemen study Eroding Transparency, “Despite Airwars providing CENTCOM with its complete civilian harm findings on Yemen during the Trump presidency nine weeks prior to this report’s publication, officials unfortunately failed to provide any event responses.”

CENTCOM also had to issue an apology in late 2020 as a result of what it described as an “administrative error”, after conceding it had forgotten its own earlier public admission of the killing of up to 12 civilians during the raid on Yakla village in early 2017.

Accountability for civilian harm at CENTCOM appears to be in decline across several theatres under current commander General Kenneth ’Frank’ McKenzie, who took up his post in March 2019. As Airwars recently noted in its annual report, 2020 saw an unexplained 80 per cent drop in the number of civilian harm allegations deemed ‘Credible’ by CENTCOM assessors working with the US-led Coalition in Iraq and Syria. And in Afghanistan, US forces have taken an increasingly robust stance against UN data which continue to flag concerns about civilian harm from international actions.

“The great majority of alleged civilian deaths and injuries from US military actions each year are within CENTCOM’s area of responsibility. And we need to see significant improvements in its identifying, reviewing and reporting of those claims,” says Chris Woods, director of Airwars. “Mwatana’s investigation is scrupulously researched and offers compelling evidence of at least 38 civilians likely killed in recent US actions in Yemen. It is not good enough for CENTCOM apparently to ignore that evidence for more than five months.”

▲ Villagers in Jaeir, al Bayda, protest a reported US strike in January 2019 that killed a 67 year old civilian man, according to Mwatana investigators and local sources

Published

March 2, 2021

Written by

Airwars Staff

US accountability for civilian casualties declines sharply during Trump's final year, as CENTCOM 'forgets' deaths of Yemen civilians.

Tracking by Airwars across multiple conflicts during 2020 shows that the number of locally reported civilian deaths from the use of explosive weapons was down by two thirds compared to the previous year. Of these fatalities, around half were in the first two months of 2020.

Comprehensive new data released by Airwars in its Annual Report 2020 suggests a possible ‘Covid effect’ – a significant reduction in conflict violence, as communities locked down during the global pandemic.

Other factors were at work too. Truce deals in Syria and Libya had a major impact in reducing civilian casualties. And the United States significantly scaled back its targeted strikes campaign in Yemen – though counterterrorism actions in Somalia continued at a high tempo. Meanwhile, limited Turkish military actions continued in both Iraq and Syria, sometimes with associated claims of civilian casualties.

“Any fall in reported civilian casualty numbers from their desperately high levels of recent years has to be welcomed,” says Airwars director Chris Woods. “Yet concerns remain that some of these wars will re-ignite as the impact of Covid recedes. Declines in US accountability for civilian deaths are also very worrying, and require urgent attention from the incoming Biden administration.”

US accountability challenges

Reported US actions declined steeply for the second year running – with no known US strikes in Pakistan or Libya, and significantly fewer in Yemen, Iraq and Syria. However US counterterrorism strikes remained at a high level in Somalia – with uncertainty about how many US actions in Afghanistan were conducted. In total, an estimated 1,000 US airstrikes took place during Donald Trump’s last full year as president – down from around 13,000 during Obama’s own final year in office.

Locally reported civilian harm was also sharply down. But as the Annual Report  shows, so too was US public accountability. In Iraq and Syria, there was an unexplained 80 per cent fall in the number of events assessed as ‘Credible’ by the US-led Coalition. And in Yemen, US Central Command had to apologise after forgetting that its own forces had killed up to a dozen civilians in a 2017 raid – despite CENTCOM’s former commander having publicly confirmed those deaths to the US Senate.

Limited respite for Syria, Iraq

Russia and the Assad government began 2020 with a ferocious campaign targeting rebels in several governorates, including Idlib. However of at least 398 civilian deaths allegedly resulting from Russia’s actions in Syria last year, all but 34 occurred before a major ceasefire was enacted on March 5th. That pause in hostilities – which still mostly holds – was prompted both by Covid concerns, and as a result of military pressure by Turkey on Assad’s forces.

Turkey also continued its ongoing campaigns against the Kurdish YPG in northern Syria, and the PKK in northern Iraq. During 2020, Airwars tracked a total of 60 locally alleged civilian harm incidents from Turkish-led actions in Syria, resulting in at least 37 alleged deaths and the injuring of up to 152 more civilians. And in Iraq, 21 locally alleged incidents were tracked throughout the year from Turkish actions, resulting in between 27 and 33 civilian deaths and up to 23 injuries.

Meanwhile, reported civilian harm from US-led Coalition actions against ISIS in Syria during 2020 was down by an astonishing 96% – with at least 18 civilians alleged killed, versus more than 465 likely civilian fatalities the previous year. Iraq saw just three locally reported civilian harm claims from US or Coalition actions – including during the US targeted assassination of Iranian general Qassem Soleimani at Baghdad International Airport.

Most civilian deaths from Russian strikes in Syria were reported prior to a March 5th ceasefire

‘Forgotten’ civilian deaths in Yemen

Ongoing monitoring by Airwars of counterterrorism actions in Yemen indicated a continuing if limited US campaign against Al Qaeda – despite US Central Command (CENTCOM) not having publicly declared a strike since summer 2019. Confirmation of several actions by US officials suggested control of the long-running campaign may have been passed to the CIA.

Meanwhile, following publication of an Airwars Yemen report in October, CENTCOM had to admit that it had forgotten its own recent admission of the killing of civilians during a 2017 raid on a Yemeni village.

Previous commander General Joseph Votel had told the US Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) during in-person evidence that he took personal responsibility for the deaths of “between four and twelve” civilians in a botched raid. But three years later, CENTCOM was claiming only that there “may have been casualties” at Yakla. A senior official later apologised to Airwars for “Our failure to provide an accurate assessment [which] was an administrative mistake, and not an intent to deceive.”

Bucking a global trend of reduced conflict violence, US airstrikes against al Shabaab continued at near record levels during 2020 – although reported civilian deaths halved in number. That may have been a reflection of AFRICOM’s increased emphasis on assessing and reporting civilian harm under new commander General Stephen Townsend.

Advocacy team engages with militaries, governments and parliaments

As well as providing comprehensive data on locally reported civilian harm across multiple conflicts, Airwars works hard to ensure that the voices of affected communities are properly heard. During 2020 productive meetings were held with Dutch, British, US and NATO military officials – often alongside our partners – with the aim of reducing battlefield civilian harm.

Our advocacy team also briefed parliamentarians and media in several countries, offering expertise and insights on issues ranging from the perils of explosive weapon use in urban centres, to the benefits of public transparency for civilian harm claims.

In October 2020 Airwars also launched a new investigations team, aimed at building on its recent study looking at the challenges faced by newsrooms when reporting on civilian harm. Our first investigation – taking a critical look at Libya 2011 – will launch in mid March.

Read our Annual Report 2020 in full.

Locally reported civilian deaths declined across all conflicts tracked by Airwars during 2020.

Published

February 5, 2021

Written by

Oliver Imhof

Abdul Hamid Dbeibah and Mohammad Menfi will lead country blighted by years of conflict into elections

Libya’s rival political factions agreed to form a transitional government on February 5th, further cementing a June ceasefire meant to end the country’s civil war.

After a lengthy UN-mediated process, the 73 delegates of the Libyan Political Dialogue Forum (LPDF) voted for Mohammad Menfi as head of the Presidency Council; Abdul Hamid Dbeibah as Prime Minister; and Mossa Al-Koni and Abdullah Hussein Al-Lafi as members of the Presidency Council. They will lead the country until full elections, scheduled for December.

The list had support from across the divided nation. Menfi, a former General National Congress member, enjoys support in the country’s East while Dbeibah, a powerful businessman from Misrata – as well as Al-Lafi – represent Libya’s West. Al-Koni comes from the sparsely populated South.

During the talks in Geneva, Menfi’s list surprised many observers by beating an alternative list – headed by current Minister of Interior Fathi Bashaga and Head of the House of Representatives Aqila Saleh – by 39 to 34 votes. The two lists had won most votes in the first round among an initial four slates.

#Libya’ new Presidential Council and Prime Minister pic.twitter.com/fxAvMhm2dO

— The Libya Observer (@Lyobserver) February 5, 2021

Little known about new government’s plans

Libya has seen 10 years of on-and-off civil war since the overthrow of longtime dictator Muammar Gaddafi in 2011. In June 2020, all sides agreed a ceasefire deal after years of fighting, and the new administration will be tasked with implementing it.

However little is known about the new interim government’s policy plans as no concrete proposals have so far been presented, analysts said.

Among many challenges are the disarmament of militias, and the withdrawal of foreign fighters from Libya. Foreign support played a significant role in recent stages of the civil war, with the United Arab Emirates backing general Khalifa Haftar and his Libyan National Army, and Turkey supporting the Tripoli-based Government of National Accord.

Besides the political dialogue continuing in Libya, a new constitution has to be drafted and common financial and economic institutions built. The process is supposed to end with fresh general elections on December 24th this year.

The LPDF marks a return to negotiations between parties, many of whom had been only recently been locked in bitter conflict.

“For the first time in years we are witnessing a (commitment) to political progress by all parties instead of moving to an armed conflict,” a UN source familiar with the dialogue told Airwars. “This is the first fruitful outcome from the whole process.”

General Haftar, head of the Libyan National Army which tried to seize control of Tripoli in 2019, had unsuccessfully sought to block the process, the UN source said.

Muslim Brotherhood-backed militias also opposed the dialogue and tried to disrupt it at various points, the source claimed.

Another issue of concern is appeasing international sponsors of a conflict in which at least 788 civilians have been killed since 2012 through air and artillery strikes, according to Airwars data.

“Turkey wants something out of that deal – the gas agreement, a joint venture for the Mediterranean,” the UN source says. Other foreign players are likely to block any such deal, which would give Turkey extensive drilling rights in the Eastern Mediterranean.

Alleged corruption and limited influence

Commentators said massive challenges remain – and questioned the potential effectiveness of the new government.

Tarek Megerisi, Policy Fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, said the dialogue was designed to bring all parties together, and to do so had helped to avoid confrontation.

“The process was engineered to ensure it produced something, rather than try to solve any of the underlying drivers of fragmentation and conflict,” he said. “So I don’t expect this government to be unifying, pacifying or very interested in repairing the various failures of the state over the last 10 years.”

Prime Minister Abdul Hamid Dbeibah has faced questions over his suitability for the role, with some critics highlighting allegations of corruption against him during his time leading a construction unit in the former Gaddafi government.

“The figures [in the new government] are perhaps less controversial than the alternative ones were – except for (Dbeibah) who is a bit more polarising,” said Emadeddin Badi, Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council.

There are also questions over the limited territorial influence of the new government due to Libya’s highly localised politics. Even though the new leaders enjoy social ties and patronage networks in Libya, they may be comparatively little known among the wider population.

So far the new administration has not presented any concrete plans about what to do with local militias and foreign fighters.

“Quick calls of support from the Ministers of Defence and Interior suggest that there is an expectation that the work done with Turkey to reconstruct western Libya’s security services will continue. Although the question of what to do with Tripoli’s militias and how Haftar will react hangs ominously over this,” Megerisi said.

The election is only an initial step that will hopefully lead to a more peaceful future for a nation exhausted by years of fighting. The United Nations Security Council has now  requested ceasefire monitors, but it remains to be seen if the ongoing ceasefire can be transformed into effective political dialogue.

“We’ll be watching those you have selected to make sure they truly go back to the Libyan people on December 24 of this year to democratically elect Libya’s representatives and political leadership,” UN acting special representative Stephanie Williams said.

▲ The Libyan Political Dialogue Forum convened in Geneva to elect a transitional government on February 5th, 2021 (via UNSMIL

Published

January 15, 2021

Written by

Oliver Imhof

New graphics also compare airstrikes and reported civilian harm by recent US presidents in Iraq, Syria, Somalia.

In it latest data project, Airwars has published comprehensive mapping of more than 5,400 air and artillery strikes in Libya since 2012. The new data covers all known locally-reported strikes to date, conducted by all parties to an on-and-off civil war that is currently on pause, after last year’s UN-brokered ceasefire deal.

A team of researchers, geolocators and specialist volunteers for several months meticulously researched the location of every claimed strike event in as much detail as possible, placing the majority at least to neighbourhood level, and with many civilian harm events now including more exact locations. The new strike data joins more than 230 reported civilian harm events in Libya since 2012 which are already published by Airwars.

The new data and mapping has been visualised by Glasgow-based design studio Rectangle, an innovator when it comes to visualising conflict data. Daniel Powers and Lizzie Malcolm of Rectangle say about the project: “The new maps visualise these incidents by civilian fatalities, militant fatalities, and strikes carried out by each belligerent. The maps are navigable by a histogram of the map data over time, to try to provide an overview of a particularly complex conflict.”

The new interactive map enables users to explore the conflict in Libya and its impact on different regions of the country. Filters make it possible to see which faction bombed how much in which region; and who caused the most reported harm to civilians – revealing a clear correlation between the use of explosive weapons in urban areas and non-combatant deaths. According to Airwars modelling of local claims, the Libya conflict from 2012 to date has claimed the lives of up to 1,100 civilians through air and artillery strikes. Additionally the map also depicts claimed deaths among militant groups.

Claudia Gazzini, senior analyst at the International Crisis Group, says of the new mapping: “This is a great instrument that visualises extremely clearly how airstrikes have affected Libya throughout its ten-year transition. In a glance we see with extreme clarity where airstrikes have occurred, how many civilian casualties there have been as a result, and the presumed belligerent.”

Overview of Airwars’ Libya mapping showing the whole range of the conflict

As a timeline above the mapping shows, Libya has witnessed intense periods of fighting since 2012 – with the LNA’s offensive on Tripoli between April 2019 and June 2020 by far the heaviest. Inga Kristina Trauthig, Libya Research Fellow at the ICSR think tank, recalls some of the shocking attacks that occurred during the war. “Buried in this quantitative data are infamous examples, such as the airstrike at a military school in the capital, Tripoli which killed over 30 people in January 2020; as well as numerous strikes against medical facilities, also in Tripoli, in late July 2019 conducted by the Libyan National Army in violation of international humanitarian law.”

Gazzini adds: “What emerges extremely clearly is also how damaging the 14 months war on Tripoli was – the majority of strikes and civilian casualties occurred within that time frame, in many cases by unknown actors.”

Violence towards civilians in Tripoli during the recent siege had also been visualised in detail for Airwars by Rectangle in innovative mapping.

Detailed view of the Battle of Tripoli between April 2019 and June 2020

“What the data really shows us is the overall consistency and ubiquitousness (of the conflict). The data visualisation powerfully brings across how heavily Libya is affected by airstrikes,” says Trauthig.

She pointed out the tool enabled macro analysis of Libya’s war but would also help identify trends during specific time periods of intense conflict “such as the correlation between increased US airstrikes in Sirte with the fight against Islamic State.”

Clicking on the map reveals more detail about individual events, such as the suspected or known belligerent and any associated deaths. Civilian casualty incidents are also linked to the Airwars database, where more granular analysis can be found.

Arabic language researchers on the project included – among others – Osama Mansour, Shihab Halep and Mohammed al-Jumaily. Volunteers included Samuel Brownsword, Eleftheria Kousta, Douglas Statt, Vasiliki Touhouliotis and Anna Zahn. Clive Vella, Giacomo Nanni and Riley Mellen worked on the geolocation team.

New graphs compare strikes, civilian harm from Trump, Obama and Bush

Also being introduced by Airwars are new graphics comparing airstrike and reported civilian harm numbers grouped by US president – initially for the conflicts in Iraq and Syria, and in Somalia.

The US-led war against so-called Islamic State has seen more than 34,000 declared international air and artillery strikes since 2014. Using official Coalition data, Airwars modelling now shows that a slim majority of those strikes took place during Barack Obama’s second term. However more than twice the level of civilian harm was reported under Trump than Obama – partly a reflection of the intensity of the latter stages of the war, though also raising questions about possible relaxation of standards to protect non combatants.

In Somalia too, new graphics show that US actions against Al Shabaab under Donald Trump surged to their highest levels since counterterrorism actions began in 2007. Alleged civilian harm under Trump was more than double that of George W Bush and Barack Obama’s presidencies combined.

Despite a slim majority of declared strikes against ISIS taking place under Barack Obama, more than twice the level of civilian harm in Iraq and Syria was alleged from actions under Donald Trump.

▲ New Airwars mapping reveals thousands of locally reported air and artillery strikes in Libya by belligerents since 2012.

