How the US hid an airstrike that killed dozens of civilians in Syria

Ruins in the Syrian city of Raqqa, where the Islamic State group ruled from for three years before being driven out, June 3, 2018. Photo / Ivor Prickett-New York Times

In the last days of the battle against the Islamic State group in Syria, when members of the once-fierce caliphate were cornered in a dirt field next to a town called Baghuz, a US military drone circled high overhead, hunting for military targets. But it saw only a large crowd of women and children huddled against a river bank.

Without warning, a US F-15E attack jet streaked across the drone's high-definition field of vision and dropped a 500-pound bomb on the crowd. Then a jet dropped one 2,000-pound bomb, then another.

It was March 18, 2019. At the US military's busy Combined Air Operations Centre at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, uniformed personnel watching the live drone footage looked on in stunned disbelief.

"Who dropped that?" a confused analyst typed on a secure chat system being used by those monitoring the drone. Another responded, "We just dropped on 50 women and children."

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

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. 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, sanitised and classified. US-led coalition forces bulldozed the blast site. And top leaders were not notified.

The Defence Department's independent inspector general began an inquiry, but the report containing its findings was stalled and stripped of any mention of the strike.

"Leadership just seemed so set on burying this," said Gene Tate, an evaluator who worked on the case for the inspector general's office and agreed to discuss the aspects that were not classified.

Tate, a former Navy officer who had worked for years as a civilian analyst with the Defence Intelligence Agency and the National Counterterrorism Centre before moving to the inspector general's office, said he criticised the lack of action and was eventually forced out of his job.

The details of the strikes were pieced together by The New York Times 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 military never conducted an independent investigation into a 2019 bombing in Baghuz that killed dozens of civilians. Graphic / New York Times

The Times investigation found that the bombing had been called in by a classified US 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. In the case of the Baghuz bombing, the US Air Force command in Qatar had no idea the strike was coming.

After the strike, an alarmed Air Force intelligence officer in the operations centre called over an Air Force lawyer in charge of determining the legality of strikes. The lawyer ordered the F-15E squadron and the drone crew to preserve all video and other evidence. He went upstairs and reported the strike to his chain of command, saying it was a possible violation of the law of armed conflict — a war crime — and regulations required a thorough, independent investigation.

But a thorough, independent investigation never happened.

This past week, after the 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.

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. Therefore, no formal war crime notification, criminal investigation or disciplinary action was warranted.

But the Air Force lawyer, Lt. Col. Dean Korsak, believed he had witnessed possible war crimes and repeatedly pressed his leadership and Air Force criminal investigators to act. When they did not, he alerted the Defence Department's independent inspector general. Two years after the strike, seeing no evidence that the watchdog agency was taking action, Korsak emailed the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Korsak did not respond to requests for comment.

A secret task force

The United States portrayed the air war against the Islamic State as the most precise and humane bombing campaign in its history. The military said every report of civilian casualties was investigated and the findings reported publicly, creating what the military called a model of accountability.

But the strikes on Baghuz tell a different story.

The details suggest that while the military put strict rules in place to protect civilians, the Special Operations task force repeatedly used other rules to skirt them.

Even in the extraordinary case of Baghuz — which would rank third on the military's worst civilian casualty events in Syria if 64 civilian deaths were acknowledged — regulations for reporting and investigating the potential crime were not followed, and no one was held accountable.

Syrian authorities distribute bread, vegetables and pasta to Douma residents in the town of Douma, the site of a suspected chemical weapons attack, near Damascus, Syria in April 2018. Photo / AP

Nearly 1,000 strikes hit targets in Syria and Iraq in 2019, using 4,729 bombs and missiles. The official military tally of civilian dead for that entire year is only 22, and the strikes from March 18 are nowhere on the list.

The battle at Baghuz represented the end of a nearly five-year US-led campaign to defeat the Islamic State in Syria. On the ground, Task Force 9 coordinated offensives and airstrikes. The unit included soldiers from the 5th Special Forces Group and the Army's elite commando team Delta Force.

