“Thousands of Civilian Deaths” — NYT on U.S. Airstrikes

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: Now, America’s air wars in the Middle East, they were advertised as the most precised campaigns in history. But new investigative reporting is revealing a cacophony with terrible errors, flawed intelligence and imprecise targeting caused deaths of thousands of civilians, a number that is severely underreported by the Pentagon. Azmat Khan exposes the true human toll of U.S. air strikes for the “New York Times” magazine. And she joins Hari Sreenivasan to discuss the impact of this warfare.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

HARI SREENIVASAN: Christiane, thanks. Asmack Kahn, thanks so much for joining us. Now, there have been several different investigations looking at the collateral damage of air strikes from the U.S. What was different about yours? What were you able to do that had not been done?

AZMAT KHAN, INVESTIGATIVE REPORTER, NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE: So, in the past, when I’ve done reporting on the ground into air strikes and I’d taken my findings to the U.S. military, they would often respond with the fact that they have classified intelligence that showed there was a threat. And once you meet that response, you’re generally at a standstill, right? There is evidence you can’t refute because you can’t see it. So, several years ago, I started filing requests under the freedom of information act for the documents that actually detail the intelligence behind these air strikes that either resulted in civilian casualties or the military rejected them as claims of civilian casualties. And it took several years. But after filing a lawsuit against the Pentagon, I obtained more than 1,300 of these kinds of records. Records that tell you what they believed the threat was, what they were targeting, the process that they went through before conducting that air strike and then, their own evaluation of whether or not that civilian casualty claim was credible. And I now have the means to compare what the military truly believed and whether or not that was actually the case on the ground.

SREENIVASAN: Now, the on the ground part, you were able to get on the ground with your reporting team and talk to survivors, witnesses of these air strikes.

KHAN: I went to every single strike in this sample myself. And what I did was I would take the coordinate military claimed was associated with that particular credible civilian casualty incident. So, of the 340 credible incidents, the coalition has acknowledged. I went to the sites of 60 of those in Iraq and Syria. Most of them were in Mosul, some were in other cities. And what I would do is I would take the coordinate, the alleged coordinate and verify that the air strike in that document took place there. Often, this was done through associating it with the alleged target or figuring out details where the video that was described in the document of what they had witnessed, you know, whether that matched with what people were telling me on the ground. And then, once I identified people who certainly were survivors of these incidents or had lost loved ones in these incidents or had been eyewitnesses, I would do in-depth interviews with them to try to reconstruct not just what was happening around that time of the strike and what things may have been misinterpreted, but to understand what the true toll of civilian loss was. I would document death certificates, hospital records, videos or photos of any injuries, the kinds of experiences that people have had as a result of these air strikes that I don’t think we have a true picture of yet.

SREENIVASAN: What’s also powerful about this reporting is how you personalize it, how you go and speak to families and you share that with your readers. I want you to tell us a little bit about the family that you met in East Mosul, the story of Kusai Saad (ph).

KHAN: So, Kusai Saad (ph) was — you know, he had been forced to move from his home as the battle for liberation began in East Mosul. And he and his family moved into a home and neighborhood called Facilia. And, you know, as the battle intensified, you know, they could hear bombings all around the gate, was ripped off the house they were staying in. They — he and his wife huddled together with their children. And ISIS came to the house they were in and forced them to move into a house next door where other families were staying, and they basically were in different rooms and spent the night there as this battle intensified, hoping to just wait out until liberation occurred and their neighborhood was freed and they could leave. Unfortunately, that morning, you know, Kusai Saad (ph), as they were sitting down to breakfast, he, his wife and their children essentially were met with an air strike on their home. And as he tried to free his child and his son and his daughter and hand one of his children to his wife, the second strike occurred, leveling the entire building. Kusai (ph) managed to get out with one of his sons, but he was unable to recover the bodies of his wife or other children for two months. In fact, when they found them, you know, they are in really grizzly state, that’s, I think, hard to still talk about. But this is a man who now — his — you know, his family says he spends entire nights at the graveyard where his wife and children are buried, whose left his home, you know, before he was forced to move out of it or fled it, you know, as it was before everything happened. And he lost his family members. And he’s the person who told me, you know, what happened was not the liberation of Mosul, it was the destruction of humanity and told me he wanted to see the video, the video that said that they saw, you know, ISIS fighters firing from that building or within that building. And he said, they should show me the video and I’ll show them Mosul. They need to see it with their own eyes.

