Friday, May 10, 2019
The
Alarming Rise of Civilian Deaths in the War On Terror
New reports show an escalation in civilian casualties from U.S.
operations in Syria, Afghanistan and Somalia—and a pattern of U.S. denial about
the scale of the problem
commondreams.org/views/2019/05/10/alarming-rise-civilian-deaths-war-terror
“There
is no military solution” is an often-heard saying since the “global war on
terror” began almost 18 years ago.
We
need political solutions to the military conflicts we’ve embroiled ourselves in
over the last two decades, most policymakers agree. But in the meantime, the
last three administrations have sent in the military to pave the way for a
political solution—and have kept them there, allegedly to protect civilians
from the Taliban in Afghanistan, ISIS in Syria and al-Shabab in Somalia,
among other militant groups.
Yet
all too often, these civilians become casualties of the very military forces
Washington supposedly deployed to protect them.
The
result is a global war on terror that persists in killing and injuring
civilians—including children—in ever rising numbers.
A
series of new reports document an alarming escalation of civilian casualties
caused by U.S. operations in Syria, Afghanistan and Somalia — and with it, a
pattern of U.S. denial about the scale of the problem. The result is a global
war on terror that persists in killing and injuring civilians—including
children—in ever rising numbers.
Syria
ISIS
claimed the city of Raqqa, in north-central Syria, as the capital of its
so-called “caliphate” in January 2014. The Obama administration launched a
bombing campaign in Syria that fall, followed by ground troops in 2015.
The
group’s control of the city was marked by horrible conditions for the civilian
population—including brutal punishments for infractions of ISIS’s religious
rules, extra-judicial killings and sexual slavery. The fighting across
Syria involved both ISIS and the various powers operating in the country: Iran,
Turkey, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Israel, the U.S. and Russia, not to mention the
Syrian government and a variety of opposition forces. As a result of this
global onslaught, Raqqa and its beleaguered inhabitants faced constant death
and destruction for years.
But it
was the U.S.-led bombing campaigns in Raqqa for which civilians and their city
paid the highest price. The April 2019 Amnesty International report title
sums it up: “Rhetoric versus Reality: How the ‘most precise air campaign in
history’ left Raqqa the most destroyed city in modern times.”
The
assault was relentless. “One U.S. military official boasted about firing 30,000
artillery rounds during the campaign — the equivalent of a strike every six
minutes, for four months straight — surpassing the amount of artillery used in
any conflict since the Viet Nam war,” the report notes. It added that “unguided
artillery” is “notoriously imprecise.”
Amnesty
documented 1,600 civilians killed by U.S.-led airstrikes on the city, limiting
their count mostly to those the organization and its partners were
able to reasonably verify on the ground. “Raqqa’s soaring civilian death toll
is unsurprising,” the report concludes, “given the Coalition’s relentless barrage
of munitions that were inaccurate to the point of being indiscriminate when
used near civilians.”
In one incident, a five-story residential
building where four families were taking shelter was completely leveled by an
air strike. “Almost all of them — at least 32 civilians, including 20 children
— were killed,” the report said. And worse: “A week later, a further 27
civilians —including many relatives of those killed in the earlier strike —
were also killed when an air strike destroyed a nearby building.”
Pentagon
officials who routinely bragged about their “precise” bombing of the city
acknowledge the killing of only 159 civilians in Raqqa — about 10 percent of
those Amnesty confirmed. So far, they’ve dismissed the rest as “non-credible,”
while refusing to launch serious investigations of the real toll.
There’s
no doubt that more serious investigations like Amnesty’s in Raqqa would
document far more casualties in all the theaters of the global war on terror.
Afghanistan
The
U.S. war in Afghanistan is in its 18th year, and more civilians are dying every
year.
In the
first months of 2019, the United Nations determined that, for the first timesince the UN Assistance
Mission began documenting deaths, more civilians had been killed by U.S. and
U.S.-backed forces than by the Taliban or ISIS. Nearly half of those deaths
caused by the U.S. and its allies occurred as a result of U.S. airstrikes,
which killed a significant number of women and children.
