Angry Planet - America's War In Somalia Is Heating Up Again

Episode Date: May 17, 2019

Civilian casualties are a fact of war. The Pentagon, we’re told, does its best to minimize them but war is messy and it’s impossible to achieve the number zero. Unless you’re talking about Somalia. America has been at war in the African country for years and, according to the Pentagon, it has conducted that war with almost no civilian casualties. Amnesty International—a non-governmental organization focused on human rights—says that’s not true and has conducted its own investigation into the war and uncovered evidence of civilian casualties.Amnesty International's report is called The Hidden US War In Somalia Daphne Eviatar is here with us to discuss it. Eviatar is Amnesty International’s director of Security with Human Rights.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. So we were suspicious because it seemed like quite a track record. They said they killed 800 terrorists in 110 airstrikes in two years, and it was a huge success. And it just seemed kind of like, really? I mean, it just, that's not generally how war works. You're listening to War College, a weekly podcast that brings you the stories from behind the front lines. Here are your hosts. Hello, and welcome to War College. I'm Matthew Galt. Derek Gannon is busy finishing his finals this week, so I've called in a pinch hitter to help me host the show, Joseph Trevethig. If you're a longtime fan, you'll know that Joe is one of our most frequent guests. He covers just about everything for the war zone at the drive.com, and also knows more about America's Wars and

Africa than anyone else I know, which is going to be important you'll see in just a minute. Joe, thank you for coming in. Thank you for having me. We're going to talk today about civilian casualties. Civilian casualties are a fact of war. The Pentagon, we're told, does its best to minimize them, but war is messy and it's impossible to achieve the number zero. Unless you're talking about Smalia, America has been at war in the African country for years now, and according to the Pentagon, it has conducted that war with almost no civilian casualties. Amnesty International, a non-governmental organization focused on human rights, says that's not true and has conducted its own investigation into the war and uncovered evidence of civilian casualties. Amnesty International's report is called

the Hidden U.S. war in Somalia. Daphne, Eviatar is here with us to discuss it. Eviatar is Amnesty International's Director of Security with Human Rights. Daphne, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. All right. So very basically at the top, I want to get some just very, very basic information out of the way. Some of our listeners may not know exactly what the nature of this conflict is. So can you tell us, and Joe, if you want to jump in on this, to why is America at war in Somalia? And how long has it been at war in Somalia?

So, you know, they've been at war for a number of years. and I'll let you get into the details of that. My focus has been, an amnesty's focus has been, particularly the recent years of the U.S. conflict, where it says that it's targeting the terrorist group al-Shabaab on behalf of the government of Somalia. So the U.S. is their theory is that they are assisting the government of Somalia to fight this non-state armed group called al-Shabaab,

which the U.S. believes has ties to al-Qaeda, so that connects it tangentially to the larger global war on terror, as the U.S. military calls it. There are a lot of problems with that assessment, but if you want to go, I'll let Joe go into the history more of the war in Somalia, because it does have a much longer history. I would just say that Somalia has a unfortunate history dating back to its colonial roots as an Italian colony in East Africa that sort of set it up in a not particularly great place over the years. You know, this is an extremely crude rundown of how Somalia has arrived in the place it is today. A succession of dictatorial governments that then in the post-Cold War space collapsed, leading to a host of internal fighting and mass famine and other humanitarian

disaster is prompting a succession of UN-mandated peacekeeping operations to try and both stabilize the situation and provide basic humanitarian needs. In the midst of that, in the 1990s, the United States deployed a tangential force. The United States was both part of the UN missions and then also deployed a separate task force. a brief period to try and neutralize certain members of the warring clans, most notably Muhammad Farah IDD, and essentially try to stabilize the situation that way by bringing ID'd either to justice or by killing him. And in the end, that proved to be unsuccessful. The infamous sort of Black Hawk Down incident in October 1993 remains a sort of stain on U.S. military history after all this time and led to Somalia basically being a no-go zone for American forces for more than a decade.

and after the 9-11 terrorist attacks, this more or less continued. There continued to be a limited interest in Somalia, despite it potentially being a refuge. Maybe, maybe not. There's some dispute over whether or not the planners of Al-Qaeda's East African bombings had fled there in the aftermath of those attacks. And then as time goes on, the situation Somalia remains unstable. leads to the ascendance of what was called the Islamic Courts Union in the mid-2000s, and they briefly essentially take control of the country in the sort of 2006-2007 time frame. And that's when the United States becomes engaged in intervening again in Somalia

to break up the Islamic Courts Union, a splinter of which becomes al-Shabaab, the predominant militant group in Somalia, who is currently fighting the internationally recognized U.S.-backed government in Mogadishu, which has a very limited control over the country. And al-Shabaab has a curious history with al-Qaeda, with leaders having pledged by it, the blood oath to al-Qaeda in the past, and then various members of the group have splintered and come back and reconciled in things. One of those groups is now a very small ISIS-affiliated entity, or so they claim, that's also operating in Somalia, which creates a sort of new dimension at the moment.

