Arthur Greene
After a secretive US task force allegedly bombed a crowd of Syrian civilians in 2019 the US military hid the event for two years and blocked any attempt to investigate it.
In March 2019, a group of men, women and children gathered outside the town of Baghuz in Syria where the so-called Islamic State was making its last stand against US forces.
Most in the crowd were trying to leave the war torn area, and few among them were armed militants, but a unit in the US military decided they represented a threat.
A fighter jet flew overhead and dropped a bomb on the crowd. Minutes later, as the dust cleared and survivors stumbled to shelter, another jet dropped two more bombs.
At a US military base in Qatar, operators who had not been warned about the attack watched the attack take place in disbelief.
“We just dropped on 50 women and children,” one person said, according to the New York Times.
In fact, the official death toll was 80.
After the attack, an Air Force lawyer was alerted that a possible war crime had occurred. He reported the strike to his chain of command which should have set an independent investigation in motion.
But this never happened. Instead, the only immediate investigation into the incident was conducted by Task Force 9, the unit which conducted the attack.
Later, a report into the incident by the defence department’s Inspector General did not mention the airstrikes at all.
“Leadership just seemed so set on burying this. No-one wanted anything to do with it,” Gene Tate, an official who worked on the case, told the New York Times.
The airstrikes first came to light this week, following a months-long investigation by the American newspaper.
The US Central Command acknowledged the killings for the first time after the Times presented its investigation to them.
In a statement, they confirmed that 80 people were killed in the attacks. Of these, they said, 16 were IS fighters and only four were civilians. They said it was not clear whether the remaining 60 were civilians or not.
In the statement, Central Command said the strike was justified as it killed Islamic State fighters who were attacking coalition forces.
Image source: nytimes.com
