The Pentagon announced on Tuesday that an inquiry into a US attack in Syria in 2019 that killed dozens of civilians showed no breaches of policy or deliberate negligence. The probe concentrated on a March 18, 2019, attack on an Islamic State stronghold in Baghouz by a special US team operating in Syria.
Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin directed the probe in November of last year after the New York Times reported that the US military had covered up scores of non-combatant fatalities during the original strike. According to the report, the strike killed 70 individuals, many of them were women and children.
The investigation discovered that the military’s initial evaluation of the incident was carried out erroneously at various levels of command, causing reporting delays and information gaps. According to three people knowledgeable about the findings, the bulk of those killed in the attack were most certainly Islamic State fighters, and military troops did not wilfully breach the laws of war or conceal casualties. Based on the findings, no disciplinary action was recommended.
Refuting the charges of attacking civilians, Gen. Michael X. Garrett, who headed the enquiry, claimed that commanders followed procedures to determine that no civilians were in the blast zone before the strike. On the other hand, Pentagon spokesman John F. Kirby claimed that the U.S. ground commanders made the best decision they could with the information they had at the time. He said, “Yes, we killed some innocent civilians, women and children. We actually do feel bad about this.” But he immediately proceeded to defend by saying, “It was in the midst of combat, in the fog of war.”
Defense Secretary Lloyd J Austin instructed the military on Tuesday to change how it analyses complaints of civilian casualties following the investigation.
The Syrian strike in March 2019
According to a New York Times story published on November 13, 2019, a US F-15E fighter jet dropped a bomb on a huge throng of women and children gathered against a riverbank near the Syrian town of Baghuz on March 18, 2019, and then continued to drop several more.
According to one officer who was around, uniformed officers watching the live drone footage inside the US military’s hectic Combined Air Operations Center at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar stared on in utter astonishment. According to the report, a legal official classified the attack as a probable war crime that needed to be investigated. However, the military made almost every attempt to conceal the devastating strike.
According to the NYT report, the strike was ordered by Task Force 9, a covert American special operations force in command of combat operations in Syria. The task force operated in such secrecy that it did not even tell its own close allies of its operations at times. The American Air Force headquarters in Qatar had no clue the Baghuz bombing was going to happen.
