"Thousands of civilians dead": investigation overwhelms US military drone fire

A US Army Predator drone flying in the skies of Kandahar, southern Afghanistan, January 31, 2010. © AP - Kirsty Wigglesworth

Text by: RFI Follow

4 min

The

publishing

an edifying survey of the US military

this Saturday, December 18.

According to Pentagon reports revealed by the American daily, drone strikes, favored since 2014 in the conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, have claimed the lives of at least 1,600 civilians, probably many more.

The latter would have been killed by an institution " 

 ".

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The US military often presents its

as a way of waging a "

"

war 

. With " 

 ", it engages fewer men directly in combat and ensures greater efficiency. All this image is swept away by the investigation published by the 

Saturday.

Within the framework of the law on transparency in administrations, the American daily obtained 1,300 reports from the Pentagon on incidents involving civilian victims.

And after more than five years of investigations, the conclusions of the

are clear: “ 

 "

Bad images, insufficient surveillance, misinterpretations of behavior ...

In five years, the United States military has carried out more than 50,000 airstrikes

, Iraq and Syria. She admitted to accidentally killing 1,417 civilians since 2017 in Syria and

. In Afghanistan, the official figure is 188 civilians killed since 2018. And again, the

, which has scrutinized the reports and investigated on the ground, says that the number of civilian victims recognized by the Pentagon is " 

 ".

The documents show that civilian deaths were often due to " 

 ," the tendency to draw conclusions consistent with what is thought likely.

People running to a bombed site were seen as fighters from the Islamic State group, not rescuers.

Simple motorcyclists were considered to be moving " 

 ", which was interpreted as the " 

 " of an impending attack.

A 5-year New York Times investigation into hidden Pentagon records shows that a pattern of failures in US airstrikes in the Middle East has killed thousands of civilians, many of them children.

None of these records show findings of wrongdoing.

https://t.co/6VCYUtSZXf

- The New York Times (@nytimes) December 18, 2021

According to Pentagon documents, misidentification accounted for only 4% of civilian casualties. But the

field investigation

shows they played a role in 17% of incidents, and most importantly, caused nearly a third of civilian deaths and injuries. Cultural factors also weighed heavily. The American soldiers thus judged that there was " 

 " in a house which they watched one day of Ramadan, whereas several families slept there during the day, period of fasting, sheltering themselves from the heat.

Poor quality images or insufficient surveillance duration often contributed to deadly strikes.

They also slowed down investigative attempts.

Of the 1,311 cases examined by the

, only 216 had been deemed " 

 " by the US military.

Reports of civilian casualties were rejected because the videos did not show bodies in the rubble or because they were not long enough to draw conclusions.

"Opacity and impunity"

The promises of transparency of the time of Barack Obama, who was the first American president to favor drone strikes to spare the lives of American soldiers, have been replaced by " 

 ", adds the daily , which had to file several lawsuits against the Pentagon and the US Army Central Command (Centcom) to obtain these documents.

" 

 ", adds the American newspaper, for which the investigation reveals " 

 ".

In the daily columns, Centcom spokesman Commander Bill Urban notes that " 

 "

(With AFP)

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