Published

January 12, 2021

Written by

Laurie Treffers

Header Image

Belgian military personnel deployed for Operation Inherent Resolve at their military base in Jordan, November 2020 (image via Belgian Air Force).

Pressure is growing on countries to support an international political declaration to restrict the use of explosive weapons in urban areas.

The Belgian parliament is considering adopting a resolution to help protect civilians from the use of explosive weapons with wide-area effects in populated areas. The resolution calls for Belgium’s active participation in ongoing diplomatic negotiations among nations on an international political declaration to avoid the use of explosive weapons in populated areas, to help reduce civilian suffering.

In a joint statement published on January 12th, Airwars, Humanity & Inclusion, PAX Christi Vlaanderen and PAX for Peace called upon Members of Parliament in Belgium to support the resolution. The statement reads: “Such resolution is a good step in the right direction as it clearly demands the Belgian Federal Government for an unequivocal commitment against the use of high-impact explosive weapons in populated areas, in line with the presumption of non-use; a recognition of the “domino effects” of wide-range explosive weapons; and a commitment to victim assistance and unconditional access to humanitarian aid. After dozens of parliamentary questions, motions and public hearings in France, Germany, Switzerland, Luxembourg and the UK, the adoption of this resolution would be pioneering as it is the first of its kind.”

Parliamentary hearing

On January 6th, the National Defence Commission of the Belgian Federal Parliament came together to discuss a draft of Resolution 1222/1 on the protection of civilians from the use of explosive weapons with wide-area effects in populated areas. Prior to the hearing, Airwars, Humanity & Inclusion, Pax Christi Vlaanderen and PAX for Peace sent Members of Parliament a letter with key recommendations.

If the Resolution is adopted by the Belgian parliament, it could be a key event in the ongoing negotiations between nations on an international political declaration. Since October 2019, more than 70 countries, including Belgium, have participated in diplomatic negotiations led by Ireland to draft such a declaration.

During the parliamentary hearing on January 6th, experts from the Belgian Red Cross and Humanity & Inclusion (HI) gave short presentations on the importance of the proposed resolution. Anne Hery, director of advocacy and institutional relations at HI, stated: “How can one systematically claim to respect the principles of precaution and proportionality of attack when using artillery or mortar shells in places where children, women and men are concentrated, or when bombing near infrastructures vital for the survival of populations, such as hospitals, schools or even power stations? The devastation in Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Ukraine, Libya, more recently in Nagorno Karabakh or in the Tigray region, in Ethiopia, forces us to rethink the methods, tactics and choice of weapons of war used today.”

"Comment peut-on prétendre systématiquement respecter les principes de précaution & proportionnalité de l’attaque lorsqu’on utilise obus d’artillerie/mortier dans des lieux où se concentrent des civils ou quand on bombarde à proximité d’infrastructures vitales?" @Anneh2906 #EWIPA pic.twitter.com/40NFKrBiKj

— Baptiste Chapuis (@Baptiste_Cps) January 6, 2021

 

Resolution 1222/1

Samuel Cogolati, a Member of Parliament for ECOLO-Groen, is one of the initiators of the resolution. Mr Cogolati told Airwars: “Today’s armed conflicts in Yemen, Syria and Libya are not the same as those of 20, 30 or 50 years ago. Because although conflicts are increasingly urban, battles are most often fought with weapons or ammunition systems with indiscriminate effects, initially designed for use on open battlefields.”

According to Cogolati, the draft resolution is “simply an attempt to respond to the call of the UN Secretary-General, as well as the ICRC and Handicap International. The text itself was written in close cooperation with civil society.” The text calls upon the Belgian federal government to not only avoid the use of explosive weapons with wide-area effects in populated areas, but also requests that the government actively pushes for the recognition of reverberating effects of explosive weapons and victim assistance as key elements of the international political declaration.

Mr Cogolati also emphasised the reverberating effects for civilians of the use of explosive weapons with wide-area effects, such as the destruction of vital infrastructure, contamination by explosive remnants of war and massive waves of forced displacement. In October 2020, Airwars and PAX for Peace presented their joint report Seeing through the Rubble on the long-term effects of explosive weapons with wide-area effects in populated areas to MPs in Belgium, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, France and Germany.

Camilla Roberti, advocacy officer for Humanity & Inclusion, is hopeful that the Resolution will be adapted, but also has reservations. “We remain concerned as Belgium reiterates its belief that IHL is strong enough and that strict compliance and implementation of IHL rules will suffice [to limit civilian harm during urban fighting]. On the contrary, we believe that IHL, which remains crucial, must be coupled with policies and standards that enhance its effectiveness during conflict and address the harm caused to civilians and civilian infrastructure during and after conflict.”

Roberti also warns that Belgium “doesn’t seem to take into account the indiscriminate effects caused by these weapons even in those cases where attacks appear ‘legitimate’. This is something we call on all States, and Belgium in particular, to put at the very centre of the future political declaration, as it will be the only way to put the people at the centre and prevent harm to civilians.”

Denial of civilian harm

Whilst Belgian parliamentarians are focused on pushing Belgium to become a pioneer in the protection of civilians, the Belgian Ministry of Defence continues to refuse taking responsibility for any civilian harm its own actions may have caused.

During a recent public event ‘New Military Technologies: What About Drones?’, organised by PAX Christi Vlaanderen, Vrede Vzw and the European Forum on Armed Drones on December 2nd 2020, Chief of Staff of the Belgian Air Forces, Colonel Geert de Decker, stated that “Neither in Libya, nor in Iraq, we have any reports of civilian casualties as a result of Belgian interventions. That is one of the things that we pride ourselves on. You are never one hundred per cent sure, but we do everything possible to avoid making civilian casualties.”

Belgium has, in fact, been implicated in several civilian harm incidents that were officially acknowledged by the US-led Coalition, but has repeatedly refused to answer on its possible involvement in these incidents. It remains unknown whether it was Belgium or France which was responsible for five airstrikes which led to the confirmed deaths of at least 22 civilians. When the Belgian Ministry of Defence was asked about their possible involvement in these strikes, officials told Airwars: “For the year 2017, BAF [Belgian Armed Forces] was certainly not involved in all events”, indicating that the Belgians were in fact involved in some of those events. It remains unclear why Belgium then still continues to state that its actions in Syria and Iraq have caused zero civilian casualties. On September 30th, 11 international and Belgian NGOs sent an open letter to then Minister of Defence Phillipe Goffin, calling on the Belgian government to finally take concrete steps to improve its transparency and accountability for civilian harm.

The Belgian parliament will likely vote on whether to adopt Resolution 1222/1 by February 2021.

▲ Belgian military personnel deployed for Operation Inherent Resolve at their military base in Jordan, November 2020 (image via Belgian Air Force).

Published

October 29, 2020

Written by

Laurie Treffers and Mohammed al Jumaily

Assisted by

Maysa Ismael

Header Image

Damage in the industrial area of Hawijah, years after the attack in June 2015 (image via NOS).
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A Dutch airstrike on Hawijah in 2015 led to the deaths of at least 70 civilians. In a key interview, the city's Mayor discusses events that day - and the ongoing suffering of affected civilians.

On the night of June 2nd to June 3rd 2015, Dutch F-16s bombed an ISIS Vehicle-Borne Improvised Explosives Devices (VBIED) factory in the city of Hawijah, in Iraq’s Kirkuk province. Secondary explosions triggered by the airstrike killed at least 70 civilians and wounded hundreds more. Today, the city of Hawijah is still recovering – not only from long-standing ISIS control of the area, but also the lasting impact on civilian lives of the Dutch airstrike five years ago.

For their new joint report, Seeing through the rubble: The civilian impact of the use of explosive weapons in the fight against ISIS, Airwars and PAX interviewed Hawijah Mayor Subhan Al Jabouri about the direct, indirect, and ongoing effects of the strike.

The questions were answered via e-mail on September 28th, 2020. The first part of the interview discusses the direct consequences of the Dutch air raid. The second focuses on the indirect effects. In the third section, the Mayor was asked about the impact the Dutch air raid still has on the lives of civilians in Hawijah. Finally, the Mayor examines the overall damage that both the ISIS occupation and the anti-ISIS Coalition have caused in his city.

Subhan Al Jabouri, the Mayor of Hawijah, in his office (Image courtesy of the Mayor)

Interview with Subhan Al Jabouri, Mayor of Hawijah

Part I: Direct harm

1. What is Hawijah Council’s present estimate of civilian deaths and injuries resulting from this Dutch airstrike?

According to preliminary reports, more than 70 civilians were killed and more than 500 others injured.

2. Can the Council please characterise the damage caused to civilian objects such as houses, roads, medical facilities, shops, schools, childcare facilities, pharmacies, factories? Is there a list of damaged properties?

Besides severe damage to civilian properties, factories, workshops and homes in the surrounding area of the explosion, a power station, civil defence centre and a wheat mill were also destroyed.

3. How many schools were damaged in the attack, and are these functional again?

A total of 37 schools were damaged and four schools are out of service and no longer running and these have not yet been rebuilt.

4. How many pharmacies were damaged and are these open again? 

No answer.

5. Is it true that an ice- and brick factory were damaged, and are these operational again?

Yes, it was confirmed that more than one ice production plant and brick factories were destroyed as a result of the airstrike. The factories have not completely reopened, nor have their owners returned to the area.

6. Is it true that the surface water sewage system was damaged, and is that operational again?

No answer.

7. Is there an overall estimate of buildings both damaged and destroyed in the Dutch airstrike?

According to the first assessment of the size of the destruction and the diameter of the impact of the shock wave of the explosion, the size of the damage reached a diameter of more than 2km and 500 buildings were subject to major damage.

8. Can the Council please outline damage to infrastructure, such as electricity, gas pipelines, water pipelines, communication lines, etcetera?

The infrastructure in the area of the explosion and the surrounding neighbourhoods were damaged, which led to the suspension of a large number of facilities, including a power station, main communication lines and water pipes in the area.

Part II: Indirect harm

9. What has been the impact of the damage to civilian objects and infrastructure from the Dutch airstrike such as a decline in access to water, electricity, heating or other essential services such as water and sanitation services, health services, displacement, environmental impact, rubble and waste management

The great damage caused to the infrastructure of the region and the surrounding areas, as well as damage to the power station and water pipelines, led to the displacement of a large number of families from the affected areas and a significant decrease in access to basic services to them.

10. What psychological impact on local communities does the Council believe has occurred?

The horror of this strike had a profound psychological effect on the psyche of the victims, as it led to the death of dozens of families and the injury of hundreds. Some families were completely wiped out, others lost at least three or four family members. The absence of direct health care and the inability of the people to help their families and watch them die under the rubble induced trauma for the people. This is in addition to the loss of their homes, properties and sources of income and their experiences of being displaced.

11. It has been reported that Hawijans remain concerned about possible radiological and other contaminant effects of both the Dutch strike and the broader campaign to remove ISIS. Can the Council please update us on these concerns?

Despite the liberation of the area and the return of locals and their attempts, the industrial zone and surrounding residential areas have not been rebuilt. However, there are still concerns among the residents about the radiological effects and polluting materials as a result of the tremendous force of the explosion, as some believe that radioactive materials are present in the area.

Part III: Long-term effects   12. How are survivors of the Dutch airstrike presently doing?

The Al-Ghad organisation, in cooperation with the local authorities, is ensuring the registration of survivors and those affected by the airstrike through voluntary work. The information currently recorded shows that the survivors are divided between internally displaced persons in Kirkuk and Salah al-Din governorate, and internally displaced persons inside Hawija as a result of the destruction of homes, sources of income and laboratories, and the lack of basic services in the area.

13. Can the local authorities please confirm the estimate that as a result of this attack, that around 2,000 people experienced psycho-social problems?

Yes, and the number of people affected may exceed this number due to the side effects of the strike.

14. Are psychological and physical rehabilitation programs available?

There are no specialized rehabilitation or psychological support programs that specifically target survivors of the Dutch airstrike, but they may be included in public programs that target the Hawija area or Internally Displaced Peoples.

15. Have victims been compensated in any way? Can the Council confirm that there has been only one family that has received compensation? 

No compensation programs were implemented for survivors.

The aftermath of the Dutch strike on Hawijah in 2015 which killed an estimated 70 civilians (via Iraqi Revolution).

16. Have the homes of citizens been repaired? If so, how many? Could the Council please confirm the estimate that 50-60 per cent of the buildings in the area have now been rebuilt?

The houses have not been completely rebuilt, and the percentage of repaired homes does not exceed 40% of the homes. Families returning to the area live in houses damaged by the effects of the strike, as they are unable to repair their homes. It is difficult to confirm this percentage, as there are many buildings that were completely destroyed and the owners of those buildings have not returned.

17. Have people returned or are they still displaced and under which circumstances are they living now?  How many Hawijans remain displaced from the neighbourhood damaged in the Dutch strike?

Living conditions are very difficult due to the lack of basic services, sources of income and the destruction of homes. It is difficult to determine the percentages of returnees in these areas because some displaced persons from outside these areas have returned to live in the affected areas and many of them are still displaced or settled in other areas such as Kirkuk and Salah al-Din.

18. Has infrastructure and or factories/shops/facilities been repaired? What has and has not so far been repaired?

The local government has launched plans to rebuild the infrastructure, but it has not been fully implemented and the region still suffers from a lack of services. Some factories have been rebuilt, such as the wheat mill and a few workshops and shops, but a number of factories are still destroyed along with many car showrooms, workshops and schools.

19. Do people have access to water and electricity again? Did they have access to it before the attack?

A number of transmission lines and water pipes have been repaired, but the main station that was damaged as a result of the bombing has not been operational yet.

20. Have roads been repaired? If so how many?

Yes, only the main road in the area has been repaired. 

21. Has the rubble been cleared? How much?

Some of the debris has been removed but the bigger proportion remains in the area.

22. Is it safe to live in the affected neighbourhoods again? Or is there a risk of unexploded ordnance?

Yes, it is safe, and the Al-Ghad Organisation for Women and Children’s Care is implementing an awareness project about the dangers of war remnants in Hawija now.

23. Do people have access to the same local facilities as before, such as medical facilities, shops, daycares, pharmacies etcetera?

Yes, some facilities were reopened thanks to individual efforts.

24. Can the local authorities confirm the loss of jobs which resulted from this attack (because stores, workshops and factories closed and are still not opened because the area still lacks electricity and has not been rebuilt)?

Hundreds of Hawija residents lost their jobs and sources of income as a result of the destruction of workshops, car showrooms and factories, as well as the destruction of the basic infrastructure of the area. Some people have reopened a small number of workshops and shops, and the mill was rebuilt too, but the lack of services hinders the complete restoration of economic and urban life.

Part IV: General damage ISIS occupation and anti-ISIS Coalition

25. One source mentions that one of two water treatment plants (WTP) in the city were damaged in another airstrike. However another source says the WTP itself wasn’t damaged by an airstrike, but instead a power station was damaged that normally provided the WTP with electricity to pump the water. Was it the WTP itself or the power station and pipelines that were damaged? 

Yes, the water transmission lines, the supplied electricity network and the power station were all damaged.

26. The source also mentions that currently, only one WTP is functioning in Hawijah, through the public grid. However because the grid is not reliable, the functioning of the WTP is limited and it cannot cover the needs of the population.  Can the Council please confirm if this was and remains true?

Yes, it is true and the situation is still as mentioned.

27. A 2018 report noted that two of the three healthcare facilities in Hawijah had been damaged by fighting with only one functioning at that time – meaning people had to travel to Kirkuk for specialized care. However, a separate local source asserts that “No health care center has been damaged because airstrike, only some minor damages in the Directorate of Health building and it already been rehabilitated, Hawija General Hospital and public health center is functioning now – but according to field staff there are huge gaps in sanitation facilities.”

Could the Council please confirm whether two out of three health centres were or were not damaged – and if so, whether they have now been repaired?  

The Health Directorate, known to the government as the ‘second health sector’ was affected by the strike.

28. Can the local authorities please confirm that there are no rehabilitation or psycho-social support programmes for the victims presently available in Hawijah?

Humanitarian organizations generally implement psychological support programs in Hawija, but there are no programs specifically for survivors of the strike.

محافظ الحويجة سبهان الجبوري في مكتبه. الصورة مقدمة من المحافظ.

