In 2017 Donald Trump overhauled Obama-era restrictions on secret wars and air strikes
conducted 108 air strikes in Somalia since 2017, killing some 800 people. The Pentagon says they were all jihadists. Amnesty International, a human rights organisation, disagrees. It has gathered detailed evidence suggesting that five recent strikes alone killed 14 civilians. That discrepancy between the civilians that external observers say have been killed in American air strikes and the number the government owns up to is repeated across the world.
In Somalia this meant commanders now needed only “reasonable certainty” that a target was present, and could make their decision without recourse to officials back home. This increased the risk of civilians being misidentified as combatants. Separately, the shift toDisputes over the civilian toll from air campaigns go well beyond Somalia.
That leaves America reliant on overhead imagery, coupled with what limited human or electronic intelligence may trickle in, to count bodies. This is particularly limiting when it comes to evaluating casualties inside buildings in built-up areas. In some cases the people on the ground—whether al-Shabab in Somalia or Pakistan’s intelligence agency—deliberately obfuscate matters, keeping the press away from bombed areas. But America’s own rules also appear to be part of the problem.
The Pentagon has taken note of all this criticism. In February it partially declassified a study from 2018 of civilian casualties caused over the previous three years. The study insisted that there was a “widespread priority to minimise civilian casualties from the highest to the lowest levels,” but found that the coalition against Islamic State had systematically undercounted.
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