A U.S.
military spokesman in Afghanistan intoned the well-known trope that U.S. forces
“hold ourselves to the highest standards of accuracy and accountability,”
before repeating that familiar refrain about a political solution: “The best
way to end the suffering of noncombatants is to end the fighting through an
agreed-upon reduction in violence on all sides.”
According
to the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, the
U.S.-backed government in Kabul now controls only about 54 percent of the country’s
districts. Eighteen years of war and occupation haven’t eliminated the Taliban
— quite the contrary. The U.S., Russia and various Afghan civil society groups
are all negotiating with the Taliban, while the U.S.-backed Afghan government
fades under a morass of corruption and incompetence.
The
war in Afghanistan has been a failure not only in political but in human terms.
As of at least 2017, Afghanistan’s infant mortality rate—the proportion of
babies dying before their first birthday—was exactly where it was when the
Taliban was in control, before the U.S. invasion: Number one in the world.
Somalia
The
largely invisible U.S. war on Somalia has been underway sporadically since the
early 1990s. Since the September 11, 2001 attacks, U.S. operations there
have included Special Forces and other ground troops hunting for al-Qaeda,
al-Shabab and other militant organizations. Beginning under the Obama
administration, the main focus has been an air war carried out largely by
drones.
In
2017, President Trump loosened the already not-very-tight regulations governing
drone attacks, reducing Obama-era rules that were supposed to protect
civilians. The result was a significant escalation in drone strikes in the
country: The number of attacks in 2017 rose to 34, and then rose again in 2018
to 47 — and this year’s total looks on pace to surpass even that.
The
U.S. Africa Command rather remarkably claims it has killed only two civilians
in the dozens of airstrikes launched in the last two years. But Amnesty
International’s Brian Castner calls that a ”denial of reality.” In the New York
Times, Castner writes that “in five of those airstrikes alone, Amnesty
International can identify by name 14 civilians killed. By denying these
casualties, our government is essentially trying to gaslight an entire
country.”
The
escalation of U.S. military intervention across Africa has remained largely
under the public radar. But it continues — and just like in the more well-known
U.S. war theaters, it results in the same consistent failure of military
operations to end security threats.
According
to the extraordinary journalist Nick Turse, “Over these last years,
the number of personnel, missions, dollars spent, and special ops training
efforts as well as drone bases and other outposts on the continent have all
multiplied… Almost no one, however — neither those senators nor the media — has
raised pointed questions, no less demanded frank answers, about why [security]
crises on the continent have so perfectly mirrored American military expansion.”
Perhaps
that’s because — as in Afghanistan and Syria — these operations do nothing
about the extreme poverty, climate change, corruption and wars (often launched
by the West) that together provide the source and the impetus for extremist
actions.
The human
toll
Behind
the numbers is an almost unbearable human toll.
“I saw
my son die, burnt in the rubble in front of me,” said one bereaved woman from Raqqa. “I’ve lost
everyone who was dear to me. My four children, my husband, my mother, my
sister, my whole family. Wasn’t the goal to free the civilians? They were
supposed to save us, to save our children.”
Yet
denial of the scale — and in many cases, the very existence — of civilian
casualties has been a feature of Washington’s global war on terror since its
origins. In 2002, Gen. Tommy Frank, then-U.S. commander Central
Command, asserted that “we don’t do body counts.”
The
toll from bombs, drone strikes and firefights is only the tip of the
iceberg. Not included are the hundreds of thousands killed in war zones around
the world by U.S.-imposed economic sanctions, by hunger
stemming from food system disruption, and by disease resulting from the bombing
of water treatment facilities, hospitals and clinics.
The
hoary old statement is still true: There is no military solution to any of
these conflicts. As long as failing military actions are still taken, however,
civilians will continue to die. And they are being killed by the very soldiers
and pilots, bombers, National Security Councils, congressional war-funders,
parliaments, prime ministers and presidents who claim to be liberating them.
© 2019
Foreign Policy In Focus
Phyllis Bennis is a
fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies. Her most recent book is the 7th updated
edition of Understanding
the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict: A Primer. Follow her on
Twitter: @PhyllisBennis
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski2001 [at] comcast.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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