مقابلة مع محافظ الحويجة: سبهان الجبوري

ليلة الثاني إلى الثالث من حزيران عام 2015، قصفت طائرة حربية هولندية من نوع F-16s معملاً  لداعش متخصصاً في تصنيع القنابل في الحويجة بالعراق. قتلت الانفجارات الثانوية التي سببتها الضربة ما لا يقل عن 70 مدنياً وأدت لجرح مئات آخرين. اليوم، لا تزال مدينة الحويجة تتعافى، ليس من حكم داعش طويل الأمد على المنطقة فقط، بل من التأثير المستمر على حياة المدنيين من الضربة الجوية الهولندية قبل خمس سنوات.

أجرت Airwars و PAX مقابلة مع محافظ الحويجة سبهان الجبوري عن التأثير المباشر وغير المباشر للضربة الهولندية، لتقريرهما المشترك الأخير “الرؤية من خلال الركام: تأثير استخدام الأسلحة المتفجرة في الحرب ضد داعش على المدنيين”.

تمت الإجابة على الأسئلة عبر البريد الإلكتروني يوم الثامن والعشرين من أيلول 2020. يدور القسم الأول من الأسئلة حول التأثيرات المباشرة للغارة الجوية الهولندية، فيما يركز القسم الثاني على الآثار غير المباشرة. في القسم الثالث سئل المحافظ عن التأثيرات المستمرة للضربة على حياة المدنيين في الحويجة حالياً. يبحث المحافظ في القسم الرابع الضرر الإجمالي الذي سببه احتلال داعش والتحالف المضاد لداعش على المدينة.

القسم الأول: الأذى المباشر

1.ما هو تقدير مجلس الحويجة الحالي للقتلى والجرحى المدنيين نتيجة هذه الغارة الجوية الهولندية؟ 

بحسب التقارير الاولية لأعداد القتلى المدنيين فقد بلغت أكثر من 70 قتيلا وأكثر من 500 جريح.

2.هل يمكن للمجلس أن يصف الأضرار التي لحقت بالممتلكات المدنية مثل المنازل والشوارع والمرافق الطبية والمحلات التجارية والمدارس ومرافق رعاية الأطفال والصيدليات والمصانع. هل توجد قائمة بالممتلكات المدمرة أو المتضررة؟

تعرضت الممتلكات المدنية إلى أضرار كبيرة حيث تعرضت المعامل والورش والمحال التجارية والمنازل المحيطة بمنطقة الانفجار الى محو ودمار بالكامل، إضافة إلى تدمير محطة الكهرباء ومركز للدفاع المدني ومطحنة.

3. كم عدد المدارس التي تضررت جراء الهجوم، وهل عادت للعمل مجدداً؟

تعرضت 37 مدرسة للضرر في المجمل،  مع خروج 4 مدارس عن الخدمة، ولم تتم إعادة بنائها.

4. كم عدد الصيدليات التي تضررت وهل تم فتحها مجدداً؟

لا جواب

5. هل صحيح أن معمل ثلج وطوب تضرر نتيجة الضربة وهل عاد للعمل مجدداً؟

نعم، تم تأكيد تدمير أكثر من معمل لإنتاج الثلج وكذلك معامل للطوب نتيجة الضربة الجوية . لم يتم اعادة افتتاح المعامل بشكل كامل او أن أصحابها لم يعودوا للمنطقة.

6. هل صحيح أن نظام الصرف الصحي السطحي تضرر وهل عاد للعمل مجدداً؟

لا جواب

7. هل هناك تقدير إجمالي للمباني المتضررة والمدمرة في هذه الغارة الجوية الهولندية؟

حسب التقييم الأولي لحجم الدمار وقطر تأثير الموجة الارتدادية للانفجار، وصل الدمار الى  دائرة يزيد قطرها عن 2 كيلومتر وتعرض 500 مبنى لدمار بنسبة كبيرة.

·8. هل يمكن للمجلس أن يحدد الأضرار التي لحقت بالبنية التحتية مثل الكهرباء وأنابيب الغاز وأنابيب المياه وخطوط الاتصال وما إلى ذلك؟

نتيجة للأضرار الكبيرة التي لحقت بالبنى التحتية للمنطقة والمناطق المحيطة وتعرض البنى التحتية في منطقة الانفجار والأحياء المحيطة بها إلى أضرار، توقف عدد كبير من المرافق منها محطة كهرباء و خطوط الاتصالات الرئيسية وأنابيب الماء في المنطقة.

القسم الثاني: الأذى غير المباشر

9. ما هو تأثير الأضرار التي لحقت بالممتلكات المدنية والبنية التحتية من الغارة الجوية الهولندية مثل: صعوبة الوصول إلى المياه والكهرباء والتدفئة أو غيرها من الخدمات الأساسية مثل خدمات المياه والصرف الصحي والخدمات الصحية والنزوح والأثر البيئي والأنقاض وإدارة النفايات؟

أدت الأضرار الكبيرة التي لحقت بالبنى التحتية للمنطقة والمناطق المحيطة وتضرر محطة الكهرباء وأنابيب الماء إلى نزوح عدد كبير من العوائل من المناطق المتضررة وتدني نسبة وصول الخدمات الأساسية إليهم .

10. ما هو الأثر النفسي الذي حدث على المجتمعات المحلية؟

كان لهول هذه الضربة أثر نفسي عميق على الضحايا حيث أدت إلى مقتل العشرات من العوائل وإصابة المئات. بعض العوائل محيت بالكامل والبعض الآخر خسر ما لا يقل عن 3-4 أفراد من أفراد الأسرة . تسبب غياب الرعاية الصحية المباشرة وعدم قدرة الأهالي على إسعاف ذويهم ومشاهدتهم يتوفون تحت الركام بصدمة كبيرة لدى الأهالي، إضافة لخسارتهم منازلهم وممتلكاتهم ومصادر الدخل اليوم وتعرضهم للنزوح .

11. أفادت التقارير أن أهالي الحويجة ما زالوا قلقين بشأن الآثار الإشعاعية المحتملة وغيرها من الآثار الملوثة من الضربة الهولندية والحملة ضد داعش. هل يمكن للمجلس إطلاعنا على هذه المخاوف؟

رغم تحرير المنطقة وعودة الأهالي ومحاولاتهم لإعادة بناء المنطقة الصناعية والمناطق السكنية المحيطة إلا أن المخاوف ما زالت مستمرة بين الأهالي من الاثار الإشعاعية والمواد الملوثة نتيجة لقوة الانفجار الهائلة حيث يعتقد بعضهم وجود مواد إشعاعية في المنطقة.

القسم الثالث: الآثار طويلة المدى

12. كيف حال الناجين من الغارة الجوية الهولندية حالياً؟

تقوم منظمة الغد بالتعاون مع السلطات المحلية بعملية تسجيل للناجين والمتضررين من الغارة الجوية بعمل تطوعي، حيث بينت المعلومات المسجلة حالياً أن الناجين منقسمون بين نازحين داخلياً الى محافظة كركوك وصلاح الدين، و نازحين داخل الحويجة نتيجة دمار المنازل ومصادر الدخل والمعامل ونقص الخدمات الأساسية في المنطقة .

13. هل يمكن للسلطات المحلية أن تؤكد التقديرات أنه نتيجة للهجوم تعرض حوالي 2000 شخص لمشاكل اجتماعية – نفسية؟

نعم ويمكن أن يتجاوز عدد المتضررين هذا العدد بسبب الآثار الجانبية للضربة.

14. هل تتوافر برامج للتأهيل النفسي والجسدي؟ 

لا توجد برامج تأهيل أو دعم نفسي متخصصة تستهدف الناجين من الضربة الجوية الهولندية تحديداً، لكن قد يتم شمولهم بالبرامج العامة التي تستهدف منطقة الحويجة او النازحين.

15. هل تم تعويض الضحايا بأي شكل من الأشكال؟ وهل يمكن للمجلس أن يؤكد أن احدى العائلات تلقت تعويضاً؟

لم يتم تنفيذ أي برامج تعويضات للناجين.

آثار الضربة الهولندية على الحويجة عام 2015 والتي أدت لمقتل ما يقارب 70 مدنياً (عن صفحة الثورة العراقية)‎.

16. هل تم إصلاح منازل المواطنين التي تضررت؟ في حال تم ذلك، كم عددها؟ هل يمكن للمجلس أن يؤكد أن ما بين 50-60 بالمئة من المباني في المنطقة أعيد بناؤها؟

لم يتم ترميم المنازل بشكل كامل ولا تتجاوز نسبة المنازل المرممة 40% من المنازل رغم عودة العوائل للمنطقة، إلا أنهم يسكنون في منازل متضررة من آثار الضربة لعدم قدرتهم على إصلاح تلك المنازل .

قد يكون من الصعوبة تأكيد هذه النسبة لوجود العديد من المباني التي دمرت بالكامل وعدم عودة أصحاب تلك المباني .

17. ما الظروف التي يعيشها الناس الآن؟ هل عادوا إلى ديارهم أم لا يزالون نازحين؟ كم عدد سكان الحويجة الذين ما زالوا نازحين من المناطق المتضرر من الضربة الهولندية؟

الظروف المعيشية صعبة جداً بسبب نقص الخدمات الأساسية ومصادر الدخل ودمار المنازل. من الصعب تحديد نسبة العائدين في تلك المناطق بسبب عودة بعض النازحين من خارج تلك المناطق للسكن في المناطق المتضررة،  ومازال العديد منهم نازحين او استقروا في مناطق أخرى مثل كركوك وصلاح الدين.

18. هل تم إصلاح البنية التحتية و المصانع و المحلات والمرافق؟ ما الذي تم إصلاحه ولم يتم إصلاحه حتى الآن؟

أطلقت الحكومة المحلية خططاً لإصلاح البنى التحتية إلا أنها لم تنفذ بشكل كامل ومازالت المنطقة تعاني من نقص الخدمات. تم اعادة بناء بعض من المصانع مثل مطحنة الحنطة وعدد قليل من الورش والمحال لكن لا يزال عدد من المصانع مدمراً والكثير من معارض السيارات والورش والمدارس.

19. هل يحصل الناس على الماء والكهرباء من جديد؟ (هل تمكنوا من الوصول إليهما قبل الهجوم)؟

تم إصلاح عدد من الخطوط الناقلة وأنابيب المياه لكن المحطة الرئيسية التي تضررت نتيجة القصف لم تعمل حتى الآن.

20. هل تم إصلاح الطرق؟ إذا كان الأمر كذلك فكم منها تم إصلاحه؟

نعم،  تم إصلاح الطريق الرئيسي للمنطقة فقط.

21. هل تمت إزالة الأنقاض؟ في حال حدث ذلك فكم حجمها؟

تم ازالة جزء من الركام لكن الجزء الاكبر باق في المنطقة.

22. هل الأحياء المتضررة آمنة للعيش فيها مرة أخرى (بالنسبة للألغام و ما إلى ذلك)؟

نعم آمنة وتقوم منظمة الغد لرعاية المرأة والطفل بتنفيذ مشروع التوعية من مخاطر المخلفات الحربية داخل الحويجة حالياً.

 23. هل تتوفر نفس المرافق المحلية لأهالي الحويجة كما كانت من قبل (مثل منشآت طبية، محلات، ومراكز رعاية للأطفال، وصيدليات)؟

نعم،  تم إعادة افتتاح بعض  المرافق بجهود ذاتية بسيطة.

24. هل يمكن للسلطات المحلية أن تؤكد خسارة وظائف بسبب الهجوم (باعتبار أن محالاً وورش عمل ومصانع أغلقت ولا تزال غير فاعلة لأن المنطقة لا تزال تعاني من انقطاع الكهرباء ولم تتم إعادة بنائها)؟

فقد المئات من أهالي الحويجة وظائفهم ومصادر دخلهم نتيجة لدمار الورش ومعارض السيارات والمصانع وكذلك دمار البنى التحتية الأساسية للمنطقة. أعاد بعض الناس افتتاح عدد قليل من الورش والمحال وكذلك إعادة بناء المطحنة إلا أن نقص الخدمات يعرقل إعادة الحركة العمرانية بالكامل.

القسم الرابع: التأثير العام لاحتلال داعش و للتحالف المضاد لداعش على الحويجة.

25. يذكر أحد المصادر أن إحدى محطتي معالجة المياه (WTP) في المدينة تضررت في غارة جوية أخرى. ومع ذلك ، يقول مصدر آخر إن محطة المعالجة نفسها لم تتضرر من جراء الغارة الجوية  ولكن بدلاً من ذلك تضررت محطة طاقة  كانت تزود محطة معالجة المياه بالكهرباء لضخ المياه. هل تضررت محطة المعالجة نفسها أم محطة الطاقة وخطوط الأنابيب؟

نعم تضررت الخطوط الناقلة والشبكة المجهزة للكهرباء ومحطة الطاقة.

26. ويشير المصدر أيضًا إلى أن محطة معالجة واحدة فقط تعمل حاليًا في الحويجة من خلال الشبكة العامة. ومع ذلك ، نظرًا لأن الشبكة غير موثوقة ، فإن تشغيل محطة المعالجة محدودة ولا يمكنها تغطية احتياجات السكان. هل يمكن للمجلس أن يؤكد ما إذا كان هذا صحيحًا ولا يزال كذلك؟

نعم صحيح ومازال الوضع كما هو مذكور.

 27. أشار تقرير صدر عام 2018 إلى أن اثنتين من مرافق الرعاية الصحية الثلاثة في الحويجة تضررت بسبب القتال وكان هناك مركز واحد فقط يعمل في ذلك الوقت – مما يعني أن الناس اضطروا أن يسافروا إلى كركوك للحصول على رعاية متخصصة. ومع ذلك، أكد مصدر محلي منفصل أنه “لم يتضرر أي مركز رعاية صحية بسبب الغارة الجوية، فقط بعض الأضرار الطفيفة في مبنى مديرية الصحة وتم إعادة تأهيله بالفعل، ومستشفى الحويجة العام ومركز الصحة العامة يعملان الآن – ولكن وفقًا للموظفين الميدانيين هناك فجوات هائلة في مرافق الصرف الصحي”. 

هل يمكن للمجلس أن يؤكد ما إذا كان 2 من أصل 3 مراكز صحية قد تضررت أو لم تتضرر – وإذا كان الأمر كذلك ، فهل تم إعادة إعمارها الآن؟

تضررت مديرية الصحة من أثر الضربة واسمها المعروف لدى الحكومة حالياً القطاع الصحي الثاني.

28. هل يمكن للسلطات المحلية أن تؤكد غياب وجود برامج دعم اجتماعية نفسية للناجين الموجودين حالياً في الحويجة؟

تقوم المنظمات الإنسانية بتنفيذ برامج الدعم النفسي في الحويجة بشكل عام،  لكن لا توجد برامج مخصصة للناجين من الضربة.

Subhan Al Jabouri, de burgemeester van Hawija in zijn kantoor (foto via de burgemeester).

Interview met Subhan al-Jabouri, burgemeester van Hawija

In de nacht van 2 op 3 juni 2015 bombardeerden Nederlandse F-16’s een ISIS Vehicle-Borne Improvised Explosives Devices (VBIED) -fabriek in Hawija, Irak. Secundaire explosies veroorzaakt door de luchtaanval hebben minstens 70 burgers gedood en honderden anderen raakten gewond. Vandaag de dag is de stad nog steeds aan het herstellen van niet alleen de langdurige ISIS-controle over het gebied, maar ook van de blijvende impact op het burgerleven van de Nederlandse luchtaanval vijf jaar geleden.

Voor hun recentelijk gepubliceerde gezamenlijke rapport Seeing through the rubble: The civilian impact of the use of explosive weapons in the fight against ISIS, interviewden Airwars en PAX de burgemeester van Hawija Subhan Al Jabouri over de directe en indirecte aanhoudende gevolgen van de aanval.

De vragen zijn op 28 september 2020 via e-mail beantwoord. Het eerste deel van de vragen gaat over de directe gevolgen van de Nederlandse luchtaanval. Het tweede deel focust op de indirecte gevolgen. In het derde deel is de burgemeester gevraagd naar de impact die de Nederlandse luchtaanval vandaag de dag nog altijd heeft op het leven van burgers in Hawija. In het vierde deel gaat de burgemeester in op de algehele schade die de ISIS-bezetting en anti-ISIS Coalitie hebben achtergelaten in zijn stad.

Deel I: Directe gevolgen  1. Wat is uw huidige inschatting van het aantal burgerdoden en gewonden door de Nederlandse luchtaanval op Hawija in de macht van 2 op 3 juni? 

Volgens de eerste rapportages zijn er meer dan 70 burgers gedood, en meer dan 500 gewond geraakt. 

