US covered up Baghuz airstrike that killed dozens of civilians in Syria

The United States covered up the 2019 Baghuz airstrike that killed dozens of civilians in Syria, a possible war crime, during the battle against the Islamic State, according to the New York Times.

Dave Philipps and Eric Schmitt, writing in the publication say that the military never conducted an independent investigation into a 2019 bombing on the last bastion of the Islamic State, despite concerns about a secretive commando force.

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 US military.

An initial battle damage assessment quickly found that the number of dead was actually about 70.

In the last days of the battle against the Islamic State in Syria, a US military drone circled high overhead, hunting for military targets in Baghuz. But it saw only a large crowd of women and children huddled against a riverbank, said Philipps and Schmitt.

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. As the smoke cleared, a few people stumbled away in search of cover. Then a jet tracking them dropped one 2,000-pound bomb, then another, killing most of the survivors.

It was March 18, 2019. At the US 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.

"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. Another responded, "We just dropped on 50 women and children", reported The New York Times.

The details, reported here for the first time, show that the death toll was almost immediately apparent to military officials. A legal officer flagged the strike as a possible war crime that required an investigation. But at nearly every step, the military made moves that concealed the catastrophic strike.

The death toll was downplayed. Reports were delayed, sanitized and classified. United States-led coalition forces bulldozed the blast site. And top leaders were not notified, said Philipps and Schmitt.

The details of the strikes were pieced together by The New York Times (NYT) 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.

The NYT 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 task force operated in such secrecy that at times it did not inform even its own military partners of its actions, said Philipps and Schmitt.

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.

This week, after The New York Times sent its findings to US 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.

It said the bombs killed 16 fighters and four civilians. 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.

"We abhor the loss of innocent life and take all possible measures to prevent them," Captain Bill Urban, the chief spokesman for the command, said in the statement.

"In this case, we self-reported and investigated the strike according to our own evidence and take full responsibility for the unintended loss of life," added Urban.

The only assessment done immediately after the strike was performed by the same ground unit that ordered the strike. It determined that the bombing was lawful because it killed only a small number of civilians while targeting Islamic State fighters in an attempt to protect coalition forces, the command said.

Therefore no formal war crime notification, criminal investigation or disciplinary action was warranted, it said, adding that the other deaths were accidental, reported NYT.

( With inputs from ANI )

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