The Daily - The Civilian Casualties of America’s Air Wars

Episode Date: January 18, 2022

Four years ago, Azmat Khan, an investigative reporter for The Times Magazine, told us the story of Basim Razzo, whose entire family was killed in a U.S.-led airstrike in Iraq. His story helped reveal how American air wars were resulting in a staggering number of civilian deaths.Analyzing thousands of pages of U.S. military reports and investigating in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, Azmat was able to gain a better understanding of why this was happening.Azmat Khan, an investigative reporter for The Times Magazine.Sign up here to get The Daily in your inbox each morning. And for an exclusive look at how the biggest stories on our show come together, subscribe to our newsletter. Background reading: The promise was a war waged by all-seeing drones and precision bombs. But Pentagon documents show flawed intelligence, faulty targeting, years of civilian deaths — and scant accountability.A trove of internal documents, combined with extensive reporting across the Middle East, reveals the tragic, disastrous failures of the U.S. military’s long-distance approach to warfare.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.

From the New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. I woke up. I looked and I can see the sky above me. The ceiling has fell off my room. Four years ago. And then I started calling my wife and my daughter. No answer.

My colleague, Asmat Khan, told us the story of Bassem Razo, an Iraqi civilian whose home was targeted by a U.S. airstrike that killed his entire family. The precision of the bombing is unmistakable. I mean, two missile strikes, one on my brother's house and one on my house. In the process, Asmat revealed that the American air war against ISIS, which the U.S. describes as the most precise in history, was resulting in a staggering number of civilian deaths. So how could this be a mistake? And she discovered that the U.S. left behind a paper trail that documented those civilian deaths.

Today, Asmat returns to describe exactly what that paper trail revealed. It's Tuesday, January 18th. Asma, there aren't that many colleagues of ours whose appearance on this show happen once every four years, and you're one of them. And the first phase of your reporting occurred back in 2017. So tell us what you have been up to since and about this second phase of your reporting. Right. So the last time we spoke, I had just finished this ground investigation into 100 airstrikes in Iraq, where I discovered that the actual rate of civilian casualties were much, much higher than what the U.S. was claiming. And remind us, what was the actual civilian casualty toll? So one in five strikes was resulting in a civilian death, a rate that was

31 times higher than what the military claimed. And as part of that reporting, I found a way to get the military's own accounting of this air war, these documents called civilian casualty assessments. And what are those assessments? Describe those. So basically, the military creates these reports in response to every claim of a civilian casualty. It's their explanation of what happened and of the military's

own effort to hold itself to account. So thousands of these reports have been written, but only a handful have ever been released. So when I got the report from the incident involving Basim Razo, who survived an airstrike that killed his family, it was really devastating and also so revealing of the kind of intelligence failures that occur. And so from this document, I had this small window into how the military sees its own air campaign, how it holds itself to account. And I thought maybe if I could get more of these reports and if I could study all of them together, maybe I could start to see patterns. Maybe I could start to see patterns. Maybe I could start to understand why the air war was so often killing civilians, why this number was 31 times higher. So I started filing requests for every single one of those reports.

And when you say every single one of them, how many are there? To date, the U.S. military has conducted more than 2,800 of these assessments. Wow. And to get them is actually pretty difficult because these assessments that I wanted, they won't be declassified, most of them say, until 20 years after the date they were produced. But I had an idea. So when I had filed that Freedom of Information Act request to get Bossom's assessment, I'd included something that Bossom had told me. He said the fact that

the American military had targeted his home so precisely would make others, for example, home so precisely would make others, for example, law enforcement, rogue security forces, militias, make them think that he was ISIS. And now, because that strike had targeted him and killed his family, he had become a target. Right, because people assume that the U.S. doesn't make mistakes. If it's targeting someone who it says is an ISIS, the assumption is that they are ISIS. Exactly. And so when I made that Freedom of Information Act request, I argued that the U.S. should process this quickly,

far more quickly than they ordinarily would because Bassem was in immediate danger. And these documents would help prove that he wasn't actually ISIS. And in Bassem's case immediate danger. And these documents would help prove that he wasn't actually ISIS. And in Bassem's case, it worked. It only took a few months, like four months, for me to receive those records. So I decided to apply that same argument to all of these other cases, all of these other reports that had been conducted, because I knew that if Bassem was in danger because of these attacks,

that had been conducted because I knew that if Boston was in danger because of these attacks, so potentially were these other survivors and victims and family members of those killed. And did that work? Not initially. At first, U.S. Central Command denied expedited processing, but I wound up filing a lawsuit against CENTCOM and the Pentagon. And as a result of that lawsuit, you know, almost every month or every other month, I've been getting batches of documents

that really detail what the coalition has examined. Some are shorter than Bossom's, some are longer than Bossom's. So to date, I've received more than 5,400 pages of these kinds of records for around 1,300 incidents. Okay. And what do you do once you obtain these 1,300 assessments? Yeah, I started to go through them to really understand patterns, not just what these show, but what the military was aware of.

