Policy

A new joint report by Human Rights Activists in Iran, CIVIC, and Airwars outlines the scale and intensity of the U.S. and Israel's first month of strikes on Iran

How does Trump’s eight-week bombing campaign compare to the history of U.S. military action in Yemen?

Ignore the leaked messages - Trump's campaign is far more deadly than Biden's

Analysis finds first month of Gaza bombing campaign among the most intense and destructive in modern warfare

Matching Israeli military strike footage to civilian casualties on the ground to reveal full human cost of 'precise' campaign

Annex This is an expedited annex of all evidence and data from a forthcoming Airwars report on patterns of civilian harm from October 2023, in the Gaza Strip. The report will be published in the coming weeks. Update: Airwars’ Gaza Patterns of Harm report can now be read online here . Annex-1: Patterns of Death, …

Cross-referencing open source evidence with Gaza Health Ministry data finds early Ministry death figures largely accurate

The US declares its military actions in 2022 resulted in no civilians killed or injured. Airwars finds otherwise

Visual retelling of 2007 Dutch bombing in Afghanistan that killed at least 11 civilians, later ruled unlawful by Dutch court

Palestinian civilians were killed every day during the two weeks following the International Court of Justice ruling on Gaza, analysis finds

Danish Armed Forces ordered to conduct a formal review of the allegations

Exposing the Danish military's role in 2011 Libya airstrikes that killed 14 civilians

Case brought to contest Ministry of Defence's lack of transparency on civilian harm processes

Tracking civilians killed in Gaza's designated 'safe zones' and how supposed havens became sites of fatal strikes

Unrealistic US standards for confirming civilian harm make it nearly impossible to acknowledge civilian casualties

Russian forces killed hundreds of Kharkiv civilians during the 2022 invasion, research finds

Two-year investigation finds major flaws in British government's official narrative

The UK claims to have killed only one civilian in the war on ISIS. Airwars found otherwise

The overall number of declared US airstrikes across all monitored military theatres fell from 441 in 2021 to a minimum of 36 in 2022

All deaths reported were in Afghanistan

A longstanding mechanism for verifying casualties of the Ukraine conflict have been subsumed by the scale of carnage since Russia’s February invasion.

The shadow of the Ukraine conflict loomed large over the first day of the informal UN-backed consultations on a political declaration on restricting the use of wide area effect explosive weapons in populated areas (EWIPA), currently underway in Geneva. Delegates from more than 65 nations have gathered to fine tune the language of the political …

Stewart McDonald MP, the defence spokesperson for Scotland’s ruling Scottish National Party (SNP), called on Wednesday for the United States and United Kingdom to join those nations backing restrictions on the use of explosive weapons in urban environments during key talks in Geneva. On April 4th the SNP became the largest British party – and …

Entire settlements reduced to rubble, attacks on civilian targets and the bombing of refugee exit routes were all part of Moscow’s brutal Syria campaign

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 …

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 …

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 …

'Why did they bomb us?' report finds major difference in military tactics, and outcomes for civilians

‘ Why did they bomb us?’ Urban civilian harm in Gaza, Syria and Israel from explosive weapons use ‘ – which is published in Arabic, Hebrew and English – provides the first comparative analysis of two very different Israeli military campaigns. Applying the same open source monitoring methodology Airwars uses to track civilian harm caused …

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 …

The US military has blamed an “administrative mistake” after conceding it forgot its own admission of the killing of up to 12 civilians during a raid on a Yemeni village in early 2017. Details of the admission feature in the Airwars annual report for 2020 which published March 2nd. The US military led a raid …

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 …

The release is a major breakthrough in transparency and could help Iraqis and Syrians finally secure apologies and even reparations for the death of family members

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 …

Airwars and PAX have published a new joint report, Seeing Through The Rubble , 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 calls upon States to develop and support an international political declaration to better protect …

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 …

The Department of Defense (DoD) informed Congress on May 6th that US forces in Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq and Somalia had between them killed at least 132 civilians and injured 91 more during 2019. The Pentagon also reported a further 79 historical deaths from its actions in Syria and Iraq during 2017-18. The 22-page Annual Report …

Newly declassified documents released by the Dutch Ministries of Defence and Foreign Affairs, and the Netherlands Public Prosecutor’s Office, have revealed a number of disturbing facts about Dutch airstrikes on Hawijah and Mosul in 2015 which killed dozens of civilians. The previously secret documents show, for example, that the Dutch military official with a potential …

Key European allies are denying dozens of civilian deaths from their own actions - even where the US-led Coalition finds such cases to be credible.

Airwars has launched a major new online resource for Somalia , providing the most comprehensive look yet at more than a decade of US counterterrorism actions in eastern Africa, and associated civilian harm claims. The nine month review has identified significantly higher levels of locally reported civilian harm than previously thought, with up to 280 …

Airwars research shows that at least 2,214 civilians were locally alleged killed by international military actions across Syria, Iraq, Libya, and Somalia during 2019 – a 42% decrease in minimum claimed deaths on the previous year. This sharp fall was largely because deaths from reported US-led Coalition actions plummeted following the territorial defeat of ISIS …

“ After a few months, it turned out that it had indeed been a wrong target. An error had been made in the intelligence process. Instead of being an ISIS target, it turned out to just be a house. A mix-up in targets. You think: shit, it’s not possible, is it? I felt sick when …