2. Kunt u de schade aan civiele objecten omschrijven; zoals schade aan huizen, wegen, medische voorzieningen, winkels, scholen, kinderopvang, apotheken, fabrieken, enzovoorts? Is er een lijst van beschadigde objecten?

Er zijn behalve zware beschadigingen aan civiele objecten zoals fabrieken, werkplaatsen, winkels en huizen in de directe omgeving van de explosie ook een elektriciteitscentrale, een Civil Defense Center en een molen vernietigd. 

3. Hoeveel scholen zijn beschadigd geraakt, en zijn deze inmiddels weer operationeel?

Er zijn in totaal 37 scholen beschadigd waarvan vier scholen volledig zijn gesloten; deze zijn nog niet opnieuw opgebouwd. 

4. Hoeveel apotheken zijn beschadigd, en zijn deze weer open?

Geen antwoord.

5. Klopt het dat er ook een ijs- en een baksteenfabriek zijn beschadigd, en zijn deze weer operationeel inmiddels? 

Ja, het is bevestigd dat er meer dan een ijsproductiefabriek en steenfabrieken zijn verwoest door de luchtaanval. De fabrieken zijn nog niet volledig heropend, of de eigenaren zijn nog niet teruggekeerd.

6. Klopt het dat het (oppervlakte water) riool is beschadigd; is dit inmiddels weer gerepareerd? 

Geen antwoord.

7. Is er een schatting van de totale schade van gebouwen die beschadigd of vernietigd zijn door de Nederlandse luchtaanval?

Volgens het eerste onderzoek naar de reikwijdte van de schade, en de doorsnee van het gebied dat door de drukgolf van de explosie is geraakt, heeft de vernietiging een diameter van meer dan 2 kilometer, waarbij 500 gebouwen voor een groot deel werden verwoest. 

8. Kunt u de schade aan infrastructuur zoals elektriciteitsvoorzieningen, gasleidingen, waterleidingen, communicatie infrastructuur etcetera beschrijven?

De infrastructuur van zowel het explosiegebied als de omliggende buurten is beschadigd, wat heeft geleid tot gebrek aan veel diensten die deze faciliteiten leverden, zoals een elektriciteitscentrale, communicatielijnen en waterbuizen. 

Deel II: Indirecte gevolgen 

9. Wat is de impact van deze schade aan civiele objecten en infrastructuur ten gevolge van de Nederlandse luchtaanval geweest, zoals verminderde toegang tot water, elektriciteit, verwarming en andere essentiële diensten zoals water en sanitaire voorzieningen, gezondheidszorg, ontheemd raken, de impact op milieu en vuilnis- en puinverwerking? 

De grote schade aan de infrastructuur van de buurt en omliggende buurten, maar ook de schade aan de elektriciteitscentrale en Waterbuizen heeft ervoor gezorgd dat een groot aantal families uit de getroffen gebieden ontheemd is geraakt en heeft geleid tot een significant verminderde toegang tot basisvoorzieningen. 

10. Wat is volgens u de psychosociale impact op de lokale gemeenschap geweest?

De verschrikking van deze aanval heeft een heftige psychologische impact op de zielen van de slachtoffers achtergelaten, aangezien het in tientallen families tot de dood heeft geleid, en honderden gevallen tot verwondingen. Sommige families zijn volledig weggevaagd, andere families verloren minsten drie of vier gezinsleden. De afwezigheid van directe medische zorg en het onvermogen van mensen om hun families te helpen en hen te zien sterven onder het puin veroorzaakten een enorme schok bij inwoners. Tel daarbij op het verlies van hun huizen, bezittingen, inkomstenbronnen en het verworden tot vluchteling. 

11. Er leven naar verluidt onder de mensen in Hawija zorgen over mogelijke radiologische en andere giftige effecten van zowel deze Nederlandse aanval, als ook de bredere militaire campagne om ISIS te verjagen. Kunt u ons over deze zorgen vertellen? 

Ondanks de bevrijding van het gebied en de terugkomst en pogingen van inwoners ten spijt, zijn het bedrijventerrein en de omliggende woonwijken nog niet opnieuw opgebouwd. Er zijn nog steeds zorgen onder de inwoners over stralingseffecten en verontreinigde materialen ten gevolge van de enorme explosie, aangezien sommigen zeggen dat er ook radioactieve materialen in de wijk aanwezig zouden zijn geweest. 

Deel III: Langdurige gevolgen

12. Hoe gaat het met de overlevenden van de Nederlandse luchtaanval?

De organisatie al-Ghad registreert samen met de lokale autoriteiten op vrijwillige basis de ontheemden (Internal Displaced People) en diegenen die schade hebben geleden door de aanval. De tot nu toe verzamelde informatie laat zien dat het ene gedeelte van de ontheemden in Kirkuk en de Salah al-Din provincie leeft, en het andere gedeelte in Hawija, aangezien hun huizen vernietigd zijn, hun bronnen van inkomsten en de fabrieken zijn weggevallen, en het aan basisvoorzieningen ontbreekt in het gebied.

13. Kunt u bevestigen dat als gevolg van de Nederlandse aanval rond de 2000 mensen psychosociale problemen ondervinden? 

Ja en mogelijk nog meer, gezien de neveneffecten van de aanval. 

14. Worden er psychologische en fysieke revalideringstrajecten aangeboden? 

Er zijn geen rehabilitatieprogramma’s of speciale psychologische hulpprogramma’s, specifiek voor de groep ontheemden van de Nederlandse aanval, maar mogelijk doen ze mee in de bredere programma’s die worden aangeboden in het gebied Hawija of aan ontheemden. 

15. Zijn de slachtoffers op welke wijze dan ook gecompenseerd? Kan de burgemeester bevestigen dat er maar een familie is die tot nu toe compensatie heeft ontvangen?

Er is geen compensatie geweest voor ontheemden. 

De ravage na de Nederlandse aanval op Hawija in juni 2015 (via Iraqi Revolution).

16. Zijn de huizen inmiddels weer opgebouwd? Zo ja, hoeveel? Klopt het dat rond de 50 tot 60 procent is herbouwd?

De huizen zijn niet volledig gerestaureerd, en niet meer dan 40 procent van de huizen zijn gerepareerd. Teruggekeerde families wonen in de door de luchtaanval beschadigde huizen omdat ze niet in staat zijn hun huis te repareren. Het is moeilijk het percentage precies te bevestigen, omdat er veel gebouwen volledig zijn verwoest en de eigenaren van deze gebouwen niet zijn teruggekeerd. 

17. Zijn de mensen inmiddels weer teruggekeerd, of zijn ze nog op de vlucht, en wat zijn hun leefomstandigheden? Hoeveel mensen uit Hawija zijn nog steeds dakloos door de door de Nederlandse aanval veroorzaakte schade? 

De leefomstandigheden zijn slecht vanwege het gebrek aan basisvoorzieningen, inkomstenbronnen en verwoeste huizen. Het is lastig een percentage te geven van hoeveel mensen zijn teruggekeerd, omdat sommige vluchtelingen van elders in het gebied zijn gaan wonen. En nog steeds zijn velen van hen ontheemd of hebben zich gevestigd in andere gebieden zoals Kirkuk en Salah al-Din.

18. Is de infrastructuur en zijn fabrieken/winkels/andere faciliteiten inmiddels gerepareerd? Wat is er wel en niet heropgebouwd tot nu toe?

De lokale overheid heeft plannen gelanceerd om de infrastructuur te repareren, maar ze heeft die niet volledig uitgevoerd en het gebied gaat nog steeds gebukt onder een gebrek aan voorzieningen. Sommige fabrieken zijn herbouwd, zoals de tarwemolen, en een paar werkplaatsen en winkels, maar nog steeds is een aantal fabrieken verwoest, net als veel autoshowrooms, werkplaatsen en scholen. 

19. Hebben mensen weer stromend water en elektra? (En hadden ze dit voor de aanval?)

Een aantal transportleidingen en waterbuizen gerepareerd, maar de centrale die verwoest werd door het bombardement is tot nu toe nog niet operationeel. 

20. Zijn er wegen hersteld, en zo ja hoeveel?

Ja, alleen de hoofdweg in het gebied is gerepareerd. 

21. Is het puin geruimd? Hoeveel?

Een deel van het puin is geruimd, maar het grootste gedeelte ligt nog in het gebied. 

22. Is het veilig om weer in de getroffen wijken te wonen? Of liggen er nog explosieve oorlogsresten?

Ja het is veilig, en Al-Ghad Organisation for Women and Children’s Care geeft momenteel voorlichting over de gevaren van oorlogsresten in Hawija. 

23. Hebben mensen weer toegang tot dezelfde voorzieningen als voor de aanval, zoals medische faciliteiten, winkels, kinderopvang, apotheken, etcetera?

Ja, sommigen zijn weer geopend met basale individuele inspanningen.

24. Kunt u bevestigen dat veel mensen als gevolg van deze aanval hun baan hebben verloren, omdat winkels, werkplaatsen en fabrieken zijn gesloten en niet meer open zijn gegaan, en het gebied nog steeds niet herbouwd is en gebrek heeft aan elektriciteit?

Honderden inwoners van Hawija hebben hun banen en hun bron van inkomsten verloren door de verwoesting van de werkplaatsen, autoshowrooms en fabrieken, en ook is de basale infrastructuur van het gebied verwoest. Sommige mensen hebben opnieuw een paar werkplaatsen en winkels geopend, en ook de meelfabriek is herbouwd, maar het gebrek aan voorzieningen hindert de volledige terugkeer van het economische en stadse leven. 

Deel IV: Algemene schade ISIS-bezetting en anti-ISIS Coalitie

25. Een van onze bronnen meldt dat een van de twee waterzuiveringsinstallaties in de stad is beschadigd in een andere luchtaanval, terwijl een andere bron zegt dat niet de waterzuiveringsinstallatie zelf geraakt is, maar de elektriciteitscentrale die de zuiveringsinstallatie normaal voorzag van elektriciteit, en dat deze daarom niet werkt. Was de waterzuiveringsinstallatie zelf beschadigd of de elektriciteitscentrale? 

Zowel de transportleidingen, het elektriciteit netwerk als de elektriciteitscentrale zijn beschadigd. 

26. Diezelfde bron rapporteert ook dat er op dit moment maar een waterzuiveringsinstallatie werkt, die afhankelijk is van het openbare elektriciteitsnetwerk. Maar omdat het elektriciteitsnetwerk niet betrouwbaar is, is de watervoorziening beperkt en dus niet genoeg voor de behoefte van de lokale bevolking. Is dit inderdaad het geval?

Ja, dit is correct en is nog steeds het geval. 

27. Een rapport uit 2018 meldt dat twee van de drie gezondheidscentra in Hawija beschadigd waren door de gevechten, en dat er op dat moment slechts een operationeel was – dit had als gevolg dat mensen naar Kirkuk moesten reizen voor meer specialistische zorg. Een lokale bron meldt echter dat er “geen gezondheidscentrum is beschadigd, maar dat er alleen kleine schade aan het “Directorate of Health”-gebouw was (inmiddels gerepareerd), dat het algemeen ziekenhuis in Hawijah weer open is, maar dat er wel enorme gaten zijn gevallen in de sanitaire voorzieningen in het ziekenhuis.” 

Kunt u bevestigen of er inderdaad twee van de drie gezondheidscentra zijn beschadigd, en zo ja, of deze inmiddels zijn hersteld? 

Het “Health Directorate” gebouw, ook bekend als de “tweede gezondheidssector”, is inderdaad beschadigd geweest.

28. Klopt het dat er geen revalidatie en psychosociale ondersteuning is voor de slachtoffers nu in Hawija?

Er zijn wel humanitaire organisaties die psychologische hulpprogramma’s bieden in Hawija, maar niet specifiek voor de overlevenden en ontheemden van deze aanval. 

▲ Damage in the industrial area of Hawijah, years after the attack in June 2015 (image via NOS).

Published

October 28, 2020

Written by

Airwars Staff

Despite at least 84 likely civilian deaths from US actions in Yemen under Donald Trump, public accountability peaked just 12 days into his presidency.

A new Airwars investigation into the ongoing US counterterrorism campaign in Yemen has identified at least 86 civilians likely killed by US actions during Donald Trump’s presidency – though the US military has admitted to no more than a dozen deaths.

Eroding Transparency, researched and written by Mohammed al-Jumaily and Edward Ray, examines US air and ground actions against both Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, and Islamic State in Yemen, since 2017. More than 230 declared and alleged US military and CIA actions are identified – among them 41 reported strikes in which Yemenis have alleged civilian casualties.

An accompanying public database details every alleged US action in Yemen since 2017 under President Trump. Employing its highly-effective all source monitoring approach, Airwars has significantly reoriented research towards Yemeni voices and experiences. There are some 4,400 unique sources in the new public database, sixty per cent of these in Arabic. More than 140 alleged or confirmed US actions have also been geolocated by Airwars to village-level accuracy.

Read our full report, Eroding Transparency: Trump in Yemen

Eroding Transparency shows that US operations in Yemen – already on the rise during the last two years of the Obama administration – significantly escalated under Trump, with dire consequences for civilian harm. US operations too often lacked both the transparency and accountability standards of other recent US military interventions, and the report identifies a worrying emphasis under Trump of both clandestine and covert activity in Yemen, obscured from public scrutiny.

Initial spike under Donald Trump

Airwars’ new research tracks a precipitous increase in alleged and confirmed US counterterrorism actions in Yemen during 2017. Indeed, the first year of the Trump presidency saw the highest reported US counterterrorism actions in Yemen since 2002.

This escalation was accompanied by a significant loosening of restrictions on how the US military could operate in Yemen: “It seems what happened was that the Trump administration was keen to take the gloves off, as it were, to be what they perceived was tougher on terrorism, and this was one of the first ready-made concepts of operation available,” says Luke Hartig, previously Senior Director for Counterterrorism at the National Security Council during the Obama administration.

When compared with available data on US actions during Barack Obama’s presidency (2009 – 2017), it is clear this initial spike under Trump in 2017 represented a distinct departure from the previous administration. That one year saw a record 133 officially declared US airstrikes and ground actions in Yemen. To put this in context, the total number of publicly declared actions in Yemen during the full presidencies of George W. Bush and Barack Obama, over a 14 year period, amounted to 150 events.

More recently however, Airwars research shows that US counterterrorism activity in Yemen has declined to its lowest reported levels since 2012.

Poor US response to civilian casualty concerns 

The expansion of US activity during the early Trump presidency resulted in a corresponding increase in likely civilian harm, Eroding Transparency reveals. Of the 86 minimum likely civilian deaths tracked by Airwars, some 93 per cent (80 deaths) arose from reported US actions in Yemen between January 2017 and April 2018. Reported civilian deaths tracked by Airwars in 2017 significantly outstripped alleged deaths in any year during the Obama presidency, as previously tracked by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.

The estimated minimum civilian deaths from Trump strikes in Yemen include at least 28 children and 13 women, resulting from some 25 declared and likely US actions. At least 63 likely civilian deaths resulted from twenty actions that US Central Command has itself publicly declared. Eroding Transparency emphasises in particular the considerable risks of US ground actions to civilians; alleged or confirmed US ground actions, though accounting only less than three per cent of likely US actions, were responsible for at least 40 per cent of the minimum confirmed or fair civilian harm tracked by Airwars.

Airwars’ new analysis further highlights the extent to which small Yemeni communities have borne the brunt of US counterterror actions. One area of Bayda governorate, roughly 25km in radius, has been the site of almost a fifth of the total likely and declared US actions tracked by Airwars in the past four years – reportedly killing at least 38 civilians.

Yet these likely deaths have gone largely unrecognised by the US military. The US Department of Defense has conceded just four to twelve deaths from a single action – the disastrous US special forces raid in Yakla, Bayda governorate, on January 29th 2017. Just twelve days into the Trump presidency, the admission of civilian harm in that raid constituted the high watermark of accountability for the administration. Yet even this concession was a considerable underestimate, In that same ground raid, Airwars and others assess that at least 20 civilians were in fact killed.

Though President Trump removed civilian harm reporting requirements for the CIA, the Department of Defense is still obliged to report civilian harm from its own actions annually to Congress. Yet apart from the Yakla concession, the Pentagon has admitted to no further civilian deaths or injuries arising from US military actions in Yemen under Donald Trump. In its 2018 and 2019 annual civilian casualty reports to Congress, the DoD instead asserted that it had found “no credible reports of civilian casualties resulting from US military actions in Yemen” for the years in question.

