The US military covered a series of airstrikes in 2019 that were likely to have killed dozens of Syrian civilians during a campaign against Islamic State, The New York Times. informed of on Saturday.
The attacks in Baghuz, east of Syria, targeted a group of women and children along the river, identified by air force personnel monitoring the area. According to the report, personnel were shocked by the bombings and it was not immediately clear who ordered them.
Around 80 people were killed in the bombings.
It later became clear that the attacks were called by a secret Special Forces task force that was conducting ground operations in the area, and which often operated without updating other forces in the area.
The Times report, based on interviews with current and former officers with knowledge of the incident, found that some personnel believed the attacks may have constituted a war crime. Despite efforts by some to properly investigate the incident, it never happened, delaying the report of the matter and cleaning it up.
“The leadership just seemed so ready to bury it. Nobody wanted anything to do with it,” Jean Tate, who worked on the case for the Defense Department’s Office of the Inspector General, told The Times. “It makes you lose faith in the system when people are trying to do the right thing but no one in a leadership position wants to hear it.”
In an email sent to the Senate Armed Services Committee and obtained by the Times, the Air Force attorney, Lieutenant Colonel Dean W. Corsack, wrote that “senior US military officers deliberately and systematically deliberately circumvented the strike process,” That personnel recorded false log entries, “explicitly seeking to cover up incidents.
In response to inquiries from The Times, the US military acknowledged that 80 people had been killed and claimed that at least 16 of them were fighters. It said there could be many other fighters, as women and children were sometimes involved in fighting under IS.