And then in the last two years or so, it's hard to judge because the United States really doesn't like to talk about what it's doing, in Somalia at all. In the last two years or so, I'd say there's been a dramatic uptick in American military activity in Somalia that stems largely from the decision of the Trump administration to declare a significant part of southern Somalia as a so-called area of active hostilities, which gives military commanders greater leeway to conduct operations without significant oversight in the past, most operations in Somalia that involved actual attacks and targeted strikes on militants had to go all the way up to the White House and come back down, and that's changed dramatically since 2017.

And so I think that, like I said, that's a extremely brief overview of what's happening in Somalia. Somalia experts will tell you that there are infinite additional complexities to the situation, and they're not wrong. But that sort of gives you a very general timeline of the U.S. involvement and U.S. interest in the region and where we are at right now. And, Daphne, it's those recent changes to the war in that southern area of Somalia that Amnesty International was focusing on, correct? Yeah. Yeah. So when Trump administration declared the, he declared the area, this was privately, it wasn't actually. public declaration, but it was reported that he declared the area, an area of active hostilities,

which essentially makes it a war zone, which means that he's going to treat it as if all the rules that govern targeting and the laws that govern targeting people to kill them are very different in a war zone than outside of a war zone. It's much easier lawfully to kill someone in a war zone than it is outside of one. So by calling it an area of active hostilities, he kind of opened the aperture and made it much easier for the U.S. military to target people lethally. And so what we saw right around that time in 2017 was a huge uptick in air strikes in the Lower Chabelle region and certain other areas that we were not able to access as well.

But in the areas where the U.S. was engaging in airstrikes, they, I think something like tripled the number of strikes in 27. and 2018 over the earlier years when they were much more restricted and who they were targeting and how they were targeting. And when you say airstrikes, what exactly do you mean? Do you mean from drones or? You know, we thought they were only drones. And then it turns out that they're not only drones.

There are some manned aircraft being used as well. So that also suggests a larger investment in the conflict. But initially it was only drones under Obama. and within the last year or two, they are using manned aircraft. Joe, do you want to ask your AC130 question? I just, I found that very interesting. I've read Amnesty's report,

and I found that very interesting in the report, and I was wondering what led to the conclusion that the appearance basically, firstly the appearance of manned aircraft was necessarily new, and that it reflected some sort of additional, you said additional investment. I'm just sort of curious how Amnesty arrived at that conclusion. And very briefly, when we say manned aircraft,

we are talking specifically about the AC 130. Correct? I think it is, yeah. So I should clarify, I was not one of the researchers on the report. We did have a military, former military, former Air Force member who did a lot of the research, specifically this kind of research looking at what kinds of weapons were used, what kind of weapon systems were used, what kind of aircraft. So he could probably tell you much better the details of what exactly he found on the ground and found in satellite images that led them to believe that these were AC130s, 130 gunships rather than drones. But I guess it was that and a combination of that and witness interviews,

where witnesses were describing what they saw and they heard, and there were a number of things that they said that led the researchers to believe, oh, these are not, this doesn't sound like a drone, this sounds like an AC130. I think there's more detail about that in the report, and I apologize since I wasn't the military analyst. I can't give you more detail on that, but that was how they concluded it. And apparently nobody had heard, whatever it was that the witnesses had seen and heard was different than what they had been seeing hearing before.

Okay, so let's get into this discussion of civilian casualties. This is kind of a weird timeline here because there's fairly recent information, or I guess the Pentagon has recently finished investigations and changed its official line. But until basically the first week of April, the Pentagon was saying that there were no civilian casualties in Somalia, correct? That's right. Ever from U.S. Since, actually, since they stood up Afri-com in 2008, I believe they were saying they did not

acknowledge a single civilian casualty until early April. And what prompted them to, I guess, re-examine civilian casualties and what number did they arrive at? So we don't, I mean, we believe it was probably related to our report because we gave them the report. And in middle of March, we met with them on March 20th. We had a long meeting, a long discussion about it. We've been sharing our evidence and the research that we produced over the course of the investigation going back about nine months. And after we gave them the final report, two weeks later, I believe, they acknowledged, they said that they had looked back at some of their own internal evidence, and they said that there were actually two civilian casualties from April of 2018 that they had somehow just not, it just hadn't, it wasn't that they didn't know about it in Afrikaom, but somehow Afrocom hadn't reported it to DoD or it hadn't made it to Washington. So sort of it, it seemed as if, there were people in the field who knew that this had happened, but it never was actually reported to the central authorities.

