The air campaign represents a fundamental transformation of warfare that took shape in the final years of the Obama administration, amid the deepening unpopularity of the forever wars that had claimed more than 6,000 American service members. Documented efforts to identify root causes or lessons learned are rare. Fewer than a dozen condolence payments were made, even though many survivors were left with disabilities requiring expensive medical care. Not a single record provided includes a finding of wrongdoing or disciplinary action. In only a handful of cases were the assessments made public. The documents show, too, that despite the Pentagon’s highly codified system for examining civilian casualties, pledges of transparency and accountability have given way to opacity and impunity. The trove of documents - the military’s own confidential assessments of more than 1,300 reports of civilian casualties, obtained by The New York Times - lays bare how the air war has been marked by deeply flawed intelligence, rushed and often imprecise targeting, and the deaths of thousands of civilians, many of them children, a sharp contrast to the American government’s image of war waged by all-seeing drones and precision bombs. These cases are drawn from a hidden Pentagon archive of the American air war in the Middle East since 2014. None of these deadly failures resulted in a finding of wrongdoing. A military review found that the object was actually “a person of small stature” - a child - who died in the strike. In November 2015, after observing a man dragging an “unknown heavy object” into an ISIS “defensive fighting position,” American forces struck a building in Ramadi, Iraq. To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android. They and three other civilians were killed.Īudio recording by Audm. Actually, the car had been bearing not a bomb but a man named Majid Mahmoud Ahmed, his wife and their two children, who were fleeing the fighting nearby. In early 2017 in Iraq, an American war plane struck a dark-colored vehicle, believed to be a car bomb, stopped at an intersection in the Wadi Hajar neighborhood of West Mosul. In fact, they hit houses far from the front line, where farmers, their families and other local people sought nighttime sanctuary from bombing and gunfire.
on July 19, 2016, American Special Operations forces bombed what they believed were three ISIS “staging areas” on the outskirts of Tokhar, a riverside hamlet in northern Syria. Part 2 examines the air war’s human toll. The documents show flawed intelligence, faulty targeting, years of civilian deaths - and scant accountability.
The promise was a war waged by all-seeing drones and precision bombs.
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