The US Army invoked “self-defense” to justify a 2019 air strike in Syria that left civilians dead after the New York Times published an investigation accusing the Pentagon of trying to cover up the killing of noncombatants.
According to the report published on Saturday, an American special force operating in Syria, often in complete secrecy, bombed on three occasions, on March 18, 2019, a group of civilians near Baghouz, the last stronghold of the Islamic State group ( EI) in the region, killing 70 people, which included women and children.
The newspaper claims that a military prosecutor “classified the attack as a possible war crime” but “the army took measures that covered up the catastrophic attack.”
The US Armed Forces Central Command indicated in a statement on Sunday (14) that a military investigation had determined that they were “self-defense attacks”, “proportional” and that “appropriate measures were taken to exclude the presence of civilians”.
The Pentagon investigation indicates that, in addition to 16 IS fighters, at least four civilians died in the attack and another eight were injured.
The military investigation did not allow “to determine with certainty the status [ndr: combatente ou não] of more than 60 other victims” of these bombings, according to the statement.
Some women and some children, “whether by indoctrination or by choice, decided to take up arms […] and, therefore, they could not be strictly identified as civilians”, concluded the Joint Command.
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