“We abhor the loss of innocent life and take all possible measures to prevent them,” Capt. As for the other 60 people killed, the statement said it was not clear that they were civilians, in part because women and children in the Islamic State sometimes took up arms. It said the bombs killed 16 fighters and four civilians. Central Command, which oversaw the air war in Syria, the command acknowledged the strikes for the first time, saying 80 people were killed but the airstrikes were justified. This week, after The New York Times sent its findings to U.S. He went upstairs and reported the strike to his chain of command, saying it was a possible violation of the law of armed conflict - a war crime - and regulations required a thorough, independent investigation.īut a thorough, independent investigation never happened. The lawyer ordered the F-15E squadron and the drone crew to preserve all video and other evidence, according to documents obtained by The Times. In the minutes after the strike, an alarmed Air Force intelligence officer in the operations center called over an Air Force lawyer in charge of determining the legality of strikes. In the case of the Baghuz bombing, the American Air Force command in Qatar had no idea the strike was coming, an officer who served at the command center said. The task force operated in such secrecy that at times it did not inform even its own military partners of its actions. The Times investigation found that the bombing had been called in by a classified American special operations unit, Task Force 9, which was in charge of ground operations in Syria. The details of the strikes were pieced together by The New York Times over months from confidential documents and descriptions of classified reports, as well as interviews with personnel directly involved, and officials with top secret security clearances who discussed the incident on the condition that they not be named. Tate, a former Navy officer who had worked for years as a civilian analyst with the Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Counterterrorism Center before moving to the inspector general’s office, said he criticized the lack of action and was eventually forced out of his job. “It makes you lose faith in the system when people are trying to do what’s right but no one in positions of leadership wants to hear it.” No one wanted anything to do with it,” said Gene Tate, an evaluator who worked on the case for the inspector general’s office and agreed to discuss the aspects that were not classified. “Leadership just seemed so set on burying this. The Defense Department’s independent inspector general began an inquiry, but the report containing its findings was stalled and stripped of any mention of the strike. United States-led coalition forces bulldozed the blast site. Reports were delayed, sanitized and classified. But at nearly every step, the military made moves that concealed the catastrophic strike. A legal officer flagged the strike as a possible war crime that required an investigation. The details, reported here for the first time, show that the death toll was almost immediately apparent to military officials. The Baghuz strike was one of the largest civilian casualty incidents of the war against the Islamic State, but it has never been publicly acknowledged by the U.S. Another responded, “We just dropped on 50 women and children.”Īn initial battle damage assessment quickly found that the number of dead was actually about 70. “Who dropped that?” a confused analyst typed on a secure chat system being used by those monitoring the drone, two people who reviewed the chat log recalled. military’s busy Combined Air Operations Center at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, uniformed personnel watching the live drone footage looked on in stunned disbelief, according to one officer who was there. Then a jet tracking them dropped one 2,000-pound bomb, then another, killing most of the survivors. As the smoke cleared, a few people stumbled away in search of cover. Without warning, an American F-15E attack jet streaked across the drone’s high-definition field of vision and dropped a 500-pound bomb on the crowd, swallowing it in a shuddering blast. But it saw only a large crowd of women and children huddled against a river bank. military drone circled high overhead, hunting for military targets. In the last days of the battle against the Islamic State in Syria, when members of the once-fierce caliphate were cornered in a dirt field next to a town called Baghuz, a U.S.

Us drone strike kills children