Over time, some officials overseeing the air campaign began to believe that the task force was systematically circumventing the safeguards created to limit civilian deaths.

The process was supposed to run through several checks and balances. Drones with high-definition cameras studied potential targets, sometimes for days or weeks. Analysts pored over intelligence data to differentiate combatants from civilians. And military lawyers were embedded with strike teams to ensure that targeting complied with the law of armed conflict.

But there was a quick and easy way to skip much of that oversight: claiming imminent danger.

The law of armed conflict — the rule book that lays out the military's legal conduct in war — allows troops in life-threatening situations to sidestep the strike team lawyers, analysts and other bureaucracy and call in strikes directly from aircraft under what military regulations call an "inherent right of self-defence".

Task Force 9 typically played only an advisory role in Syria, and its soldiers were usually well behind the front lines. Even so, by late 2018, about 80 per cent of all airstrikes it was calling in claimed self-defence.

The rules allowed US troops and local allies to invoke it when facing not just direct enemy fire, but anyone displaying "hostile intent". Under that definition, something as mundane as a car driving miles from friendly forces could in some cases be targeted. The task force interpreted the rules broadly, the former officer said.

CIA officers working in Syria grew so alarmed over the task force's strikes that agents reported their concern to the Department of Defence inspector general, which investigated the claims and produced a report. The results of that report are top secret, but a former task force officer said the CIA officers alleged that in about 10 incidents, the secretive task force hit targets knowing civilians would be killed. The former officer said the report determined that all the strikes were legal.

The inspector general declined to release the report or discuss its findings.

A fatal strike

The camp at Baghuz was effectively the Islamic State's Alamo — a last stand where hard-core militants vowed to fight to the death. The coalition had laid siege, hoping to starve the fighters out. In six weeks, 29,000 people, most of them women and children, surrendered. On March 18, drone footage showed the camp still harboured large numbers of people suspected of being fighters and their families.

Coalition drones had scoured the camp 24 hours a day for weeks and knew nearly every inch, including the daily movements of groups of women and children.

What happened on the morning of March 18 is in dispute.

That day Islamic State fighters trapped in the camp launched a predawn counteroffensive, according to Central Command, which oversaw Task Force 9. It said hundreds of Islamic State fighters started firing rifles and grenade launchers and sending forward fighters with suicide vests. The coalition pummeled the fighters with airstrikes — so many that by midmorning, the coalition had used all the missiles on its drones. Only one US drone, controlled by the task force, was left in the area, and it was unarmed.

At about 10 am, local Syrian forces reported they were under fire and in danger of being overrun and called for an airstrike, Central Command said. The task force drone tracked a group of fighters as they made their way through the camp to the area where the women and children sheltered.

A 5th Special Forces Group officer in the task force looked at the drone footage and did not see any civilians. But the drone he relied on had only a standard-definition camera. Central Command said there were no high-definition drones in the area that could get a better view of the target.

The Special Forces officer gave the order to fire. With no precision missiles left, the ground commander called in 500- and 2,000-pound bombs. The strike log classified the strike as self-defence.

In fact, a high-definition drone was available. The task force did not use it. Circling above, it was streaming footage of the same patch of ground to the operations centre in Qatar. Because the task force operated at a high level of secrecy, the people in Qatar watching the high-definition drone were not aware the task force was about to call in a strike.

Central Command said the task force did not know that the better drone was overhead.

The high-definition drone recorded a very different scene from what was described by Central Command this past week. In it, two or three men — not 16 — wander through the frame. They have rifles but do not appear to be maneuvering, engaging coalition forces or acting in a way that would seem to justify a self-defense strike with 2,000-pound bombs. A chat log used by analysts who were watching the footage noted the presence of women, children and a man with a gun but did not mention any active combat.