And then to compare them in particular for instances where I've been to a site on the ground. You know, what did I learn on the ground that might be different from the military's own understanding? And that allowed me to see its shortcomings. So sometimes they proceeded with the strike even though they knew civilians would be killed. And that's because they had determined it proportional to the military advantage they might gain from that strike. Right. This is the horrible reality of war. Exactly. But often I was seeing that these weren't just instances where they knew civilians would be harmed and considered it proportional. Oftentimes they were completely unaware of it. Many times they had anticipated no civilian deaths or had not detected the presence of civilians in the area before they struck. And once I started

to get these assessments and really look at them, I had a much better understanding of why civilian casualties were happening and why the military was unaware of them beforehand. Mm-hmm. And what is that reason or reasons that you could find once you had these documents? I found several reasons. One really important one was misidentification. This idea that their intelligence led them to target something that they believed to be ISIS. But in fact, it was a civilian or a civilian home. Often they were

perceiving hostile intent from just ordinary actions and behaviors. So an ISIS headquarters was actually the home of civilians or males on five motorcycles driving quickly and in formation displaying the signature of an imminent attack were actually just guys on motorbikes. I've actually talked to military sources who describe this as confirmation bias, which is a tendency to search for and interpret information in a way that confirms your pre-existing beliefs. So if you're looking for an enemy, you'll likely see an enemy, even when you're presented with evidence otherwise. You know, in one case, they had a tip about an ISIS explosives factory near Raqqa. And they watched this compound where they saw what they assessed to be white bags of ammonium nitrate. And they followed these cars that left the facility. And when they hit one of them, they watched a secondary explosion from that car, which suggested to them there had

been explosives in the car, which then allowed them to strike the building that they thought was an explosives factory. And not long afterwards, these claims surface online that a cotton gin was targeted. And so they re-evaluate their intelligence. They look at this facility, and the review calls into question almost all of the assessments they made. Those white bags of ammonium nitrate were most likely bags of cotton. The secondary explosion, upon further review, there actually wasn't one. They said it, quote, reflected effects in a manner that gave the appearance of secondary effects.

So again and again, you saw these instances in which they had utter confidence according to their earlier intelligence, but upon further review, realized that a lot of those were completely misidentifying what they wound up targeting.

misidentifying what they wound up targeting. So it sounds like, in a case like that, once the U.S. military comes to believe that it's dealing with an ISIS fighter or an ISIS location, they start to see everything through that prism, and the suspicion grows, They start to see everything through that prism, and the suspicion grows, and the original error is never corrected. In fact, it's just compounded. Exactly. It's really hard to unsee someone or something as a target, even when you're presented with evidence otherwise.

Okay, and so what's the next category of reasons why these civilian deaths are occurring at such high rates? The second category is failing to even know that civilians existed in that area that they wanted to bomb. they relied on, these collateral scans taken by drones, was sometimes just seconds or minutes long, not nearly enough to truly know whether civilians were there, or the quality of that footage was low. One case that just really stood out to me was this November 2015 airstrike in Ramadi, where they were watching what they had assessed to be a defensive fighting position. And they saw a man drag a quote, unknown heavy object into that building. And they carried out an airstrike against that building. And only later did someone looking at the footage on a bigger screen TV identified that that unknown object wasn't an object, it was a person. And the way they characterized it was a person of small stature,

consistent with how a child would appear standing next to an adult. So that object was a child. Yes. So part of what you're finding is that the most advanced military in the world is basing decisions to launch airstrikes on what seems like some

pretty crappy quality video. Right. It's not always the case that they have that high quality video. Sometimes it was pretty poor. quality video. Sometimes it was pretty poor. Okay, so what was another pattern that you saw in these assessments? So another category was just rushing to carry out these strikes. So as an example, you know, sometimes they would prep targets in advance and they would look for targets and then put them aside, like basically wait to carry them out until a more strategically opportune moment. But when they finally do carry out those strikes later, their intel is out of date and inaccurate. known as TAPCA, they pulled up these previously vetted targets and they greenlit them in rapid