So that was kind of an odd revision. These were not two that we highlighted in our report. These were two additional ones. They were ones that our researchers looked up, but were not able to verify conclusively that they were civilians. So, I mean, the researchers were really painstaking about the way that they went about verifying who were the people killed. I mean, that was really what they were trying to do is look at who was killed from these airstrikes. Who were they really? Because it wasn't that Afrika, they weren't denying conducting the air strikes, although one of the strikes would highlight that they said they did not conduct. But they admitted conducting 110 air strikes in the last two years. And that includes most of the ones that we documented. And they did acknowledge that people were killed.

It's just that they said they were all terrorists. So we were suspicious because it seemed like quite a track record. They said they killed 800 terrorists in 110 airstrikes in two years, and it was a huge success. And it just seemed kind of like, really? I mean, that's not generally how war works. Things don't work that smoothly. And so our researchers were suspicious and really did an incredible amount of research and interviewing and checking it against publicly available information.

and satellite photos and everything we possibly could. And we're able to verify the results of five specific strikes and concluded that 14 civilians were killed and eight were injured in just those five specific strikes. And part of it was due the difficulty of doing research in Somalia

and being able to interview people there is extremely difficult because of the security concerns. So the two that Africa identified were not among those. 14, but they were among, I think, a large group of 15 strikes that the researchers were looking into. Can you talk a little bit more about Amnesty International's methodology for investigating civilian casualties in a place like Somalia? Yeah, so this is difficult and unusual because usually, I mean, depending on where we work, but often after a conflict, the researchers are able to go to the site of, of the strikes and interview people on the ground on site.

In this case, we weren't able to do that because it was just too dangerous, both for the witnesses themselves and for the researchers. So we had people locally who could find witnesses in the lower Chabelli region, which is what we were focused on, and bring them to Mogadishu, where our researchers interviewed them in person. Then we also cross-referenced the results of those interviews with, for example, doctors, hospitals, additional witnesses. They went to IDP camps.

They interviewed people there. So they really interviewed about 150 people just on these five strikes. And then in addition, had access to satellite photos, had access to all of the Afri-Com releases about the number of strikes they had done and where those strikes were to the extent that they reveal that information. And also online reports. So there are local news sources, some of which are more or less reliable, that also report these things online.

And so they use that information, but without relying on any of it, without verifying it with a number of individuals. Do we have any idea how the Pentagon, what their methodology is? How do they investigate and confirm civilian casualties? Yeah, so this is, I mean, I think part of our big dispute with the Pentagon is that they don't bother to do witness interviews or interviews with physicians or first responders or hospitals. They don't, and they don't look at, let me backtrack for a second.

They don't do interviews. They often don't visit strike sites. In this case, we weren't able to actually visit strike sites either. In a lot of other cases, we are able to do that. But part of the problem is that what they do is they look at the evidence that they have available, which is usually, you know, the video feed from the aircraft. And then some whatever intelligence reports they had that led them to target the way that they did. And then they might, if there's an outside allegation of a civilian casualty, they might look at the source and decide whether they think it's credible or not. But they don't do additional investigation.

And I think that's why we see large differences in the numbers that DOD reports versus the numbers that a lot of NGOs report. It certainly, you know, amnesty's investigations, we will always speak to eyewitnesses, relatives, members of the community who can say who was this person. I mean, even if you have a person's name that doesn't tell you whether they were lawfully targetable, whether they were a fighting member of al-Shabaab. it just tells you their name. So, and when the targeting is happening from the air, even if you're conducting surveillance

for a while, you don't necessarily know who each of these individuals were. And so I think the problem is both the lack of, the lack of eyewitness investigation, and the lack of eyewitness interviews and community interviews, the lack of, and also just a lack of understanding even patterns of life in some of the areas. where they're targeting. One thing we found was a lot of the people, a number of the civilians that were killed were farmers. And some of them were out irrigating their fields at night.