SREENIVASAN: What does the military say were civilian casualties and what did you find on the ground?

KHAN: So, in case after case, if the casualty was not reported via a journalist on the ground or via an NGO that went on the ground, the military tended to underestimate the casualties. They tended to count only what they saw in footage, and footage was often lacking. So, sometimes it would be a minute and 22 seconds long. And based on a review of that footage, because they saw no one being taken out of the rubble or because they saw — they didn’t see, you know, dead bodies in that footage that was sometimes just seconds long, they would sometimes reject these casualty allegations. I went to dozens of non-credible sites in addition to those 60 credible sites, and what I found even in instances where the military acknowledged casualties, where they said, OK, we saw one child injured. You know, in that home, I might document the total of 12 people killed and multiple other injuries. And this happened again and again. So, the system they’re using, not just to acknowledge whether or not civilian loss happened but the true toll was severely underestimated. I also found that there were different categories for why these strikes were occurring and that several of them were ones that the military seemed to not really know the full extent of. And I think the most important one they were unaware of was what’s known as misidentification. So, when they’ve concluded that somebody is a combatant, but in reality, that was a civilian, and why those kinds of mistakes or misinterpretations happened. And from that, as I dug deeper, I would find instances when they, for example, identified something as a weapons making factory that was, in fact, a cotton gin, where they associated what were white bags of what they saw as ammonium nitrate were probably just bags of cotton. Where they looked at five men on motorcycles driving in the “signature” of a threat from ISIS were in fact just men on motorbikes. Things like this happened again and again where something as simple as a civilian home was assessed to be an ISIS headquarters, and almost everything people did was seen with an incriminating lens, something that we often refer to as confirmation bias.

SREENIVASAN: So, they were assuming that places were ISIS bases or safe houses when perhaps they were just normal residences?

KHAN: Exactly.

SREENIVASAN: One of the phrases that we hear in this is collateral damage or proportionality, that there are likely to be civilian casualties but that the U.S. military is trying to balance the greater good that if they see a bomb making facility by ISIS and unfortunately, there’s a child involved in the air strike, this is a cost of war. But in your reporting, you say that documents that the government has identified children killed or injured in 27 percent of cases in the times since ground reporting, it was 62 percent. What accounted for such an enormous disparity?

KHAN: Yes. So, part of it is that they don’t see children, right, in some of these bombings. It takes a while to pull bodies. Children can be very small and the video footage isn’t always very clear, depending on different factors. But more than that, what I’ve often found is that their assessments of proportionality, even in cases where they acknowledge that they saw children before a strike, sometimes, rather than using that information to reassess whether or not they have the right target, they proceeded with a strike anyway, saying that because they believed they were attacking a weapons factory that the deaths of three children they spotted on the roof would be worth taking out that weapons factory. And yet, when I went to that site and I talked to everyone I could in that neighborhood, what I found is that that was just an ordinary civilian home. A home where 12 members of a family lived and 11 of them were killed, only one little girl survived. And when I talked to that little girl’s grandmother who was not at the house that night of the strike and I laid out, you know, what I’d seen in the document and she told me that children would go on the roof of the house to warm up, that no one was ever making weapons at this facility. In fact, there was a bread oven on the roof and it’s possible that that bread over was what they misinterpreted, maybe lots of smoke or high heat signature from it was what made them determine this was a weapons factory. But when I told her that they assessed this to be proportional for this reason, her response to me was, but they didn’t gain any military advantage. The only thing they did is that they killed the children. And so, these assessments of proportionality, you know, what gives us faith, what gives the American people faith in our wars is this idea that we conduct these air strikes, not just with a coherent process but that our intelligence is really good. And what I found is that it’s not just in quick instances of the fog of war or where things are very quickly executed, even in cases where there are — there’s a deliberate long-term pre-planned process, the intelligence was wrong over and over. And so, it really calls into question what we’ve been told about how our wars are operated.

