The daily has access to 1,300 reports from the Pentagon that show many failures in intelligence and drone missions in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, without a fault or sanction being pronounced.
Le Monde with AFP
The New York Times has published on Saturday, December 18, a shock investigation that hurts the image of a “clean” war under “precision strikes” regularly presented by the US military in its struggle against jihadist groups in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria.
“The US Air War has been marked by failing information, hasty missile fire, and the death of thousands of civilians, including many children,” Concludes the log in this survey Based on 1,300 Pentagon reports on incidents, obtained by the US daily as part of the Transparency Act in Administrations (FOIA). “Not a single report concludes with a fault or disciplinary sanction”, is it specified.
The promises of transparency of Barack Obama, which was the first American president to favor drone strikes to spare the lives of American soldiers, were replaced by “opacity and impunity”, Adds the daily life that had to take several trials to the Pentagon and the central command of the US Army (Centcom) for these documents.
In five years, the US military led more than 50,000 air strikes in Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq. She has admitted accidentally killed 1,417 civilians in air strikes in Syria and Iraq since 2014. In Afghanistan, the official figure is 188 civilians since 2018.
A number of civilian victims underestimated / H2>
For this survey conducted over several months, the New York Times analyzed the documents obtained and investigated the field, verifying official information on more than 100 bombed sites. Several of the cases mentioned were already known, but the survey shows that the number of civilian victims admitted by the Pentagon is “clearly underestimated”. The documents show that the deaths of civilians were often due to a “confirmation bias”, the tendency to draw conclusions consistent with what we probably think, according to the New York Times.
Current people to a bombarded site were seen as combatants of the Islamic State group, not rescuers. Simple bikers were considered moving “in formation”, which was interpreted as the “signature” of an imminent attack.
According to the Pentagon documents, identification errors accounted for only 4% of civilian casualties. But the field survey by the Times shows that they have played a role in 17% of incidents, and especially that they have caused nearly one-third of the deaths and civilian injuries.
Cultural factors have also weighed. The American soldiers thus ruled that there were “no presence of civilians” in a house they watched one day of Ramadan, while several families slept during the day, fast period, filling with heat.
“We regret every innocent loss of life”
Poor quality images, or insufficient monitoring have often contributed to deadly strikes. They also hampered attempts at investigations. Of the 1,311 cases examined by the New York Times, only 216 had been judged “credible” by the US military. Information reporting on civilian victims were rejected because the videos did not show a body in the rubble or because their duration was insufficient to draw conclusions.
quoted by the New York Times, the Centcom spokesman, Commander Bill Urban, noted that “even with the best technology in the world, errors occur, whether due to erroneous information or A misinterpretation of available information “.
“We do everything to avoid doing harm. We investigate all credible cases. And we regret every innocent loss of life,” he said. For the newspaper, “EMERGING In the end of more than 5,400 pages of documents, it is an institution that accepts that collateral damage is inevitable”.