And that probably looked suspicious to the military. But in that region, it's actually a very common thing to do in this particular season. That's how people can do their irrigation of the fields in the nearby river. That's just what's done. But it didn't seem as if the military knew that. So it seems like there were a lot of mistakes made just, due to the distance and maybe a lack of firsthand knowledge of how these communities operate. Joe, I know that we've talked about the way the Pentagon picks targets and confirms those targets when they're doing air strikes.

Has any of that changed in the past few years? Not that I'm aware of. one would hope that at least it was as good as it was under the Obama administration. I will hardly dispute that it's a far less than perfect system. It's not, and it does create all of these potentials for mistakes inherent to the system. It's not a system that necessarily, I will reframe that by saying it is certainly a system, that could see substantial improvement. And anybody who says that basically the fog of war and the complicated nature of determining who is who and where they are and why, basically, that's not a good answer to me.

I don't understand why it wouldn't then be worthwhile to ensure that you are doing it as well as you can. and that goes for any kind of strike, whether it's, you know, basically, as I've said in past podcast, whether that involves you going around the corner and stabbing somebody or whether that involves dropping a bomb on them from 20,000 feet. It's, it doesn't matter. The issue is about ensuring that the, that the targeting process does the best possible job to avoid this. That's supposed to be the goal. And can you briefly describe what that targeting process is? I know we've talked about it before, but I just want to remind people of what that looks like. Well, it depends.

And it, you know, part of that is part of what we may be seeing. It's hard to tell because there's so little transparency about what's going on in Somalia. But what we may be seeing is this impact of the change in official status of Southern Somalia as an area. active hostilities, which leads to what many would sort of describe as sort of dynamic targeting, i.e., you get a report that somebody is somewhere and that person might be of interest, and that person might be somebody, or there might be some thing going on that you need to respond to. You know, there's been a lot more reports of airstrikes in response to attacks on partner forces, co-located with American

advisors, which is always a euphemism for there are Americans embedded with Somali forces conducting operations, and they have come under attack. And so, you know, we may be seeing then that somebody doesn't know where the fire is coming from or somebody doesn't know what's going on.

And so there is the potential for confusion there. But the targeting process, when it comes down to targeted strikes, is supposed to be about using all of the tools that available to identify the location of the person in question. And I won't go.

There's an entire separate legal debate about whether any of this is legal. But the targeting process itself is about identifying that individual or a group of individuals fixing their location and then striking at them. And it's supposed to be that you have steps at every part of the process to ensure that that you have the right person, that you are doing everything you can to prevent the chance of civilian casualties. And what we've seen a lot is that doesn't always work.

One of the historically, you know, in the last I guess decade or so now, but one of the ways that the U.S. military has repeatedly used to fix the position of these individuals is by cell phone signals. And that's a SIM card. That's not, and that's not

you and I don't have a SIM card that is that is tied to my name. And in many countries, the swapping of SIM cards and the swapping out of SIM cards and the sale and exchange of SIM cards without the sale and exchange of phones is very common. And so if you are tagging someone based on the metadata in a SIM card, well, you're striking at the cell phone. And we've talked about this in the past. We've seen actual U.S. military reports that phrase it this way, that the strike is not even against the. the person, the strike is against the cell phone. And that is a system that can only cause problems. Because striking at the cell phone as a means of getting it a particular person is just, I mean, it's insane to believe that that is going to be 100% effective 100% of the time.

It's just, that's just impossible. Daphne, what was your, what was Amnesty International's interaction with Africom and the Pentagon? unlike during this process. Did you try to involve them? Did they stonewall you? What was that like? Yeah, so we involved them from the very beginning. We let them know that we were doing this.

We sent over a bunch of questions about specific strikes. The researchers met with them in Stuttgart and Germany. We really didn't get very much information from them. I mean, they were very cordial and listened and spoke to us, but really didn't share much information. So I feel like we made a good effort and we spoke to them also after the report was out and they seemed to listen to what we were saying. But I don't know that there was much exchange of information. That makes sense. I don't think we got much from them. Something else I wanted to touch on in the report is this idea of broken humanitarian law

and war crimes, which I think are both pretty strong. words. Can you explain why some of what you found may rise to the level of war crimes? Yeah. So, you know, the challenge here is that we didn't have sufficient information to determine that one way or another. What we had was some information that people were targeted, that there were specific strikes where, say,

a vehicle was targeted, and the vehicle was struck at a time when it was approaching a village of civilians, and civilians there were killed or injured. And it could have been targeted. It appeared that it could have been targeted when it was on an isolated road. And so it wasn't clear why they chose to strike when it was near civilians. Now, that doesn't necessarily mean it was a war crime. but the law requires international humanitarian law,

which is the laws of war, require that you take all reasonable precautions to protect civilians. So if the strike was conducted, knowing that it was more likely to kill civilians, and yet they waited anyway and conducted it at that time, that could be a war crime. Again, AFROM didn't respond.