succession without really reevaluating whether, you know, these targets, which were based on months old intelligence, were now functioning in some other manner. For example, were now being used by civilians. So in the case of those TAPCA strikes, they concluded that there were all of these different problems with the intelligence, and that as a result, you know, they believed 10 civilians had been killed. You had mentioned that these assessments serve two purposes, to review an incident, but also to provide some framework for the military holding itself accountable. some framework for the military holding itself accountable. Did you find any evidence that there were repercussions for the incidents that you just described and for the people who carried them out? So in not one of these 1,300 assessments, was there a finding of wrongdoing or of disciplinary action

for the particular people involved in carrying it out. But not only that, they weren't really doing what I was doing, which was to look at all of these assessments in aggregate, to study them, to try to find patterns, lessons, recommendations in totality, you know, basically an effort to prevent these recurring problems from happening again and again. prevent these recurring problems from happening again and again. And also, what did the U.S. military say when, after all this review of these documents, you brought them your reporting and basically told them what was in their own assessments about civilian deaths? The military told me that they regret each loss of civilian life

and that they work diligently to avoid this kind of harm. But I didn't see that level of commitment in the documents. And I definitely didn't see it when I investigated these cases on the ground. We'll be right back. So describe this reporting that you do on the ground that is raising so many questions about whether the U.S. really is committed to preventing civilian deaths. So it's always been important for me to investigate

these types of incidents on the ground. But in this case especially, because I have all of these documents with details about how the military determined that this was a valid target and what they believe went wrong, I have the opportunity to actually assess the assessments to get a truer accounting of what went wrong and why. So over the course of years, I visited more than 100 civilian casualty strike sites in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan. And for those credible cases, right, where I have these documents, I had to have a very rigorous methodology to match that incident to the document to make sure the place I'm in actually corresponds to the incident being described in the military's assessment.

So, you know, I would arrive at the coordinate where the strike allegedly took place. And sometimes I would walk into a corner store or a local market and ask if there were any airstrikes in that area. What happened in that event? Sometimes I would knock on a door. You can just tell him we're journalists and we heard about what happened to your daughter and we're trying to understand that and document what happened in this incident. And go precisely if it was a house where it took place. What was the airstrike targeting? What did it hit?

You know, I would ask someone in that house, you know, was there an airstrike here? So that house fell on this house. And I had to be really careful not to lead with information that other people might just agree to or say they remembered, to really vet and verify that. Because sometimes people might feel incentivized to just confirm what you're asking about, to say that they saw something, because you're a foreign journalist.

And, you know, there's sometimes a perception that aid can come their way or that talking to you or saying that they're a survivor of an airstrike may result in a payment. I'm so sorry for your loss. So I can only report out what happened. Sometimes people are just confused.

So you want to be able to seek out the most reliable information, and you want to interview the people, the sources, with the best eyewitness testimony, with the best direct experience. And did these people you spoke with have any theories about why they had been targeted? I mean, sometimes people were completely confused as to why an airstrike hit that location. You know, they didn't see an ISIS target nearby, and they were really struggling to comprehend that. Sometimes they understood, you know, that there had been an ISIS member nearby. Most of the time, people really just wanted someone to listen to their

stories, to hear what they'd suffered, what they'd experienced, what it meant to lose someone they loved or to be permanently disabled. And I think the one incident I remember most is an interview in West Mosul. So I had this document that described an ISIS bed-down location, this place where ISIS fighters were apparently sleeping, in this village known as Al-Tanak. And in the document, they describe, you know, having determined that this was exclusively used by ISIS. And before carrying out the strike, they were observing this house exclusively used by ISIS. And then they see something

they don't expect. Three children on the roof. Now, this directly challenges their assessment that this was exclusively used by ISIS. So they return this targeting package back to the team to reassess it. And they look at it and they now up the numbers, their estimate of how many civilian casualties there will be. And they say three people might die. And they go back and they look at this target and now they don't just see it as a place where ISIS fighters sleep. They see it as a weapons manufacturing facility. And it's because of something that is redacted coming from the

target. Now, I don't know what that is, but I really wanted to understand what made them so confident to wind up targeting that facility after having seen three children. Right. So I go to this site and I ask around and people very quickly identify this as the location of where the strike happened. And people tell me that there was a family, all of whom were killed except for one little girl who survived. And that next door, a few people were injured, including another little girl who was permanently disabled. And after talking to that family with those injuries, I ask about the one little girl who survived from the family in the home that was targeted. And they told me that she's now living with her grandmother.