During those same years, Airwars assesses, at least 30 civilian deaths were likely incurred by US actions, including events reported by local advocacy NGOs such as Mwatana for Human Rights.

US Central Command did not respond substantively to Airwars’ comprehensive submission, nine weeks prior to the publication of Eroding Transparency, of more than 1,000 pages of archived source materials, in both English and Arabic, relating to all 41 declared and alleged US actions which had led to local claims of civilian harm in Yemen under President Trump.

Precise location by the Airwars team of houses reportedly damaged as a result of an April 11th 2020 alleged drone strike (via Google Earth)

An effective counterterrorism approach?

Throughout the US’s lengthy counterterrorism campaign in Yemen, the key focus has been an almost exclusively militarised approach to degrading the Jihadist presence and influence in the country. This began in earnest in 2009, with the US taking the lead in containing AQAP as a result of what it saw as the Yemeni government’s inability to effectively counter terrorism in the country.

Since the inauguration of President Trump, Airwars has tracked a minimum total of 460 militant deaths from alleged and confirmed US actions in Yemen – the overwhelming majority belonging to Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). A small cluster of strikes are also known or suspected to have targeted so-called Islamic State in Yemen, in October and November 2017. Approximately 60% of the total minimum militant deaths tracked by Airwars, amounting to 242 AQAP or ISIS fighters, were killed in 2017.

Airwars research suggests a subtle focus by both CENTCOM and the CIA on targeting “high-value” targets, with the possible exception of the October 2017 attacks on ISIS-Y training camps, which appear to have been aimed at significantly degrading the group.

According to Yemen expert Dr Elisabeth Kendall, the US’s primary focus on high-value targets has “put al-Qaeda under pressure because they end up being concerned about holding meetings to discuss strategy and iron out disputes… this means that the seeds of doubt and suspicion, both naturally occurring and sown by spies… and are left to fester and you end up with defections and splintering”. Additionally, while previously the group would have had programmes including “educational training, military training, management training,” the recent US campaign had made it almost impossible to run these programmes, says Dr Kendall.

However, the US’s militarised approach may also have thwarted local efforts to control and contain militant groups in Yemen. Given the often porous relationship between AQAP and tribes, the sometimes indiscriminate nature ofsUS strikes has actively undermined efforts by tribal elders to convince their members who have joined AQAP to leave the group in exchange for immunity.

Additionally, deadly US ground raids in 2017, in which dozens of civilians and tribal members were killed, have reportedly alienated local communities and further entrenched distrust and hostility towards US involvement in the country. Eroding Transparency highlights several cases where US actions may have had such unintended consequences.

IS-Y fighters training at the Abu Muhammad al Adnani training camp, which was targeted in October 2017 by a US action (ISIS propaganda image)

The future of US actions in Yemen

Though reported US actions have declined in frequency in the latter years of Donald Trump’s presidency, there has also been a marked shift towards covert or clandestine US actions, shielded from public accountability. As Eroding Transparency shows, while CENTCOM itself asserts that it has not conducted any airstrike in Yemen since June 24th 2019, during that same period Airwars tracked 30 allegations of US strikes in Yemen.

Of these 30 incidents, 15 have been assessed by Airwars as likely US strikes based on local reporting. And in three events, all during 2020, admission of responsibility for actions by US officials has in turn indicated those attacks were conducted either by the CIA, or were clandestine US military actions.

At this juncture, the future of US counter-terrorism in Yemen remains unclear. Though Airwars has monitored a clear decline in the apparent frequency of US actions since 2018, Eroding Transparency also highlights a corresponding weakening of public accountability for those actions.

Read our full report, Eroding Transparency: Trump in Yemen

▲ Mabkhout Ali al Ameri with his 18-month old son Mohammed, shortly after a botched US raid on al Ghayil in January 2017 had killed at least 20 villagers, including Mohammed's mother Fatim Saleh Mohsen. © Iona Craig

Published

October 23, 2020

Written by

Oliver Imhof

Header Image

Libyan delegates shake hands after signing a ceasefire deal in Geneva on October 23rd 2020 (via UNSMIL)

Agreement could end civil war that has ravaged the country for almost a decade. But questions remain over concrete implementation and foreign involvement.

The two most important parties to the conflict in Libya, the Government of National Accord (GNA) and the Libyan National Army (LNA), agreed on October 23rd to an immediate and permanent ceasefire in Geneva under the auspices of the United Nations. The landmark deal – which took many Libya analysts by surprise – could possibly cement the already peaceful situation of a de facto ceasefire in place since June, when the LNA withdrew its forces from Tripoli.

Besides a freeze on all military agreements with foreign forces operating in Libya in general, the deal also implements various confidence-building measures such as the reopening of airports, seaports and roads between west and east Libya.

Another important feature agreed upon is the identification and categorization of all militias, with a view to reintegrating some of them into Libya’s armed forces.

The influence of militias, especially in and around Tripoli, has been a major factor in the destabilisation of post-Gaddafi Libya. The UN-recognised GNA has failed for example to demobilise its powerful forces, which had been used as justification by the LNA in its recent failed attempt to seize the capital.

Cautious optimism regarding this ceasefire agreement. Contentious issues moving forward:

– the departure of foreign forces & freeze on military agreements– operationalizing cantonment of weaponry/ceasefire– the DDR program proposed, which revives debates on who is a "militia" pic.twitter.com/MGIfxPDQIT

— Emadeddin Badi (@emad_badi) October 23, 2020

The UN-brokered ceasefire has been received positively by many commentators, in contrast with the outcome of the Berlin Conference in January 2019, after which hostilities quickly flared up again due to the lack of any concrete mechanisms and guarantees. This new agreement seems to be more robust, even though many details have yet to be figured out by the committees. Additionally, the military stalemate on the ground over the past months has helped to put a political solution back on the table.

Acting Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for Libya, Stephanie Williams, said in a statement: “Today is a good day for the Libyan people.” She added: “The parties agreed that all military units and armed groups on the frontlines shall return to their camps. This shall be accompanied by the departure of all mercenaries and foreign fighters from all Libyan territories – land, air and sea – within a maximum period of three months from today.”

International meddling had been one of the main drivers of the Libyan civil war. The GNA had received extensive support from Turkey in the recent past, which also introduced Syrian mercenaries to the conflict who had previously fought for the Syrian National Army against the Assad regime. The LNA in turn, supported by the United Arab Emirates, Russia and Egypt, has also allegedly made use of Syrian fighters as well as Sudanese mercenaries. The United States had become increasingly vocal this year as Russian mercenaries on the ground and in the air began playing an increasing role in Libya’s affairs. Some of those Russians are already said to have left the oil ports in both Sidra and Ras Lanuf.

International arms shipments and the influx of mercenaries on both sides fuelled the conflict with devastating consequences for civilians. From the overall 777 minimum civilian deaths recorded by Airwars since the end of the NATO campaign in 2011, 429 fatalities (55 per cent) occurred after the beginning of the LNA’s offensive in April 2019. While the LNA and the UAE were accused of  causing 271 deaths, 85 fatalities were attributed by local sources to the GNA and its ally Turkey. The additional deaths could not clearly be attributed to any side.

Libya: Almost 300 civilians were locally reported killed during the LNA's recent failed siege of Tripoli.

Innovative interactive mapping from Airwars reveals the scale of violence experienced by local communities. https://t.co/hwFqCj093G pic.twitter.com/EgVPzfxEC5

— Airwars (@airwars) September 14, 2020

Ending international involvement in Libya will thus be crucial to finally putting an end to the civil war. However, it remains to be seen if all parties abide by the rules this time . President Erdogan of Turkey has already said that the agreement was “not reliable” as it was not made at the highest level.

Germany facilitated the difficult talks in Geneva, which included various parties to the conflict, with Foreign Minister Heiko Maas saying: “The inner-Libyan discussion formats agreed at the Berlin Conference in January culminated in a first, decisive success. Libya has not yet reached its goal, but has cleared an important hurdle towards peace.

It is clear that the people in Libya want and must shape the future of their country themselves. We therefore call on the international actors to support this path unreservedly and to refrain from any further interference.”

▲ Libyan delegates shake hands after signing a ceasefire deal in Geneva on October 23rd 2020 (via UNSMIL)

Published

October 2, 2020

Written by

Laurie Treffers

As Belgium's F-16s return to the skies of Iraq and Syria, significant accountability improvements for civilian harm are needed.

On October 1st, Belgium once again sent its F-16s to participate in Operation Inherent Resolve, fighting ISIS in Iraq and Syria. Yet the Belgian, Iraqi and Syrian publics are still kept in the dark when it comes to civilian harm during previous deployments. The Belgian military to this day refuses to take responsibility for civilians its actions might have killed or injured.

Also this week, an open letter to defence minister Philippe Goffin from eleven civil society organisations including Airwars – calling for greater transparency and accountability for reported civilian harm – has been widely covered by the Belgian media.

Until the end of 2017, Belgium was one of the more active Coalition allies, alternating with the Dutch military. During some 991 declared missions, the Belgians fired nearly one thousand bombs and missiles. A total of 95 Belgian military personnel and a team of four Red Card Holders will now be deployed again until September 2021. According to the parliamentary resolution approving this latest weapon deployment, any possible action in Syria “covers only a buffer zone on the border with Iraq and is much more restricted than in 2017”. The stated aim of the mission is to protect troops on the ground, and to carry out planned or ad-hoc targeted attacks on ISIS.

In August, the Belgian news organisation HLN reported that the Belgian military had updated its weapons to ‘precision bombs’. F-16s will be armed with bombs of the type GBU-39/B Small Diameter Bomb. According to a Belgian military technician, the munition was chosen because of its “surgical precision”.

According to Alma Al Osta, Arms Advocacy Manager with Humanity And Inclusion, this change of munition is not enough: “There is much more to protecting civilians than just choosing a precise weapon. Belgium has indeed chosen GBU-39/B bombs, which are known for their precision, but these bombs weigh around 115kg and are capable of penetrating one meter of steel-reinforced concrete. If this weapon is used on open battlefields without the presence of civilians, then the risk would be smaller. But wars nowadays are fought in towns and cities where people live, children go to school, and civilians gather on markets.”

Besides the direct impact of explosive weapons in urban areas, Al Osta is worried about their secondary effects: “We have no information on how Belgium will prevent civilian harm and mitigate the so-called domino effects of airstrikes, such as trauma, damage to civilian objects, displacement, lack of access to education, health care and agricultural land, contamination with unexploded ordnances, damage to the environment and further instability,” she notes.

The zero civilian casualty myth

In March 2020, Commander of the Belgian Air Component Frederik Vansina refused to answer any questions on Belgian involvement in specific civilian harm incidents and told De Morgen: “Countries within the Coalition show solidarity and neither confirm nor deny [involvement]. Let’s talk about how the Syrian regime and Russia operate there. That’s a different story. Just look at the images of Homs and Aleppo.”

Back in 2017, a senior Belgian official had told Airwars that the government was planning to admit two civilian harm incidents – one at Al Qaim on February 27th 2017 and the second incident on March 21st of that year in the vicinity of Mosul. According to the US-led Coalition itself, the strikes had killed at least two civilians and injured four others. However, the Belgian government then publicly failed to take responsibility for these incidents, and even asserted that its actions had killed zero civilians.

In March 2020, a joint investigation by Airwars, RTL Netherlands, BBC, De Morgen and Liberation revealed that Belgium consistently refuses to acknowledge civilian casualties from its actions, even where the US-led Coalition has conceded particular Belgian strikes to have killed and injured non combatants. In response to this investigation, the Belgian Ministry of Defence stated only that the Belgium Armed Forces (BAF) were “certainly not involved in all events.”

Previous comments by Colonel J. Poesen, head of operations at the Belgian Air Force, indicated that only incidents in which international humanitarian law was possibly violated were being investigated. However, the acknowledged civilian harm events recognised by the Coalition show that civilians are nevertheless killed in military actions, even where they might comply with international humanitarian law.

Lack of parliamentary overview

A major bottleneck to greater transparency and accountability for Belgian military actions abroad is a lack of effective parliamentary oversight. According to a 2018 report by Pax Christi Vlaanderen and Vredesactie, “there is no binding parliamentary approval for foreign missions, nor mandatory evaluations during and after the operation. Moreover, there is no formal and transparent framework under which the government periodically informs parliament about the specific objectives, content and consequences of military operations.”

In the special parliamentary commission Follow-up of Foreign Missions, established in the early 2000s, MPs are confidentially briefed about military interventions. Yf Reykers, Assistant Professor in International Relations at Maastricht University notes: “This commission is special in the sense that there are not many countries having such a commission in which high-level classified information is shared. However, that information cannot be used by MPs who are part of that commission because they are bound to strict confidentiality. They are also unable to verify this information independently with other sources.”

Belgium about to send four #F16s to #Iraq and #Syria as part of #InherentResolve.For the #warpowers community: parliamentary approval by a remarkable coalition of minority government parties with @de_NVA and far-right @vlbelang. https://t.co/lVAIsQFRzP via @demorgen

— Yf Reykers (@YfReykers) June 26, 2020

The Parliamentary resolution approving the upcoming weapon deployment does include several amendments that call on the government to improve its transparency and accountability practices. For example, Parliament requests the federal government “to communicate publicly, after investigation and taking into account military and security considerations, about possible civilian casualties as a result of Belgian military operations and to ensure active cooperation and exchange with external monitoring groups and human rights organizations.”

Reykers is generally positive about the amendments: “It is progress that Parliament is even considering transparency and accountability practices. That is really a change compared to a few years ago. We see that Belgium is learning from its neighbouring countries, such as the Netherlands, especially after the Hawijah scandal.”

However, Reykers also sees possibilities for the Government to manoeuvre itself through the amendments with minimum levels of transparency and accountability: “The question is if these amendments will bring about structural change. One of the things that is really needed is systematic evaluations [of civilian harm claims] before, during and after a mission, ideally publicly available.”

While the new parliamentary resolution urges the federal Government to improve its transparency and accountability during the upcoming deployment, it is yet to be seen whether Belgium will structurally change its practices – and whether the civilian victims of its previous airstrikes will receive answers.

    An opinion piece by Laurie Treffers for Airwars, related to Belgium’s recent redeployment to Iraq and Syria, was also published in the Belgian daily De Standaard on September 24th 2020.
▲ Library image: A pair of Belgian F-16s over the Baltic region in early 2020 (Picture via Belgian Defence)

Published

September 30, 2020

Written by

Airwars Syria team and Shihab Halep

At least 17 nations have intervened militarily in Syria in recent years. In their own words, Syrians describe the often devastating consequences for civilians.

In 1996, the US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was asked by reporter Lesley Stahl about sanctions against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq: “We have heard that a half million children have died. I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?” Stahl asked. The Secretary of State responded: “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price–we think the price is worth it.”

Airwars data collected from local sources indicates that since 2014, at least 15,000 civilians were likely killed as a result of airstrikes and shelling from at least 17 foreign powers fighting within Syria, including members of the US-led Coalition; Russia; Iran; Turkey; and Israel. Thousands more have been injured. Here the Airwars Syria team asks: has the price paid by civilians been worth it?

For some Syrians, the intervention of so many foreign powers in Syria has its origins in the Assad government’s mishandling of mass demonstrations in the early days of a national uprising. Jala, a Syrian woman now living in London, told Airwars “Had the crisis been managed correctly by the Syrian regime back in 2011, and had the regime focused on a political solution and refrained from using power against its own people and from deploying the army in Dara’a, the intervening powers wouldn’t have found a pretext, and we wouldn’t be talking about the intervention now.”

Reasons for the intervention of so many foreign powers in Syria vary widely. For Russia, assistance to the Assad government has helped deliver long dreamt of access to a Mediterranean port. For Iran, its costly efforts to ensure the survival of the Syrian regime while seeking to promote a regional anti-Israel axis have been paramount. For the United States and its Coalition allies, a desire to defeat the terrorist group Islamic State has more recently been supplemented by a desire to counter Iranian and Russian plans for Syria. President Erdogan of Turkey has used the chaos of Syria’s wars to impose a buffer zone in northern Syria and disrupt Kurdish efforts to carve out a new state. And Israel, although not involved in the ground conflict, has nevertheless conducted hundreds of airstrikes against both Iranian and Hezbollah forces within Syria in recent years.

With so many foreign powers and their proxy actors fighting within Syria, this chart by analyst Charles Lister from 2016 indicates the sheer complexity of the situation.

