The bombs killed at least 16 IS fighters, according to the US military assessment. He said that they were unaware that a drone with a high-definition video footage was in the area and relied on a standard definition feed from another drone.Īccording to the Central Command account, the drones over Baghuz had used all their Hellfire missiles, so the air support available came from F-15s, which dropped three bombs. Urban said that on the morning of 18 March, IS fighters launched a counterattack on SDF positions that lasted several hours, during which an SDF position was in danger of being overrun, and US special forces called in an airstrike. Multiple entreaties to Isis to allow family members to depart the area were rebuffed, and thousands of family members remained in the area of the fighting.” “The remaining fighters including some women and child combatants, along with many Isis family members, including some who were likely held against their will, decided to make a determined stand in an area that included buildings, tunnels and cliffs. “The Isis pocket included thousands of fighters and family members including women and children,” said Capt Bill Urban, the Central Command spokesman. US Central Command said the context for the airstrikes was a desperate last stand by IS, referred to by the alternative acronym, Isis.
The New York Times investigation found that the airstrike at Baghuz was called in by a shadowy US special forces unit known as Task Force 9, operating independently from the operations centre in Qatar, and which appears to have side-stepped the procedures put in place to minimise civilian casualties. Gene Tate, a civilian analyst in the inspector general’s office, who complained about the lack of action, was forced out of his job. “Senior ranking US military officials intentionally and systematically circumvented the deliberate strike process.” “I’m putting myself at great risk of military retaliation for sending this,” Korsak wrote to the committee, in emails obtained by the Times.
Korsak subsequently sent details of the incident to the Senate armed services committee. The air force lawyer, Lt Col Dean Korsak, took the case to the Pentagon inspector general, but the subsequent report was stripped of any mention of the strike. But no independent inquiry was ever carried out. The initial battle damage assessment put the death toll at 70. Within minutes, a legal officer flagged a possible war crime that required investigation, and ordered the drone footage and other evidence. “Who dropped that?” one analyst asked on a chat system used by those monitoring the drone footage, according to the report. It said the drone operators in Al-Udeid airbase were stunned when they saw the first 500lb bomb dropped by a US F-15E plane, and then a second, 2,000lb bomb dropped on the survivors. The Times report said two bombs were dropped on a crowd of women and children, trying to escape the fighting on the banks of the Euphrates, who had been identified as civilians by a US drone operated from Qatar. The strike was carried out on 18 March 2019 on the town of Baghuz on the Euphrates River, which forms the Syrian-Iraq border, where Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), with US air support, were besieging the last organised remnants of IS in Syria. Central Command argued that because some women and children had taken up arms for IS, whether by indoctrination or choice, they “could not strictly be classified as civilians”.
The confirmation from US Central Command followed a report by the New York Times in which former and current Pentagon officials alleged there had been a cover-up of a likely war crime. The US military has confirmed for the first time a 2019 airstrike in Syria that killed up to 80 people, mostly women and children, but claimed the strike was justified as it killed Islamic State fighters who were attacking coalition forces.
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