A lot of our questions tried to get to this point. Why did you make this decision? Why did you make this targeting decision? You know, one of the people killed was a phone company repairman. Why did you kill him? You know, that goes to the issue of that they use phones to strike people. And so somebody who was carrying a phone, there's no indication that he had any connection to al-Shabaab became a target. And we don't know what the intelligence was that led the U.S. government to target him.

But if it was just because he had a phone, that we would say was not. sufficient to protect civilians. So a lot of it really comes down to specific information that Afri-Com is not willing to release. Right, but I do think we need to stress that the U.S. military is not specifically, as far as we know, targeting civilians. No. They are generally, I mean, this is war, but they are generally acting in good faith. Yeah, and I think that that's an important point. And generally, the military, of course, is not trying to kill civilians. I think what we found was that often when it comes down to actually conducting these strikes,

it's not clear how some of these targeting decisions are made. So, for example, our researchers spoke to a former commander from Africa, who said, you know, after long several hours of conversation, And in the course of that conversation basically said that they were targeting military age men who appeared to be with what they believed were known members of al-Shabaab in areas that were considered sympathetic to al-Shabaab. That's not actually lawfully sufficient for someone to become a target just because they happen to be, say, a 21-year-old male, right? So that's the kind of thing that if that's actually what they're doing, then that could be a war crime. Now, again, you know, this is just the way it was described. It's certainly not a new way that we've heard people within the military talk about the way targeting is done,

the idea of targeting military age men in specific locations at specific times when they seem to be near the enemy. We heard that in the Obama administration earlier on as well. And then after there was a lot of criticism of that, President Obama tightened up the rules a lot in terms of who could be targeted. It seems that the rules have been changed back. So that's the kind of questions that this raises. Are you actually following the laws of war when you're doing your targeting? Or are you assuming that a military H-man, who happens to be in a particular place, is therefore lawfully targetable.

If you had your druthers, what would you like the Pentagon and Africom to do to increase transparency? Well, they could start by answering the questions that we've asked, a lot of which go to this question of, you know, why did you target the specific person? It's already done. And they don't have to give us the names of their sort of their intelligence sources. But they could certainly provide a lot more information about their targeting. processes and how and why they targeted certain people or places at certain times without revealing classified information. And that would allow us to know, okay, this is how that mistake was made.

It also would allow them to know that was how that mistake was made. And if they're not even acknowledging that the mistake was made, then it's not clear that they're learning how to do better the next time. I mean, that's one of the important things. That's one of the reasons I think that Congress has asked the, has required the Pentagon to report on civilian casualties. It's both so we know how many civilians are being killed, but also so we know how to prevent that better going forward. And you can't learn lessons from mistakes made in the past if you don't acknowledge that mistakes were made. And, you know, we had, we did extensive reporting on the U.S. assault on Raqa and Syria when the U.S. was,

when ISIS was in control of Raqa. And we produced a lot of evidence of civilian casualties that initially the military said, no, we don't think these are credible claims. They went back and reinvestigated. And the vast majority of the civilian casualties we identified, they ultimately agreed with were civilians. So they're capable of going back and looking at the evidence again. And they do sometimes acknowledge when they've made a mistake.

In Somalia, they haven't. It's interesting that they're maintaining still, that there were only two civilian casualties in, you know, hundreds of airstrikes in the last few years, despite this very strong evidence that we presented to them. I mean, maybe they're continuing to review. They have started to say that they're, you know, open to looking at new sources of evidence,

but this should be part of their regular ongoing review is they should be conducting meaningful investigations. Daphne, thank you so much for coming onto War College and walking us through this. Anastey International's report is called the Hidden U.S. War in Somalia. It is online on their website. And it's a thick, dense read, but I think people should take a look at it to get a sense of how war is conducted. Thank you for having me. That's it for this week.

War College listeners, War College is me, Matthew Galt. Kevin Nodell and Derek Gannon. It was created by myself and Jason Fields, whose sabbatical is not yet done. If you liked the show, please drop us a comment on iTunes. It helps other people's find the show. Follow us on Twitter at War underscore College

or on Facebook where we never post at Facebook.com forward slash war college podcast. Next week, we'll be talking about nuking the moon. Until then, stay safe.