This *simple* chart shows all states of hostility currently being played out on #Syria’s territory#IntractableWar pic.twitter.com/1inprNB6U0

— Charles Lister (@Charles_Lister) February 13, 2016

The US-led Coalition and civilian harm

Without the intervention of so many foreign powers in Syria, the recent history of the nation would have looked very different. Starved of Russian and Iranian support, the Assad government would most likely have been overrun by rebel forces. ISIS would also likely have surged, using the vast arsenal of weapons it had captured in Iraq during 2014 to occupy more and more Syrian territory.

So did the international intervention save the Syrian peoples? Or instead has it elongated and exacerbated the conflict, and consequently the suffering of civilians?

Following an earlier military intervention in Syria by Iran in support of the Assad government, six years ago this week the US-led Coalition launched its first airstrikes in Syria on September 23rd 2014, targeting both the so-called Islamic State that now controlled vast swathes of Syria; and also al-Qaeda’s local Syrian faction. Dozens of strikes by US, Saudi, Emirati and Jordanian aircraft that day – as well as Tomahawk missiles fired from US warships – led to the Coalition’s first reported massacre of civilians in Syria in Kafar Dryan. The Coalition still denies civilian casualties in that attack.

According to Airwars data gathered from local sources on the ground since 2014, the long running Coalition campaign against ISIS in Syria has so far likely killed at least 5,658 civilians, a high proportion of whom were women and children. Almost four thousand more civilians have reportedly been injured. The alliance itself presently concedes 671 non combatants killed by its actions.

Hasan Al-Kassab is an activist from Raqqa, who worked in the research unit of the Euphrates Project which funds many reconstruction and body retrieval projects in Raqqa. Hasan told Airwars that he lost two of his uncles during the Coalition’s Raqqa campaign in 2017. One uncle, Abdul Latif Hasan Al-kassab, was taking water from the Euphrates river when a Coalition airstrike targeted the area on June 25th 2017. His uncle was immediately killed along with two other civilians. His other uncle died when another Coalition airstrike targeted a building in Raqqa days before the city was liberated. “There is no mechanism to contact the Coalition who I believe is responsible for the death of my two uncles to investigate their death,” says Hasan today.

Additionally, Hasan told Airwars that the Initial Response Team in Raqqa has so far found 28 mass graves in Raqqa, containing more than 6,000 bodies, with two thirds of them believed to be civilians.

Destruction in Raqqa city in 2017, following the Coalition’s successful campaign to oust ISIS (Picture via Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently)

Zain Al-Abidin Al-A’kedi, an activist from Deir Ezzor living in northern Syria, told Airwars that he believes that the Coalition’s intervention against ISIS in Syria was necessary, but had come too late. “The wasted time led to an increase in the number of deaths and casualties by ISIS and the US-led Coalition airstrikes, in addition to huge damage in the cities and towns,” Zain said.

Firas Hanosh, an activist from Raqqa and a former doctor with Medecins Sans Frontières in one of Raqqa’s field hospitals, also believes that the US-led Coalition intervention in Syria was necessary, because local forces were unable to defeat ISIS. However, he argues that the Coalition’s choice of the mainly Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces as its ground proxy was a mistake. “The US-led Coalition didn’t choose the right partner on the ground (SDF) , which is racist against the Arab civilians.” Firas told Airwars that it is unsafe for him to return to his ravaged home city. He says he is also worried about being arrested by the SDF, because of his work as an activist monitoring the situation in Raqqa.

Wary of intervening on the ground in Syria or getting involved in the civil war, the US still needed to combat ISIS. It therefore turned to the Kurds – initially helping the newly formed SDF to drive out ISIS from its own areas. “Without the Coalition’s intervention forces, we would have lost Kobane, Qamishli and other Kurdish areas.” Dlshad, a Syrian cyber security engineer now living in Washington DC ,said. However, as the SDF then advanced against ISIS in primarily Arabic-population territory, tensions rose.

Other Syrians believe the US and its allies had hidden motives. Jala, a Syrian woman now living in London, believes that the US intervention in Syria, though declared to be against ISIS, was in fact aimed at controlling the oil fields of North East Syria. President Trump has done little to dispel this view, and US troops today occupy many of Syria’s oil fields.

Assad’s allies: Russia and Iran in Syria

Even as the US-led Coalition was ramping up its attacks against ISIS in Syria, the regime was losing badly on the ground to rebel forces. Reports estimated that despite Iranian and Hezbollah support, Bashar al-Assad held only 25% of Syria by late 2015. Assad asked for support from his Russian allies – leading to Moscow’s largest foreign intervention since its disastrous Afghanistan campaign of 1979-1989. The outcome in Syria would prove to be very different.

The first Russian airstrikes in Syria took place on September 30th 2015, targeting the towns of Za`faranah, Talbisah and Ar-Rastan in Homs; and Al Makrmeya and Jisr al Shughour in Idlib. From the first day, the effects on civilians were devastating. At least 43 civilians reportedly died in Russia’s initial airstrikes – with more than 150 more injured.

A BBC map from 2015 indicates how little territory the Assad government still held before Russia’s armed intervention.

Accused of indifference to civilian harm from its actions in Syria – and even the deliberate targeting of communities – Moscow has yet to admit to a single civilian death in five years of war. Airwars monitoring has so far recorded 4,487 locally reported problem airstrikes by Russia in partnership with the Assad government from 2015 to 2020 – which between them reportedly led to the deaths of as many as 22,000 non combatants, and the injuring of up to 40,000 more.

“The Russian intervention in Syria is not new,” argues Dlshad, a cyber security engineer now living in Washington DC: “I come from Rmeilan city which is rich with oil, and the Russians have been in the city for a long time.” That said, Dlshad believes the Russian intervention both extended the life of Bashar Al-Assad’s regime – and in some cases curbed his actions. He argues for example that Assad would have been more brutal against his own people without Russian control.

“The Russian military involvement changed the military equation,” argues Abdulkarim Ekzayez, a Research Associate at the Department of War Studies at King’s College, University of London and himself a Syrian: “Large-scale aerial attacks on vital infrastructure such as hospitals, schools and bakeries have weakened the resilience of the targeted communities in opposition held areas. Consequently the regime was able to take control over most of the opposition pockets in central and southern Syria, pushing all opposition factions into the north west with clearly defined contact lines between the two warring parties.”

Mohammed Al Fares, the nom de plume of a humanitarian worker living in Idlib, believes that the Russians have followed a systematic plan to target civilians in Syria – something the US-led Coalition tried to avoid, he says. However, Jala believes that none of the actors in the Syrian conflict cared deeply about civilians, including Syrian fighters on the ground because they focused only on achieving military gains and not on civilians.

The other key ally of the Assad government, Iran, has taken a different approach. Years of sanctions have left it with a poorly equipped air force. Instead Tehran’s efforts in Syria focused on its domestic rocket and drone programmes, in turn channelling them to both Hezbollah and to the Syrian regime.

In addition, Iranian ground forces have played a key role in the fighting. The Quds Brigade is known to be involved at a senior level in the Syrian conflict and even in changing the structure of the Syrian army. The Syrian 4th Brigade is close to Iran for example, while the 5th Brigade has closer links to Russian forces.

Qassem Soleimani, the former head of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, pictured near Aleppo’s historic castle after the city’s capture from rebels (Image via Zaman al Wasl)

Unilateral interventions in Syria

With a weak government in Damascus, multiple foreign powers have for years conducted unilateral actions in Syria in support of their own national interests. The United States has long targeted al Qaeda-linked fighters in western Syria for example; while the British conducted a controversial targeted killing of a UK citizen in 2015. Two nations in particular have fought lengthy unilateral campaigns.

Turkey has launched several massive operations in North East Syria, alongside its earlier targeting of ISIS in Idlib. In January 2018, Ankara launched Operation Olive Branch in Afrin, and later Operation Peace Spring in October 2019.

Overall, hundreds of Syrian civilians have been locally reported killed by Turkish actions – both against Kurdish forces, and ISIS-occupied areas such as al Bab.

Syrians interviewed for this article were strongly opposed to Turkey’s interventions. “There was no threat against Turkey. Why did Turkey intervene? Turkey is racist against the Kurds and that’s it,” claimed Dlshad.

H.J, a female architect from Damascus who asked not to be fully named for safety reasons, argued: “Syrians thought that Erdogan was helping the Syrian cause, but he eventually used it as a bargaining chip with Europe; causing destruction and division between Arabs and Kurds, and turning Syrian youth into mercenaries”.

Israel’s own unilateral aerial campaign in Syria has proved devastating against both Iranian and Hezbollah forces. In early 2019, a senior Israeli commander declared that the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) had dropped more than 2,000 bombs on Syria during the previous year, while Prime Minister Binyamin Netenyahu said that “the IDF has attacked hundreds of times Iranian and Hezbollah targets.”

Despite the significant scale of Israel’s intervention, international attention has been limited. This may in part be due to the low levels of reported civilian harm from Israeli strikes in Syria compared with other foreign powers. Since 2019, Airwars monitoring indicates that between 13 and 22 civilians were killed and over 40 injured in nine Israeli airstrikes of concern. With its focus in Syria almost exclusively on military targets, Israel appears to have limited the widescale civilian harm seen in the actions of others.

According to Mohammed Al Fares, a Syrian spoken to for this article, “It is good that Israel is destroying the regime’s military installations. However, they are doing it because they don’t want Iran to get an upper hand in Syria, not for the sake of the Syrian people.”

The reverberating effects of foreign intervention

Years of conflict in Syria, combined with external intervention by at least 17 foreign powers, have changed the face of the country for ever. According to the UNHCR, there are 6.2 million people, including 2.5 million children, currently internally displaced within Syria, the largest such population in the world. Beyond Syria’s borders, the total number of registered Syrian refugees has so far reached 5.5 million.

The direct links between external interventions and the displacement of civilians can be challenging to unpack.

In North East Syria for example actions by rebels; by ISIS; and later by Turkish forces, saw more than 215,000 people driven from their homes. While many have returned, an estimated 100,000 remain displaced.

Similarly, Syrian Arab Army operations supported from the air by Russia have proved highly disruptive. During the last major campaign between December 2019 and March 2020 in North West Syria, the UN reported a new displacement of more than 960,000 people, including more than 575,000 children.

Humanitarian worker Mohammed Al Fares, himself an IDP, told Airwars about his own experience. “When you are forced outside your residence, you die slowly. You lose everything, your home, your land, your job and your money. You try to start over and build a new life, but it is difficult.”

A Syrian woman pictured in an IDP camp in north east Syria (Picture courtesy of Refugees International)

The destruction of Syria’s infrastructure over the past nine years has also been extreme – much of it the result of foreign actions. Among the most brutal examples have been Aleppo and Raqqa – the first significantly at the hands of Russian forces; the latter mostly as a result of  the US-led Coalition’s targeting of ISIS. According to ReliefWeb: “About a third of homes in Syria were thought to have been damaged or destroyed by 2017. In 2018, the UN estimated the cost of material destruction in Syria at $120 billion.”

Hasan Al-Kassab told Airwars that eleven bridges in Raqqa were destroyed including Raqqa’s New Bridge during the Coalition’s 2017 campaign, and that civilians are only slowly starting to return because of a lack of basic services. For example, 60% of Raqqa is still without electricity.

East Aleppo, which witnessed brutal bombing by the Assad government supported by its Russian ally, experienced a similar fate. Battles which began in  2012 reached their climax in November 2016, when SAA troops began a decisive campaign that ended a month later with the retaking of the city. This caused very significant damage to Aleppo.

H.J, the architect from Damascus, believes that the destruction in Syria has been systemic and not just ‘collateral damage’ as militaries claim. “The destruction caused by all different actors is called many things, of which: Urbicide/ Identicide. That is, to commit a massacre against the urban environment; to target relationships that connect people and places, erasing their identities. Nowadays, one third of Syria is destroyed, and about 80% of Syria’s Night lights are gone.”

Significant opposition remains from many countries to the reconstruction process in Syria while Bashar al-Assad remains in power. However, the US is implementing small scale rebuilding activities in areas under SDF control, focusing on basic services like water, electricity and rubble removal that don’t reach the level of reconstruction. At the same time, with Russia and Iran unable significantly to support the regime financially as it seeks to rebuild Syria, limited scale investments risk lining the pockets of warlords, profiteers and cronies.

A price worth paying?

Mohammed Al Fares believes that overall, external intervention by so many foreign powers has had a negative impact on the course of the Syrian revolution, and on the general situation in the country. “Syrians had been in a state of solidarity with each other when the revolution started and [they eventually] controlled about 70% of Syria. External intervention including money channelling, divided the Syrians and brought into the decision making people who were not fit to lead. This in turn made the revolution very political until it lost its momentum. However, the revolution continues with its youth, women, elders and children despite all the obstacles it faces”

However others see more subtlety. According to Hasan Al-Kassab from Raqqa: “We can’t put all the interventions in the same basket. The Coalition intervened to eliminate ISIS, Russia intervened to oppress the people and legitimise the regime against the civilians, while Turkey intervened to fight the PKK and secure its borders. However every intervention is still an occupation, because there is no mechanism to give oversight to the people. They built military bases and disturbed the fabric of the Syrian people.”

From her side, H.J, the female architect from Damascus, argues that after the regime started killing civilians in 2012, the Syrian people tolerated even ‘allying with the devil’ to oust Bashar Al-Assad. ‘’I didn’t personally support this opinion, but we needed any offerings, we naively thought that the world would help us without anything in return. We were wrong, and all interventions were bad. The country was divided, and military bases were established.”

With peace still nowhere in sight in Syria – and fighting likely to resume as the Covid pandemic recedes – there is little sign of foreign powers withdrawing any time soon. While their interventions have radically changed conflict dynamics, they have done little to support the Syrian peoples in their aspirations for freedom and justice. Yet if the same kind of resource spent by foreign powers on bombs and missiles could one day be diverted to Syria’s infrastructure development, to education, and to the fostering of civil society, another future remains possible.

▲ Syria's Bashar al-Assad in the cockpit of a Russian Su-35 fighter at Hmeimim air base, Latakia in December 2017 (Image via Syrian regime Facebook page)

Published

September 30, 2020

Written by

Airwars Staff

Open letter from 11 Belgian and international organisations calls on the Defence Minister to increase transparency and accountability for civilian harm.

On October 1st 2020, Belgium will send four F-16s to Iraq and Northeast Syria for a period of 12 months, to once again participate in Operation Inherent Resolve – the international campaign against so-called Islamic State.

Yet Belgium has been one of the least transparent countries in the Coalition, refusing publicly to concede any civilian harm from its own actions and with no additional accountability mechanisms being put in place during the new deployment. despite the urgings of the Belgian parliament.. 

Airwars, together with our Belgian and international partners, is today publishing a joint open letter recently sent to Minister of Defence Philippe Goffin, which urges the Belgian government to take concrete steps to improve its transparency and accountability for civilian harm resulting from its own military actions. The full text is reprinted below. 

 

Dear Mr Goffin,

On October 1st, 2020, Belgium will send four F-16s to participate in Operation Inherent Resolve. As a collective of civil society organisations, we have concerns about the limited levels of transparency and accountability of this military deployment. Belgium’s past participation in Operation Inherent Resolve still remains highly secretive. As a result, Belgian members of Parliament cannot thoroughly exercise democratic oversight, while the Belgian, Syrian and Iraqi public are kept in the dark about possible cases of civilian harm as the result of previous Belgian airstrikes or other activities in support of airstrikes in the fight against the so-called Islamic State.

Previous comparative research by Airwars has highlighted that Belgium remains one of the least transparent countries in the US-led International Coalition. As a joint investigation by Airwars, BBC, De Morgen and Liberation revealed in March 2020, Belgium refuses to acknowledge civilian casualties from its actions, even where the US-led Coalition has conceded these same cases as credible. In response to this investigation, the Belgian Ministry of Defence stated only that the Belgium Armed Forces (BAF) were “certainly not involved in all events”, without providing any more details or proof for such a bold claim.

Belgium’s focus thus far in the debate on civilian harm and accountability has been on the legality of airstrikes. As long as the Belgian Ministry of Defence does not consider civilian harm incidents to have breached international humanitarian law, it refrains from engaging in exercises or lessons learnt, or in evaluations that are publicly available.

We believe that this position is not sustainable. As we have seen in the Netherlands, where media uncovered in October 2019 that the Netherlands had been responsible for a 2015 airstrike on Hawijah, Iraq, in which at least 70 civilians died, once the truth about civilian harm incidents inevitably comes to light, it can lead to major national blowback and severely harm the trust of both Parliament and the public in its government.