My name is Azmat. What's your name? And eventually I get to that grandmother's house, a woman named Katbeya Ahmed. How are you? I'm okay, I'm okay. grandmother's house, a woman named Katbea Ahmed. This is the answer. It's okay, I'm okay. I'm not hurt. Shukran.

Thank you very much. And she just invites me and my translator, Momin, in. She's really warm and inviting. First of all, I'm, you know, I'm a journalist, and I'm trying to understand, you know, what happened. And, you know, I started the interview in the way that I normally do, just telling her that I was a journalist, trying to understand what happened in incidents that harm civilians. I want to ask you some questions about it, but if anything I'm

asking is hurting you or it's difficult for children to hear, I don't have to ask. And you're welcome to say no, I don't want to answer that at any time. And she smiled and she said, ask whatever you want. So we had a conversation where she told me about her brother, whose house this was, and how her brother's son was married to her daughter. And so she lost more than just her brother. She lost her daughter, who was her best friend. She was my life. She was my oldest daughter. She was not only my daughter.

She was my friend and my everything. She'd lost grandchildren and nephews and nieces. And that after the bombing, neighbors heard what they thought was the sound of a cat screaming. And when they lifted the blocks, they found Rahaf, the one little girl who survived. She told me that she'd taken in her granddaughter. So I told her, I told Rahaf, I am your mom. I just wanted to let her know that because I have other daughters, so she was just like my other daughters. So I was as a mom for her.

I still am. She calls me mom and she calls me dad. She told me that the family was poor, that they had been planning to come to her house for a meal that night because they often could barely afford to eat. And she said, I'll never forget this. At that day, they didn't even have dinner. They died without eating. She said they died without eating dinner.

She said they died without eating dinner. I'm just trying to understand, like it's clear that that family, Mohammed, your brother, all of them were civilians. Why do you think this happened to them? You know, I asked her why she thought this airstrike landed on their home. And she was certain it was some kind of a mistake. During times of wars, everything happens. Mistakes happen. certain it was some kind of a mistake. During times of wars, everything happens. Mistakes happen.

There were random airstrikes. And it happened that they got one of those random airstrikes. And when I pressed her on that further, you know, she shared some theories about why she thought it was hit, why others in her family who are now also sitting in the room thought it had been hit. And they gave similar answers. And Isis' truck was maybe passing by. Or on the roof, there was a tenor, an oven that was used to make bread that burned on a much cheaper oil that burned really deeply.

Maybe they saw the heat from the sky. And in my own head as she's saying this, I'm just thinking, is that the thing that was redacted coming from the target? But I didn't say anything about that. Is that perhaps why they thought it was a weapons manufacturing site? Possibly. they thought it was a weapons manufacturing site? Possibly.

So it was about an hour and a half into our conversation before I finally told her. So I want to tell you a little bit about what the document says and get any explanation you might have or any comment you might have on what they claim. That I have this American document, that I had sued my own government to get it. And she's changed. She's perked up.

She's very interested. She wants to know what's in it. So the document says that there was a compound they wanted to target. And so I tell her the initial description. And they believed that it was being used by ISIS for military purposes. And then I tell her the thing that I've been most reluctant to tell her, I think, because she seemed so at peace with what happened.

But the day before the strike happened, they were watching footage of the house, and they saw three children on the roof. And I told her that before striking and they saw three children on the roof. And I told her that before striking, they saw three children on the roof. And her whole face changed. She said the kids would go on the roof when they got cold. They didn't have gas, so they would just go upstairs to get exposed to sunlight. She said that quietly. And I told her how after seeing the children, they re-evaluated the target.

And now when they re-evaluated it, they saw something that made them believe the house was a weapons manufacturing facility. You don't have to ask us. Go to people in the neighborhood. Ask them. Everybody will tell you the exact same thing. Ask them if there was a weapons facility. They'll tell you. That's impossible.

I believe you. I asked her what she wanted to tell the people who wrote the document and who did this bombing. And it was like she changed. I am on fire now. I can't tell them. I can't tell them. They will innocent.

They didn't do anything. And she said, why did you kill them? They were innocent. They were turned into just flesh. Their house wasn't suspicious at all. I ask now, I want to know the reason. There wasn't any manufacturing facility. When people in the neighborhood pulled him out, they were innocent people.

