They Were Jealous of Our Freedoms

A spate of deadly bombings in recent months by the U.S. against marketplaces, schools, and mosques in Syria and Iraq have raised alarms about the type of intelligence the U.S. is using to carry out airstrikes, as well as the criteria being used to determine whether civilians are present at the targeted sites.

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The attacks documented in the report include a March 20 airstrike that targeted a school housing displaced people in the suburban town of Mansourah, outside of Tabqa, as well as another strike that hit a packed marketplace in Tabqa City two days later. Investigators from Human Rights Watch visited the sites of both attacks this July and collected the names of at least 84 civilians who had died in the bombings, including 30 children. While witnesses who spoke to investigators acknowledged that ISIS members, along with their families, had been around the areas of the bombings, they also said many civilians were nearby who had no connection to the group.

In the case of the March 22 marketplace bombing, huge numbers of people who had been lining up to buy bread at a local bakery were killed by an airstrike in an attack that may have been targeting a few ISIS members sitting in a nearby internet cafe. While the U.S.-led coalition has acknowledged carrying out the March 20 attack against the school, which it claimed had targeted a suspected weapons storage facility, it has said that it is still assessing the circumstances surrounding the marketplace bombing.

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HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH’S estimate for the strikes’ death toll — based on named victims — is likely a conservative number, Solvang said, since many of those killed in the school strike were internally displaced refugees from surrounding areas whose identities were not necessarily known to locals. In response to questions from Human Rights Watch, the U.S. military stated that it had “determined prior to the Mansourah attack” — on the school — “that there was no civilian activity at the site,” but it was still assessing the Tabqa City incident.

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The bombing took place in broad daylight, at 5 p.m., in a crowded marketplace as large numbers of people were queuing to buy bread from a local bakery. The lines of people should have been clearly visible to coalition forces conducting aerial surveillance before the attack was carried out.

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According to local residents, the Mansourah school had long hosted displaced civilians fleeing other parts of Syria, and civilians had used the Tabqa market throughout the years-long war. Any person with local knowledge would likely have been able to identify the substantial risk that the two sites contained significant numbers of civilians.

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This March, the U.S. bombed a mosque in the northern Syrian town of al-Jinah, an attack that locals said killed dozens of civilians who had gathered for a religious service. Interviews conducted by The Intercept with survivors indicated that large numbers of innocent people were killed in that attack. The military has said that its investigation into the incident will not be reopened.

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In a Time interview earlier this month, Lt. Gen. Stephen Townsend, the top U.S. military officer during much of the coalition effort against ISIS, praised the Trump administration for having “freed us up a bit to prosecute the war in a more aggressive manner.”

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Townsend insisted that the war was being waged proportionately, adding that responsibility for any civilian deaths lay solely with ISIS.

  The Intercept

He has no trouble sleeping at night.

“We must maintain the initiative and we must liberate the people of Iraq and Syria from this real and mortal danger.”

Liberate them from mortal danger by mortal liberation.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.