The Pentagon looked into dozens of reports alleging that US-led coalition bombings against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIL) killed civilians and dismissed four out of five of them in two days.
Some of the fatal incidents, which took place between September of last year and April of this year, were believed to have been caused by the Syrian government, according to one close observer of the bombing campaign. But its lead investigative journalist said that “numerous” others were deemed not the responsibility of coalition forces by the Department of Defense within 48 hours “based on extremely limited information.”
“Few of these events were later re-examined, despite significant evidence of civilian deaths often emerging,” Chris Woods, head of Airwars.org wrote Thursday, after the analyses were released.
The London-based transparency-promoting initiative–which monitors the aerial campaign against ISIL using international and regional news outlets, US military and coalition partner press releases, and social media posts–said that independent reports of the airstrikes have alleged they were responsible for up to 117 civilian casualties, mostly in Syria.
The Pentagon has only admitted to accidentally killing two civilians in Syria since the campaign against ISIL was launched last September. In May, a Defense Department spokesperson recognized that six months earlier, the US had been responsible for the deaths of two children.
In response to the release of the internal inquiries, a military spokesperson told The Guardian that it had looked into 71 incidents. Ten were the subject of deeper probes; five remain open, and only the result of an inquiry into the airstrike that killed the aforementioned kids has been released to the public.
Central Command released the reports in response to a Freedom of Information Act request that had been filed by War Is Boring journalist Joseph Trevithick.
Airwars.org noted that the records contained thirteen cases of alleged civilian casualties that the organization had previously not heard about.
“These range from pilots reporting that civilian vehicles had strayed into their killbox, to FBI informants alleging mass casualties,” Woods wrote.
