Dutch attack on IS bomb factory Hawija one of the bloodiest of the coalition

Last weekend, the United States Department of Defense hundreds of documents made public about attacks on targets of the terrorist organization IS that resulted in civilian deaths. That happened at the order of the judge after legal proceedings by the American newspaper The New York Times.

The 5,400 pages of documents shed light on the factors that led to civilian casualties. This concerns a shortage of resources such as drones to properly map the environment, technical failure of weapons used, inattention and secrecy on the part of the military, so that mistakes cannot be learned. ISIS’ tactics of staying close to civilian centers also play an important role.

The attacks, from September 2014 to January 2018, killed more than 1,000 civilians and have been confirmed by the United States. Incidentally, NGOs such as Airwars and Amnesty assume a multiple of this. For their investigation, NYT reporters visited about 100 locations in Iraq and Syria to map the impact of the airstrikes.

The overview shows that the Dutch airstrike on an IS bomb factory in Hawija, northern Iraq, which resulted in at least 70 confirmed civilian deaths, was one of the coalition’s bloodiest attacks. An attack during the recapture of Mosul in March 2017 killed more civilians, according to the US: 105. Then many women and children were killed in an attack on a building where two IS fighters had been holed up. The building collapsed. The NYT added an attack in July 2016 on the Syrian village of Tokhar near Aleppo (120 dead).

Secondary Explosions

The coalition had difficulty with attacks on weapons depots such as in Hawija in June 2015, according to the NYT, which pays the necessary attention to this. According to the newspaper, a third of the confirmed civilian deaths were attributable to attacks on such targets. This was because the military had difficulty assessing the consequences of ‘secondary explosions’. When attacking a bomb depot, the weapons stock almost always explodes, causing a huge shock wave. As a result, some 400 buildings in Hawija were destroyed or damaged. Afterwards, the US high command changed the procedure for these types of targets, NRC and NOS reported in April 2020 on the basis of internal Pentagon documents.

The documents shed light on the factors that led to civilian casualties

Because the coalition regularly struggled with a lack of drones, soldiers could be faced with unnecessary surprises during attacks, the NYT says. The fact that civilians suddenly come into the picture during an attack is not necessarily a coincidence, as the military often argue. If the area is mapped more thoroughly and for a longer period of time, these kinds of risks can be better calculated, according to the newspaper. Civilians were also killed when a US commander saved precision bombs for a more risky attack.