Moments after the task force called in the strike, an F-15E attack plane hit the spot with a 500-pound bomb. Five minutes later, when ground forces saw people fleeing the blast site, the F-15E dropped two 2,000-pound bombs on the survivors. The entire attack took 12 minutes.

A failed investigation

Defence Department regulations require any "possible, suspected or alleged" violation of the law of armed conflict to be reported immediately to the combatant commander in charge as well as criminal investigators, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the secretary of defence and the secretary of the Army.

After viewing the footage, Korsak ordered the units involved to preserve nine pieces of evidence, including video, and reported the strike to his chain of command. He also notified the command of concerns that the unit appeared to be covering up the alleged war crimes violations by adding details to the strike log that would justify a self-defense strike. Commanders did not take action.

Coalition forces overran the camp that day and defeated the Islamic State a few days later.

Civilian observers who came to the area of the strike the next day found piles of dead women and children.

Satellite images from four days later show the sheltered bank and area around it appeared to have been bulldozed.

Concerned that details of the airstrike would be buried as well, Korsak alerted the Air Force's version of the FBI, the Office of Special Investigations. A major responded that agents probably would not look into it.

The Air Force Office of Special Investigations declined to comment.

Korsak again pressed his chain of command to act, informing his command's chief legal officer in a memo in May 2019 that regulations required an investigation. His superiors did not open an investigation.

Unwilling to let the issue drop, Korsak filed a hotline complaint with the inspector general's office in August 2019.

A four-person team in the office was already looking into shortcomings in the civilian casualty reporting processes in Syria and quickly set up an interview in a secure setting. After reviewing the high-definition footage and interviewing Korsak, the team, which included Tate, told superiors in the inspector general's office that the allegation of a war crime was "extremely credible."

But like the Air Force lawyer's earlier effort, Tate's team soon hit roadblocks. Central Command was slow to turn over evidence. Tate obtained video from several drones flying over Baghuz that day but could not locate the footage from the task force drone that called in the strike.

Tate studied the task force's casualty report, but it did not match what he saw on video. The civilian deaths stated in the report were "an impossibly small number," he said.

The final section of the casualty report was reserved for the legal opinion. In one version of the report that Tate was sent by the staff at Operation Inherent Resolve, the Baghdad-based military command overseeing operations in Iraq and Syria, a task force lawyer and an operations officer wrote that a violation of the law of armed conflict may have taken place. In another copy that came from Central Command, he said, that opinion had been removed.

Tate could find no evidence that the Joint Chiefs, the defence secretary or criminal investigators had been alerted, as required.

Within days of interviewing Korsak, Tate's team took their findings to supervisors and told them the office was required to alert those officials and criminal investigation agencies. Tate said his supervisors took no action. The team pressed leaders numerous times over the next several months, and in January 2020, Tate's team leader drafted a memo that would formally alert authorities. It only needed to be signed by the deputy inspector general overseeing the team. Tate said the supervisor did not sign it.

In the months that followed in 2020, the team finished its report on broader issues in the civilian casualty reporting process, but as it went through the editing and approval process, all mentions of the Baghuz strike were cut.

Tate became increasingly pointed in criticising the leadership of the inspector general's office. In October 2020, he said he was forced out of his position and escorted from the building by security.

A spokesperson for the inspector general's office disputed Tate's account. She said that it alerted the proper authorities at Central Command shortly after receiving the first hotline complaint in 2019. The spokesperson said the office also notified criminal investigators about the strike in October 2020, 14 months after receiving the hotline call.

Tate refused to give up. He contacted the Senate Armed Services Committee in May and sent a 10-page letter describing the strike and what he viewed as a "systematic failure" on civilian casualty reporting. The committee then contacted Korsak, who replied with a detailed email.

Tate waited for months for the committee to call back and give him an indication that it was actively looking at the case. This past week, he said with a sigh that he was still waiting.

Written by: Dave Philipps and Eric Schmitt
Photographs by: Ivor Prickett
© 2021 THE NEW YORK TIMES