SREENIVASAN: You know, I know that there are cases where the Pentagon compensates families, how rare is that?

KHAN: It’s extremely rare. Within Iraq and Syria, there have probably been fewer than a dozen payments. You know, when they’re not on the ground to investigate these or to meet survivors themselves or to assess these kinds of claims themselves, they’re also less likely to make those kinds of payments. You know, this is something that in the past, they saw as a strategic imperative. But it’s also important to keep in mind that these payments are capped at very low amounts, usually around $2,500 for a death. So, for some people, it’s not nearly enough for losing a loved one. And for those who have lifelong injuries, it’s not nearly enough to have the kind of medical care they’re going to need for the rest of their lives.

SREENIVASAN: When you were speaking to some of the people on the ground in these different communities, what does it do to your world view, I guess, if you know that a missile can just literally just come out of nowhere and you or your loved ones could be killed?

KHAN: So, I think it’s caused a lot with the people I’ve spoken to lose faith in their government or in some of the systems that were responsible for the kinds of violence they faced, and it really depends on which war zone you’re in. In Afghanistan, you know, I’ve met the survivors who told me that, you know, this was a large reason that many of these districts and areas fell to the Taliban or became Taliban strongholds in recent years. It’s certainly the case that their perspectives on the Afghan government were radically shaped by the large number of civilian casualties that resulted, not just from air strikes but different kinds of missions by Afghan forces, Afghan security forces. But also, in Iraq and Syria, I’ve spoken to people who basically said that, we don’t call it liberation, we call it the destruction of humanity or the eradication of ISIS was paid for with our bodies. And they have a great deal of resentment toward their government for having left them with ISIS and cutting off all of the different exit quarters in Mosul that would have prevented them from having a lower rate of civilian loss.

SREENIVASAN: So, has the Pentagon responded to your work or most recent reporting?

KHAN: So, when I went to the Pentagon to tell them about my findings, you know, they were adamant that they take great care to prevent civilian harm, that they regret each loss of civilian life. And that in instances where they’ve determined it’s incredible, that they investigate each claim. I haven’t found that to be the case that they investigate each claim. Investigation would require a full investigation, something they rarely conducted. And I think it would also require them going on the ground, something that they don’t do. In terms of, you know, when I asked them, you know, would you or what has prevented you from going on the ground? They have talked about this environmental situation that is quite difficult and hard for them to operate within. But me as a lowly reporter with a fraction of the resources or capabilities that they have, you know, was able to do this, then there’s really no excuse for why they’re not.

SREENIVASAN: I can hear members of the U.S. military saying, listen, this rebel war has cost us more than 6,000 service members. And if we did not have the capacity to take air strikes remotely, that number would be much higher. What do you say to that after looking through all these documents?

KHAN: That’s fair and it’s something I’ve written myself, right, that these — it’s a choice that was made, you know, to reduce the number of American lives lost. I think the problem is that to truly measure whether the wars that are continuing should continue, you need an informed public that understands where the costs really lie, and even if they’re not happening in as high numbers to the American people, you do need to also consider these foreign lives that we don’t fully know the true toll of or the impact they’re having on the ground. You know, for example these parts of Afghanistan that became Taliban strongholds, right, things that the members of the public should know. It was really startling to me to see how many people were so surprised by the fall of Afghanistan. But to those who have been watching, not just civilian casualties but the outcomes of these wars from reporters who had told it on the ground from these people who have experienced it there, it wouldn’t be a surprise. And so, what I would say is that I would not let the fact that there are reduced casualties for American service personnel to distract from the fact that there are still casualties happening and they’re having significant impacts on the ground, and we need that information to truly understand, not just whether the costs and means of war are worth it, but to have that in mind the next time the American public is set to debate another war.

SREENIVASAN: Investigative reporter of the “New York Times” magazine Azmat Khan. Thanks so much for joining us.

KHAN: Thank you for having me, Hari.