They were ISIS. I believe you. Will you tell her I believe her? I'm curious, as you ended that interview and you walked away, did you think to yourself, this was the right decision to tell her what really happened, what the U.S. knew that they had seen those three children, that they had known those children would die? Or did you wonder to yourself if you shouldn't have ever told her?

She said something to me that made me feel comfortable with it. Thank you so much. I really appreciate that you took the time. So I told her before I left. I genuinely, I'll remember this always. Thank you. That I would never forget this interview.

Hello, sir. I genuinely I'll remember this always thank you that I would never forget this interview and she said it was the same for her I thank you actually I will also never forget this and that she was so grateful that we spoke that she learned what she did to know the reason. I always wanted to know the reason because I know they were innocent. That she learned what she did. I never forget, by the way. I still see them.

I can still see their shadows in front of me. I never forget them. I never forget their shadows. I hated asking her those questions. I felt awful for asking, but I think I also felt really angry that my own government wasn't doing this, that I had to do it.

angry that my own government wasn't doing this, that I had to do it. That you had to give her this life-changing information. It's not my job, or at least it shouldn't be. Mm-hmm. Like, I've done this so many times now. At some point, you have to stop, right? Like, haven't I learned enough? I think I know what I need to know about this air campaign. And at some point it should be the military's job to do this.

And certainly the military in recent years especially has made little to no effort to try to talk to people on the ground to see how these rules of war actually play out. to see how these rules of war actually play out. You know, that you can make a decision about something being proportional, but what if your intelligence is wrong? What if you've misinterpreted a bread oven as an ISIS weapons manufacturing facility? And instead of seeing three children and realizing you have the wrong target, now you're willing to see it as an even more threatening target so as to feel comfortable with what you want to bomb.

I hated asking her those questions. I didn't want to do it, but I just... I wanted to know what happened. And if I didn't, who would? that are really only giving the appearance of accountability. Because real accountability would mean doing the kind of work that you're doing and the U.S. is not. Your perception is actually what people on the inside have told me. Someone who used to investigate civilian harm for the military told me that this whole system, all of these elaborate processes, procedures, these records, that they're essentially an effort to provide legitimacy

for the military's actions, an effort to project to the whole world that the United States is accountable. A former high-level official who used to be involved in the air campaign told me that it was also meant for those on the inside, basically to give them psychological comfort, to think that, hey, mistakes happen, but we've gone through this process. We're holding ourselves accountable, something that might also make them feel better. holding ourselves accountable, something that might also make them feel better. So I can't tell you what each individual officer thought as they did each assessment, but I can say that overall what these documents show is that the military hasn't prioritized accountability in a meaningful way. At this point, I think I've revealed everything that I can reveal about what goes wrong and why. And if this doesn't force them to go on the ground, to talk to people,

to try to understand the impacts of the bombs they're dropping, what's going wrong and why, and to change how they target and how they evaluate airstrikes and how they understand the impacts of what they're doing so that they can prevent it from happening again and again and again, then I don't know what will. Asmat, thank you very much. We really appreciate it.

Thank you, Michael. Here's what else you need to know today. On Sunday, the rabbi of the Texas synagogue that was held hostage by a gunman for 11 hours on Saturday described a harrowing escape that involved throwing a hostage by a gunman for 11 hours on Saturday, described a harrowing escape that involved throwing a chair at the gunman and dashing for exit doors. The rabbi told the Times that the gunman, a British citizen who was later killed by police, spoke of a Pakistani scientist who was convicted in 2010 of trying to kill American soldiers in Afghanistan. Since that conviction, the scientist has become a hero to some Muslim extremists. In an interview, the gunman's brother said he suffered from mental illness and questioned

why he was able to travel from the UK to the US in the first place. And over the weekend, the number of daily COVID infections in the US surpassed 800,000, a new record, and daily deaths approached 2,000 people. Joining me now, the US Surgeon General, Dr. Vivek Murthy. Dr. Murthy, thanks so much for joining us. In an interview on Sunday, the U.S. Surgeon General said that infections from the highly contagious Omicron variant had not yet peaked. We shouldn't expect a national peak in the next coming days. Next few weeks will be tough. Today's episode was produced by Luke Vanderplug, Caitlin Roberts, and Michael Simon-Johnson. It was edited by Michael Benoit and engineered by Alishaba Etuk.

Original music by Marion Lozano. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Lansford of Wonderly. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbar borough see you tomorrow