Call for greater transparency 

So far, the Belgium Ministry of Defence has given few signs that it is committed to improving its transparency and accountability practices during the coming deployment of four F-16s, even while there has been a clear message from Parliament that more transparency is required. We, therefore, urge the Ministry of Defence to fully comply with a parliamentary resolution of June 25th, 2020. Specifically, Amendment number 4, 6 and 17 of this motion request the federal government to do the following (unofficial translation):

4. To demonstrate militarily responsible maximum transparency vis-à-vis the Chamber of Representatives, with regard to the prevention, monitoring and reporting of possible civilian casualties as a result of our military efforts, in particular through strengthening parliamentary scrutiny of the actions of the national Red Card Holder.

6. To actively consult with the Dutch government in order to take note of all the lessons learned from the Hawija tragedy, to understand them and to subsequently report to the Chamber of Representatives on how these lessons will be used during the Belgian military deployment, in order to avoid civilian casualties as much as possible.

17. To communicate publicly, after investigation and taking into account military and security considerations, about possible civilian casualties as a result of Belgian military operations and to ensure active cooperation and exchange with external monitoring groups and human rights organizations (emphasis added).

Currently, consultative processes are ongoing [with militaries] in the United States, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands to improve transparency and accountability for civilian harm and to implement policies to better protect civilians in armed conflict. These processes are taking place in consultation with various civil society organisations, including academics and NGOs, such as Airwars, CIVIC, Amnesty International and local civil society organisations.

We believe that it is crucial that Belgium commits itself to improve its poor transparency and accountability track record. We hereby wish to inform you that we, as a collective of civil society organisations, stand ready to actively work together and share our expertise and knowledge with the Ministry of Defence in order to make concrete progress towards improved transparency and accountability of Belgium’s upcoming military deployment in Iraq and Syria.

Recommendations

The undersigned organisations call upon the Belgian government to, at the minimum:

    Publish the exact date and near location of all Belgian air raids carried out in the fight against ISIS; Publish the results of all investigations into civilian casualties – including the data, location, targets and number of civilian casualties of military action – even if the Ministry of Defence’s own investigation concludes that there has been no violation of international humanitarian law; Draft guidelines for proactively publishing this information (in the future) as open data in a machine-readable overview that enables control by independent parties; To work together with external parties, including NGOs, by drawing up standards for the minimum criteria that external claims for civilian victims must meet in order for the Ministry of Defence to be able to assess them; Provide capacity at the Ministry of Defence so that officials can focus on monitoring and actively publishing data on airstrikes and civilian casualties in armed conflict, including in future military interventions so that the consequences of military intervention are systematically monitored and published; Introduce or support a mechanism where potential victims of Coalition bombardments can come forward and report issues of concern; Adopt a political declaration on the use of explosive weapons in populated areas with a clear commitment to data collection and transparent reporting.

While the Belgian military has decided to use precise small diameter bombs during the coming deployment period, we believe that it is crucial to emphasise that protecting the lives of civilians and civilian infrastructure, in particular in urban areas, requires more than using precision weapons.

The undersigned organisations are preparing to publicly communicate on this matter and share a copy of this letter with the Belgian press by the end of September, as we believe this discussion concerns the Belgian public. We hope that you will respond positively to our call for cooperation and exchange on this important matter, and we are happy to enter into dialogue with the Ministry of Defence for further discussion of our recommendations.

Signed,

11.11.11

Agir pour la Paix

Airwars

Amnesty Belgium

CNAPD

GRIP

Humanity & Inclusion

Oxfam Belgium

Pax Christi Flanders

Vredesactie

Vrede vzw

▲ Library image: The F-16s of the Belgian military have been deployed to Iraq and Syria several times since 2014. Picture via Belgian Ministry of Defence.

Published

September 22, 2020

Written by

Airwars Staff

Airwars adds voice to partners calling on the US government to end its targeting of the ICC

The United States Government recently applied sanctions to senior officers of the International Criminal Court – a court of last resort established by treaty, and endorsed by a majority of countries including most of the US’s closest allies. In partnership with a number of organisations working on the protection of civilians in conflict, Airwars is calling upon the US Government to end its targeting of ICC officials. The public statement also calls on both Presidential campaigns to publicly commit to rescinding an Executive Order passed by President Trump in June, which formed the basis of the ICC sanctions.

We the undersigned, representing human rights and humanitarian non-governmental organizations working on the protection of civilians in conflict, write in opposition to United States sanctions against named senior personnel within the International Criminal Court (ICC).

We call on President Trump to revoke these harmful sanctions immediately and to rescind Executive Order 13928 on “Blocking Property of Certain Persons Associated with the International Criminal Court.” We also call on the Presidential campaigns of both major parties to publicly commit to reversing this harmful Executive Order. The United States should support the rule of law rather than punish those seeking to provide redress to victims of harm.

The ICC exists as a court of last resort to hold government officials and other powerful actors accountable when domestic courts are unable or unwilling to prosecute the most serious international crimes. The Court has secured successful prosecutions for war crimes and crimes against humanity. The primary beneficiaries are the many civilian victims who can secure no justice elsewhere and the communities subject to cycles of violence fuelled by impunity. They include many victims and survivors of violence for whom the United States has been a strong, vocal advocate for justice and accountability.

We understand that the United States takes issue with some of the ICC’s jurisprudence and assertions of jurisdiction. However, we believe that concerted diplomatic efforts and engagement with the ICC will enhance its effectiveness more than punishing individuals who have dedicated their careers to delivering justice to victims of egregious crimes.

As condemnatory statements from close U.S. allies make clear, the United States has lost significant international standing through these sanctions, which have undermined the international rule of law and provided succour to war criminals seeking to evade justice. 

The United States should recommit to an independent and credible domestic process of investigating and holding to account U.S. citizens for alleged abuses, free from executive interference and consistent with U.S. and international law. That is the best way to ensure that U.S. service members are afforded due process of law in a domestic forum for any alleged wrongdoing and that the U.S. is recognized as a leader in the pursuit of global justice and accountability.

Signed,

Action on Armed Violence

Airwars

Amnesty International USA

Center for Civilians in Conflict (CIVIC)

Human Rights First

Oxfam America

Oxford Research Group

Saferworld

▲ A recent appeal hearing at the International Criminal Court (Image via ICC)

Published

August 19, 2020

Written by

Airwars Staff

Support from the Reva and David Logan Foundation follows recent study showing challenges of mainstream media coverage of civilian casualties.

A new Senior Investigator will be joining the Airwars core team in the coming weeks, thanks to a two year grant from the Reva and David Logan Foundation – a Chicago based family philanthropic fund.

Over the past six years, Airwars has consistently shown that its groundbreaking work has a powerful impact on the public understanding of civilian harm – and can lead to positive changes in both policies and practices among militaries. However, systemic challenges in many newsrooms can result in the issue being poorly reported. Our recent study News In Brief, authored by US investigative reporter Alexa O’Brien and also funded by the Logan Foundation, explored the many obstacles to good reporting of this critical issue.

Responding to this deficit, new funding will enable Airwars to majorly enhance its own capacity for much-needed investigations into civilian casualties and their causes, in particular with the appointment of an in-house Senior Investigator – who will be supported by a wider team of geolocation, research and design professionals.

Airwars will then seek partnerships with key US and international media on the most vital and controversial cases and stories. In doing so, it aims to bridge a critical gap in the mainstream reporting of civilian harm from war – and bring many more stories to public awareness. A key focus will be to explore innovative approaches to engaging new audiences on civilian harm issues.

Major investigations

Since its founding, Airwars has published several major investigations into civilian harm. In 2017 our then-inhouse reporter Samuel Oakford revealed with Foreign Policy that, according to senior US military officials, more than 80 civilians had been killed in non-US international airstrikes in Iraq and Syria. That investigation still serves as a key point of engagement for our advocacy work with individual belligerents.

In June 2019, Airwars partnered with Amnesty International on a major project War in Raqqa: Rhetoric versus Reality – which found that at least 1,600 civilian deaths had likely been caused by the US-led Coalition during the battle of Raqqa. More recently, Airwars has played a prominent role in reporting the scandal surrounding Dutch responsibility for a 2015 airstrike in Hawijah, Iraq, in which 70 or more civilians likely died. And in early 2020 – in partnership with the BBC, Liberation, De Morgen and RTL Netherlands – Airwars revealed that European militaries were failing to declare civilian deaths from their own actions in the war against ISIS, even where US military personnel had concluded otherwise.

“Airwars is unique. There are few organisations that shine a light so intensely on the wholesale slaughter of innocent civilians caught up in the fury of war. The Airwars team has developed groundbreaking methodology to track these horrors and has delivered their consequent findings with authority to governments, the military and the public,” commented Richard Logan, President of the Reva and David Logan Foundation.

“Their work has consistently brought changes in perceptions and in the conduct of war. It has contributed to a significant reduction of non-combatant battlefield deaths and injuries. For these and other related reasons, it is crucial to magnify Airwars’ investigative capacity to ensure that the plight of the most vulnerable stays at the forefront of all our minds. We are honoured to support their efforts.”

▲ A young girl passes a bomb crater in West Mosul, April 2017 (Image courtesy of Kainoa Little. All rights reserved)

Published

August 7, 2020

Written by

Mohammed al Jumaily

A protracted conflict against the terror group ISIS has left much of Iraq in ruins - though there are signs of rebirth.

On the fateful evening of August 7th 2014, then-US President Barack Obama gave a live address to the nation announcing the beginning of military actions in Iraq against so-called Islamic State (also known as ISIS and Daesh), ushering in a new era of US involvement. The following day, US Navy F-18 Hornet fighters launched the first airstrikes against ISIS in Iraq. Six years on, and 14,700 international air and artillery strikes later as well as thousands more by Iraq government forces, Iraqis are still reeling from the war against ISIS and its aftermath.

The conflict itself displaced over five million Iraqis and left schools, hospitals and other vital infrastructure in affected provinces across northern and central Iraq in utter ruin. While statistics on the number of civilians who perished overall during the war against ISIS varies, Iraq Body Count estimates that 67,376 civilians were killed between January 2014 and December 2017. According to the World Bank, the total cost of the conflict amounts to a staggering 124 trillion Iraqi Dinars ($107 billion), which is equivalent to 73% of the country’s entire GDP in 2013.

It is also estimated that 138,051 residential buildings and units were damaged, half of which were destroyed beyond repair in Iraq during the long war on ISIS. Meanwhile, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA) has estimated that the conflict left 6.2 million people in need of targeted humanitarian assistance.

Beyond the cold statistics showing the impact of war on an already beleaguered country, personal testimonies of Iraqis themselves give a more visceral idea of life under ISIS, and the aftermath of the military campaign. They also speak to the ongoing challenges that Iraqis living in formerly ISIS-occupied areas continue to face six years on.

Life under ISIS

By the time the US began its military campaign in Iraq, so-called Islamic State had already seized significant territories in northern and western parts of the country including Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city – plunging the nation into its most serious crisis since the US-British invasion in 2003.

The announcement of a US air campaign came shortly after ISIS’s genocidal campaign on the Yazidi community in Sinjar and its surrounding areas in Nineveh province had begun – and almost two months after ISIS’s notorious massacre [Warning: GRAPHIC] of up to 1,700 unarmed Iraqi military cadets in Camp Speicher. The next three years would see the lives of millions of people change radically. The terror group’s occupation of these territories ravaged communities and decimated the social fabric of many of the cities under the group’s rule. Locals living in areas under ISIS occupation recount wanton acts of brutality by the group, in a bid to enforce their control and dominance.

Khalid al-Rawi, a musician and community activist in Mosul [see main picture], describes the state of fear instilled by the group during their occupation of Iraq’s second city. “I know many musicians who destroyed their instruments [out of fear of being caught] or would go far away in order to play a bit of music… If anyone played music openly, they could have been killed, but musicians wouldn’t have dared to do this”, Khalid recalled to Airwars this week. “People were killed for the smallest reasons by them [ISIS] – I was one of the people who if they caught me, I would have been killed instantly.”

Ziad Ghanim Sha’ban, a lawyer from Tikrit in Salahuddin province, paints a similar picture of violence and fear under ISIS, particularly when it came to religious and ethnic coexistence. “Iraqi society, as you know, is like a mosaic [of different ethnic and religious groups],” explains Ziad. “We have Kurds, we have Sunnis with Shia parents and Shias with Sunni parents, as well as Turkmen in our community – we are one country, but when ISIS came, this changed. They rejected and fought this vigorously, and killed anyone promoting this [coexistence] – this instilled great fear in society and many families were torn from the community.”

Ziad goes on to recall how some husbands and wives who had spouses from southern Iraq – where the population is predominantly Shia Muslim – divorced and ran away to avoid persecution by the group.

War on ISIS and the legacy of the International Coalition

Following a series of gains made by ISIS throughout 2014 that saw the terror group control up to a fifth of Iraq’s territory and 6.3 million people (19% of the population), the Iraqi Government, with the support of the Popular Mobilisation Units (PMUs) consisting of numerous armed groups, as well as international allies led by the United States, began pushing back against ISIS, slowly reclaiming territory until the group’s territorial defeat in December 2017.

The role played by the US-led Coalition was instrumental in eventually defeating ISIS. The US-led alliance has declared 14,771 air and artillery strikes in Iraq since its inception, providing air cover for Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) and decimating ISIS positions in northern and western Iraq. Today the group exists only on the margins of Iraq, harried by ISF and Coalition attacks. However, the human and material cost of this campaign has been immense – and experienced almost exclusively by Iraqis themselves.

ISIS killed and injured many thousands of civilians during its occupation, and many more died in ISF actions. Using local sources, Airwars has also to date tracked 895 separate civilian harm allegations against the International Coalition in Iraq. According to local reports, between 9,801 and 14,037 civilians were claimed killed in these incidents and up to 12,248 others injured. The US-led alliance itself has so far publicly admitted 688 deaths from its actions in Iraq.

Beyond this, the military campaign has left vast swathes of the country in ruins, making it almost impossible for hundreds of thousands of civilians – still displaced by the conflict – to return to their homes.

Khalid recalls a number of instances where families were caught up in airstrikes targeting ISIS militants: “I have a friend whose family, including uncles and aunts, were living in the same house. From what was explained to me, there was one ISIS member on the roof of the house so an International Coalition missile struck the building, killing 13 or 14 members of that family.”

Ziad also recounts the tragic story of his younger brother, who was killed by what he says was an International Coalition airstrike in Tikrit. “I have my brother, a child, named Muhanad aged only 11 years old, who was injured in an airstrike and died immediately and we have still, to this day, not received any compensation or acknowledgement from the Coalition.”

In almost all cases, those interviewed say that very few, if anyone, receives any form of acknowledgement or compensation from the Iraqi Government or from the International Coalition. “The reality is that as a lawyer, as part of a team of lawyers, we submitted more than a hundred complaints against Coalition forces, calling for compensation…In the end we didn’t even receive 5% of the compensation we were entitled to,” Ziad told Airwars.

Reconstruction and Reconciliation

Six years on from the beginning of the International Coalition’s own campaign against ISIS, the societal impact of the group’s occupation and the conflict that ensued has been transformative, and will likely remain with Iraqis for decades. In many parts of the country that were under ISIS rule, communities remain divided, and little effort has been made by central and local governments to bring people together. In the absence of government action, locals have taken it upon themselves to repair the social fabric of their communities, in the days following liberation from ISIS.

Khalid al-Rawi points out that despite the immense challenges faced by the people of Mosul and the difficulties of the last few years, the re-emergence of a vibrant civil society in the city has been an unexpected yet significant silver lining in the post-ISIS years. “A number of initiatives have emerged aimed at promoting reconciliation, which I myself have taken part in. For example, we went to Hamdaniya, [a predominantly Assyrian district, with a significant Christian population] and cleaned and helped rebuild churches; and a number of young people helped clean another church in Mosul.”

He also says that the city’s experience under ISIS rule has changed many people’s attitudes about music and the arts, which were previously, perhaps, looked down upon by many in more conservative parts of the city.

