Us drone strike kills children12/7/2023 ![]() In the case of the Baghuz bombing, the American Air Force command in Qatar had no idea the strike was coming, an officer who served at the command center said. The task force operated in such secrecy that at times it did not inform even its own military partners of its actions. The Times investigation found that the bombing had been called in by a classified American special operations unit, Task Force 9, which was in charge of ground operations in Syria. The details of the strikes were pieced together by The New York Times over months from confidential documents and descriptions of classified reports, as well as interviews with personnel directly involved, and officials with top secret security clearances who discussed the incident on the condition that they not be named. Tate, a former Navy officer who had worked for years as a civilian analyst with the Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Counterterrorism Center before moving to the inspector general’s office, said he criticized the lack of action and was eventually forced out of his job. “It makes you lose faith in the system when people are trying to do what’s right but no one in positions of leadership wants to hear it.” No one wanted anything to do with it,” said Gene Tate, an evaluator who worked on the case for the inspector general’s office and agreed to discuss the aspects that were not classified. “Leadership just seemed so set on burying this. The Defense Department’s independent inspector general began an inquiry, but the report containing its findings was stalled and stripped of any mention of the strike. United States-led coalition forces bulldozed the blast site. Reports were delayed, sanitized and classified. But at nearly every step, the military made moves that concealed the catastrophic strike. A legal officer flagged the strike as a possible war crime that required an investigation. The details, reported here for the first time, show that the death toll was almost immediately apparent to military officials. The Baghuz strike was one of the largest civilian casualty incidents of the war against the Islamic State, but it has never been publicly acknowledged by the U.S. Another responded, “We just dropped on 50 women and children.”Īn initial battle damage assessment quickly found that the number of dead was actually about 70. “Who dropped that?” a confused analyst typed on a secure chat system being used by those monitoring the drone, two people who reviewed the chat log recalled. military’s busy Combined Air Operations Center at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, uniformed personnel watching the live drone footage looked on in stunned disbelief, according to one officer who was there. Then a jet tracking them dropped one 2,000-pound bomb, then another, killing most of the survivors. As the smoke cleared, a few people stumbled away in search of cover. Without warning, an American F-15E attack jet streaked across the drone’s high-definition field of vision and dropped a 500-pound bomb on the crowd, swallowing it in a shuddering blast. But it saw only a large crowd of women and children huddled against a river bank. military drone circled high overhead, hunting for military targets. “I saw the whole scene,” she said.In the last days of the battle against the Islamic State in Syria, when members of the once-fierce caliphate were cornered in a dirt field next to a town called Baghuz, a U.S. Ahmadi, the driver’s daughter, staggered outside, choking, and saw the dismembered bodies of her siblings and relatives. The family’s SUV, parked next to the Corolla in the tight confines of the courtyard, was set on fire, while smoke filled the house. Ahmadi and several of the children were killed inside his car others were fatally wounded in rooms alongside the courtyard. military said Saturday that it had killed the planner of that bombing in a different drone strike on Friday night.įamily members who witnessed the explosion said that Mr. With the Biden administration coming under withering criticism for its planning and execution of the evacuation of tens of thousands of American citizens and Afghans, the pressure to avoid a second attack was intense. The attack on Sunday was carried out in a tense atmosphere, following the suicide bombing at the airport that killed at least 170 civilians and 13 U.S. ![]() And as the last planes departed, taking the last American troops with them, the American military presence in Afghanistan vanished after 20 harrowing years. The giant American airlift that carried tens of thousands of Afghans to safety came to an end on Monday, the Pentagon announced, but left tens of thousands more behind.
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