And it relied overwhelmingly on a lot of drones with really good cameras that could study targets before they were hit, to make sure we’re hitting the right place, the right people, without civilians being in the way.Īnd to carry out this war with that level of precision, the military has reams of laws and regulations that control what they can target and who they can hit. And it was done that way in order to try and minimize the loss of life, both to civilians and to coalition troops. This war was fought overwhelmingly from the air. Well, I know that probably the public thinks of war as total chaos, but it’s not total chaos. So, Dave, why are they calling a lawyer here? What exactly about this strike is so unusual? dave philipps And if it’s a war crime, then regulations require that I report it. And he immediately looks at the details, and he decides this is potentially a war crime. And his job in the operation center is basically to be the one there who knows the rules of law and can figure out what’s a war crime and what isn’t. They take that information pretty quickly to an Air Force lawyer named Dean Korsak. And they quickly figured out that they were wrong. They did what’s called a battle damage assessment, basically a count of what got hit. Well, the first thing they did was they followed their training.
So what do those people in the room do? dave philipps And another one says, we just dropped on 50 women and children. One of them immediately types out, who dropped that, meaning the bomb. There’s chatting with each other over secure chat logs, just trying to figure it out. So there’s all these people in the operation center that don’t know what the heck is going on, and they scramble to try and piece things together. And there was this shuddering blast that basically filled the whole view of the drone camera and engulfed all of these people, killing nearly all of them. And the people in the operation center were calmly watching this when, suddenly, they saw something across their screens that they didn’t expect.Īn American F-15 attack jet came right through and dropped a large bomb dead center into this group of women and children. The drone, it lingered for several minutes, slowly circling with its cameras focused on these folks, either sleeping or just laying down low to take cover from whatever combat might be coming. And the drone hovered over and focused in on a group of women and children who had found refuge down by the river against a steep sand bank.
Now, what they saw was a field that was just littered with a tangle of cars and makeshift tents of debris of the leftovers from weeks of combat.īut also within there was a lot of people. And on this day, a lot of people in the command center are watching a drone that was flying up overhead. Once, the group had controlled millions of acres, but by that day in March, they only controlled about one square mile of dirt fields pressed against the Euphrates River in Syria. The coalition had, over years and thousands of airstrikes, basically clawed away its territory. You have banks of computers, big screens, all of them watching the air war against the Islamic State. And there we have, it almost looks like mission command for NASA. The story starts March 18, 2019, in a big Air Force combat operations center in Al Udeid in Qatar. I spoke to my colleague, Dave Philipps, on how the system designed to bring this to light ended up keeping it hidden.ĭave, where does the story start? dave philipps Today: A Times investigation reveals one of the largest civilian casualty events of the war against the Islamic State. Monday, November 15th, 2021 sabrina taverniseįrom The New York Times, I’m Sabrina Tavernise. Hid a Deadly Airstrike Inside the Times Investigation on a bombing that killed dozens of noncombatants in Syria - one of the largest civilian casualty events of the war against the Islamic State.
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