“There is a positive I see [from this experience], a new page has been turned for the youth of this community – a revolution has occurred….from an artistic perspective, before people [used to say to me] music is wrong and haram and if you learn music it means you work in a bar. Now that is not the case, there has been a lot more acceptance after liberation from ISIS.”

https://twitter.com/MosulEye/status/1187252884053864448

However, Ziad paints a bleaker image of the societal impact of ISIS rule and the subsequent fighting that emerged. In contrast to Mosul’s civic revival, many in Tikrit are afraid to engage in civic activities, he says. “Since the violence we saw in Hawijah and Tikrit in 2013 against protesters and by ISIS during their rule, activists have not emerged in our areas because they saw the executions that would take place if they did come out… Even when protests emerged in Baghdad and the south [in 2019 and 2020], there were no protests in Salahuddin, Anbar, Hawijah and Mosul because [people] knew they could be killed,” explains Ziad.

In terms of reconstruction, efforts by the Government have often seemed futile, with progress slow and, in many cases, non-existent. Despite liberation from ISIS, residents of Anbar, Salahuddin and Nineveh provinces face an uphill task in rebuilding their cities and communities, made even more difficult by government incompetence and widespread corruption.

Abdulrahman Mohammad, a businessman and community leader in Fallujah, who fled his hometown after the arrival of ISIS back in 2014, explains that upon returning to his city after three years, he found a city in ruins and a devastated local economy. “When we came back after ISIS, everything we had was lost. Our factories were destroyed. In the end, the economy of the province [of Anbar] had halted,” explains Abdulrahman. “Work is not given to anyone except to a specific group [of people] through patronage networks,” he elaborates.

“Anbar had 30 very large cement factories, each employing 500 people. To this day, these factories remain damaged and unusable,” laments Abdulrahman, adding that “Efforts to create jobs by the government are non-existent. None.”

The situation in other towns such as Sinjar in Nineveh, and Baiji in Salahuddin, is even more dire. According to the World Bank, 70% of housing assets in Sinjar were damaged, while in Baiji, 94% of residential buildings were damaged.

As Iraq now enters its seventh year following the beginning of the war against ISIS, many Iraqis have little faith in government efforts to rebuild their cities, and are instead forced to put up with the devastation wrought upon them by ISIS and years of war. While the post-ISIS period has brought security to the liberated provinces of Iraq – and has also created a space for local civil activism to flourish in certain areas – many know that there is still a long way to go before the majority can truly taste the fruits of liberation from ISIS.

▲ Musician Khalid Al-Rawi trained with his friends on the Oud secretly under ISIS. Once the city was liberated, he took to Mosul's streets spreading music and arts. This photo was taken near the central library of Mosul University during Mosul Eye's Save The Book campaign in August 2017.  Published with kind permission of Ali Y. Al-Baroodi

Published

July 9, 2020

Written by

Airwars Staff

Killing of Iranian commander by US drone strike represents 'not just a slippery slope. It is a cliff', warns Special Rapporteur

The US assassination of Qasem Soleimani, the head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), in Baghdad in January 2020, was unlawful on several counts, according to a new report submitted to the United Nations Human Rights Council by its expert on extrajudicial killings.

Dr Agnes Callamard, the current UN Special Rapporteur on Extra-Judicial Executions, asserts in her latest report that Soleimani’s controversial assassination by a US drone strike on Baghdad International Airport on January 3rd 2020 had violated international law in several ways.

Noting that the US drone strike had also killed several Iraqi military personnel, Dr Callamard notes that “By killing General Soleimani on Iraqi soil without first obtaining Iraq’s consent, the US violated the territorial integrity of Iraq.”

The Special Rapporteur also argues that by failing to demonstrate that Soleimani represented an imminent threat to the United States – and instead focusing on his past actions dating back to 2006 – that his killing “would be unlawful under jus ad bellum“, the criteria by which a state may engage in war.

In the bluntest condemnation yet of the Trump Administration’s killing of Iran’s leading military commander, Dr Callamard argues that “the targeted killing of General Soleimani, coming in the wake of 20 years of distortions of international law, and repeated massive violations of humanitarian law, is not just a slippery slope. It is a cliff.”

She also warns that the killing of Iran’s top general may see other nations exploit the US’s justification for the assassination: “The international community must now confront the very real prospect that States may opt to ‘strategically’ eliminate high ranking military officials outside the context of a ‘known’ war, and seek to justify the killing on the grounds of the target’s classification as a ‘terrorist’ who posed a potential future threat.”

Speaking to Airwars from Geneva ahead of her presentation to the UNHRC, Dr Callamard described the US killing of General Soleimani as “a significant escalation in the use of armed drones, and in the use of extraterritorial force. Until now, drones have focused on terrorism and on counterterrorism responses. Here we’re seeing the displacement of a counterterrorism strategy onto State officials.” She described the Trump administration’s justification of the assassination of a senior Iranian government official as “a distortion of self defence.”

Qasem Soleimani, Iran’s highest ranked military commander, was assassinated in a US drone strike near Baghdad on January 3rd 2020 (via @IRaqiRev).

‘The second drone age’

Dr Callamard’s denouncement of the US’s killing of Qasem Soleimani marks the latest in almost 20 years of concerns raised by United Nations experts on the use of armed drones for targeted assassinations. In 2002, following the killing of five al Qaeda suspects in Yemen by the CIA, then-rapporteur Asma Jahangir warned for example that the attack constituted “a clear case of extrajudicial killing”.

UN reports since then have tended to focus on controversial drone campaigns outside the hot battlefield, in countries including Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and Palestine’s West Bank and Gaza Strip.

With her new report, delivered to the UNHRC on July 9th, Dr Callamard seeks to bring the discussion on armed drone use up to date, noting that “the world has entered what has been called the ‘second drone age’ with a now vast array of State and non-State actors deploying ever more advanced drone technologies, making their use a major and fast becoming international security issue.” The term ‘second drone age’ was originally coined by Airwars director Chris Woods, to reflect a growing wave of armed drone proliferation among state and non-state actors.

My latest report to the UN #HRC44 focus on targeted killings by armed drones: https://t.co/qLsqubaMpA The world has entered a “second drone age”, in which State and non-State actors are deploying ever more advanced drone technologies, a major international, security issue.

— Agnes Callamard (@AgnesCallamard) July 8, 2020

 

As Dr Callamard and her team write: “The present report seeks to update previous findings. It interrogates the reasons for drones’ proliferation and the legal implications of their promises; questions the legal bases upon which their use is founded and legitimized; and identifies the mechanisms and institutions (or lack thereof) to regulate drones’ use and respond to targeted killings. The report shows that drones are a lightning rod for key questions about protection of the right to life in conflicts, asymmetrical warfare, counter-terrorism operations, and so-called peace situations.”

Many of the conflicts monitored by Airwars are referenced by Dr Callamard.

    In Iraq, she notes that non state actors including ISIS deployed armed drones, sometimes to devastating effect. “In 2017 in Mosul, Iraq, for example, within a 24-hour period ‘there were no less than 82 drones of all shapes and sizes’ striking at Iraqi, Kurdish, US, and French forces.” In Libya, the Special Rapporteur asserts that “The Haftar Armed Forces carried out over 600 drone strikes against opposition targets resulting allegedly in massive civilian casualties, including, in August 2019, against a migrant detention center.” Callamard notes that a ‘nations unwilling or unable to act’ defence – first used by George W Bush’s administration to justify drone strikes in Pakistan and elsewhere – had been employed by several nations, including Turkey and Israel, to justify attacks in Syria. The UN Special Rapporteur also cautions that as more States acquire armed drones, their use domestically has increased: “Turkey has reportedly used drones domestically against the Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK), while Nigeria first confirmed attack was carried out against a Boko Haram logistics base in 2016. In 2015 Pakistan allegedly used its armed drones for the very first time in an operation to kill three ‘high profile terrorists.’ Iraq has similarly purchased drones to carry out strikes against ISIS in Anbar province in 2016.” Finally, Dr Callamard warns that non-State actors including terrorist groups increasingly have access to remotely piloted technologies – noting that “At least 20 armed non-State actors have reportedly obtained armed and unarmed drone systems.”

“Drones are now the weapon of choice for many countries. They are claimed to be both surgical and to save lives – though we have insufficient evidence to conclude either,” Dr Callamard told Airwars. “Drones may save the lives of ‘our’ soldiers – but on the ground is another matter.”

Civilian harm concerns

The UN Special Rapporteur’s latest report highlights concerns about ongoing risks to civilians from armed drone use. Citing multiple studies, she writes that “even when a drone (eventually) strikes its intended target, accurately and ‘successfully’, the evidence shows that frequently many more people die, sometimes because of multiple strikes.”

Callamard also cautions that “Civilian harm caused by armed drone strikes extends far beyond killings, with many more wounded. While the consequences of both armed and non-combat drones remain to be systematically studied, evidence shows that the populations living under ‘drones’ persistent stare and noise experience generalized threat and daily terror’.”

The UN’s expert on extrajudicial killings additionally notes the key role drones play in helping militaries to determine likely civilian harm: “Without on-the-ground, post-strike assessment, authorities rely on pre- and post-strike drone-video feeds to detect civilian casualties leaving potentially significant numbers of civilian casualties, including of those misidentified as ‘enemies’, undiscovered. Studies showed that in Syria and Iraq the initial military estimates missed 57% of casualties.”

The Special Rapporteur does however point out that civilian harm can be reduced by militaries, “through stronger coordination, improved data analysis, better training of drones’ operators, and systematic evaluation of strikes.”

▲ Aftermath of US drone strike on Baghdad International Airport in January 2020 which assassinated Iranian General Qasem Soleimani (via Arab48).

Published

July 7, 2020

Written by

Laurie Treffers

Header Image

Archive image of munitions being loaded onto a Dutch F-16, during the war against ISIS (via Defensie).

Ministry of Defence says it is revising current civilian harm reporting procedures

The Dutch Minister of Defence, Ank Bijleveld, has reported to Parliament on the latest progress made by the Government in improving transparency regarding civilian harm as a result of Dutch military actions. Coupled with other steps taken in the months after the Hawijah scandal, the Netherlands appears slowly to be shedding its reputation as one of the least transparent members of the international Coalition fighting so-called Islamic State.

In her June 29th letter to Parliament, the Minister laid out a number of changes which she claimed would improve both transparency and accountability. The letter followed on from a fourth parliamentary debate on May 14th on the Hawijah case. Back in October 2019, it was revealed that the Dutch military had been responsible for a 2015 airstrike in Iraq, which had led to the deaths of an estimated 70 civilians. The Government had then withheld that fact from the public for more than four years.

An important topic during the fourth debate was the April 21st release of key US military documents on the Hawijah incident. The US Department of Defense had provided those previously classified documents to Dutch media, after a judicial procedure following an unanswered Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.

Four months earlier, Minister Bijleveld had filed a request with her US counterpart Defense Secretary Mark Esper publicly to share the documents, including the American DoD’s own investigation into Hawijah. She received a negative response to that request on February 28th. However, MPs say they found it difficult to understand why the Minister was not given permission to share the documents, when they were publicly released to the press just two months later.

The contents of those documents revealed that US officials had been aware that an airstrike on the targeted ISIS IED factory in Hawijah could possibly present a significant risk to civilians. CIA informants had, for example, warned the Coalition about civilians living in the area. Furthermore, while Minister Bijleveld has continuously stated that all procedures leading up to the Hawijah strike were followed correctly, the US investigation revealed that Coalition target development processes had been amended after the deadly event, as they had proved to be insufficient. This was not reported to Parliament by Dutch defence officials.

Excerpt of the key US documents released to Dutch media in April 2020. LTG Sean MacFarland approved the recommendation to adjust the Coalition’s targeting development processes.

It was in this context that the Minister, once again, recently had to explain herself in front of a clearly frustrated Parliament. During the May 14th debate, Bijleveld said she shared the frustration of MPs regarding what was characterised as poor communication from the Americans and the Coalition.

In her letter of June 29th to MPs, the Minister wrote that she had met with her US counterpart Mark Esper earlier that day and that he had, in her words, “deplored the course of events, endorsed the importance of transparency and indicated that his department had done everything possible to provide the correct information.”

Red Card Holder

One major criticism of Hawijah was that the Dutch ‘red card holder’ had agreed on the strike taking place – despite the known risk to civilians in the area. The Red Card Holder  (RCH) was the Dutch representative in the Combined Air Operations Center in Qatar, with the option of vetoing actions which fell outside Dutch rules of engagement. According to Bijleveld, as of July 1st, the instructions for the Dutch Red Card Holder have been updated in line with a successful parliamentary motion. From now on, she noted, the red card holder must proactively request important information related to future airstrikes the Dutch military may carry out. In the case of Hawijah, the Dutch RCH was, for example, unaware that the Americans had intelligence suggesting that a possible airstrike posed a risk to civilians.

The Minister’s latest letter also states that the MoD expects to complete its updating of internal reporting procedure on civilian harm in the second half of 2020. The process of informing the Public Prosecutor’s Office (OM) has already been updated: from now on, the OM will be informed as soon as the MoD starts an investigation into any civilian harm allegation. In the case of Hawijah, it took Defensie nine months to inform the OM.

On June 23rd, the minister additionally proposed a new procedure to inform Parliament of any investigations into civilian harm during future Dutch missions. Whereas the initial plan was to inform Parliament confidentially, the Minister now suggests that due to “the importance the parliament attaches to public transparency”, the default will instead be for the defence ministry to publicly inform parliament of such cases, unless this “is impossible, according to the Minister.”

According to Lauren Gould, Assistant Professor in Conflict Studies at Utrecht University and project leader of the Intimacies of Remote Warfare project, the Minister’s proposal contains several loopholes: “This is history just repeating itself: the Minister uses the catchphrase ‘national, operational and personnel security’ and is exempt from being transparent or being held to account for a lack of transparency. It should be clearly defined when the parliament finds it acceptable that a minister does not inform the broader public. The minister will have to prove that these exceptional circumstances are at play.”

Gould continued: “Furthermore, the question remains: what information will Defensie share with parliament? They’ve stated multiple times that as a small country, the Netherlands is unequipped to independently investigate the nature of targets or the civilian casualties that occur. There’s nothing in the procedure about how they will tackle one of the main problems in the Hawijah case: that crucial information collected by the US about Dutch military actions was withheld from the Dutch parliament and public.”

The aftermath of the Dutch strike on Hawijah in 2015 which killed an estimated 70 civilians (via Iraqi Revolution).

Victim compensation

In her June 29th letter to Parliament, the minister also noted that on June 10th, Defensie personnel had spoken with Basim Razzo, a survivor of another 2015 Dutch airstrike, which had killed four relatives when Mr Razzo’s Mosul home was bombed by a Dutch F-16 as a result of an intelligence error. Mr Razzo himself was severely injured. According to Minister Bijleveld, discussions are continuing with Mr Razzo’s counsel, human rights lawyer Liesbeth Zegveld.

Earlier, the Minister had promised to explore possibilities to voluntarily aid local projects for the devastated community in Hawijah. There have, it’s now emerged, been talks between the Dutch embassy and local authorities on the matter. The Minister writes that Defensie has identified several local organisations operating in Hawijah; and that these have been asked what their community needs. Bijleveld says she hopes to inform Parliament of developments after the summer recess.

“To prevent this information from reaching Parliament in another manner”, the Minister also note that local authorities in Hawijah have expressed concerns about possible undefined radiation after the Dutch airstrike in June 2015. According to Bijleveld however, the munitions used in the attack were not capable of producing radiation. Both the MoD and the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs say they will explore whether the concerns of Hawijans can be verified in another manner.

The Minister also reports on a lawsuit filed by human rights lawyer Zegveld in the name of Hawijah’s victims. According to Bijleveld, the Dutch Cabinet has sent a note of sympathy to the victims and their relatives, but claimed that an offer to begin a conversation was rejected.

Explaining that rejection, lawyer Zegveld told Airwars: “[The Minister] wanted to have a one on one conversation ‘human being to human being’ with the Hawijah victim living in the Netherlands. He was expected to come alone, without me or anyone else. We did not agree to that. It’s not about the person Bijleveld, but about her responsibility as a Minister.”

Republishing data

Along with the Minister’s latest June 29th letter to Parliament, the MoD has now also published its weekly reports of all anti-ISIS airstrikes in Iraq and Syria between 2014 and 2018 as open data, after recent requests from Airwars and the Open State Foundation.

“While Airwars welcomes this next step towards a more transparent Defensie, the content of the data is still below standard,” says Airwars deputy director Dmytro Chupryna. “Other Coalition allies such as the UK already report the specific date, targets and near locations of their airstrikes. For Defensie to become more transparent, improving their reporting on airstrikes really is one of the first steps to take.”

▲ Archive image of munitions being loaded onto a Dutch F-16, during the war against ISIS (via Defensie).