08/08/16 – Chris Woods – The Scott Horton Show

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Alright, Chris Woods.
He is the author of the book, Sudden Justice, about the drone wars.
Sudden Justice, America's Secret Drone Wars.
It's called, available at Amazon for you there.
And he used to be with the Bureau for Investigative Journalism, and did quite a bit of work there, especially on, I guess starting out on the Pakistan drone war, and then really has been keeping track of the numbers of killed in all the drone wars, and, well, and otherwise, I guess, Navy and Air Force fighters and bombers now, in the war with the Islamic State.
And now he's at airwars.org, and especially keeping track of the war with the Islamic State.
Now, it's the second anniversary today, huh?
August 8th.
Oh, it's also the anniversary of the Georgian invasion of South Ossetia.
Anyway, it's the anniversary of a lot of things.
Welcome back to the show, Chris.
How are you doing?
Thanks for having me on, Scott.
Yeah, busy times.
As you say, second anniversary today of the coalition war with the so-called Islamic State.
Now, they've just gone to rescue some Yazidis from a mountaintop.
Yeah, I read it at Reason Magazine.
This is a perfectly legitimate reason to start a war.
It'll be over by the end of the weekend.
Yeah, it's turned into a long and tough war.
According to the numbers we've had from the coalition, more than 14,000 airstrikes now, 52,000 bombs and missiles dropped on so-called Islamic State.
I mean, the picture has changed a lot in the last year.
You know, the first year was really holding Islamic State.
The battle lines really didn't move that much.
But this second year, we've seen a lot of change.
So Islamic State has been thrown out of a lot of Iraqi cities and towns.
It's been pushed out of places in Syria as well.
Much more on the defensive these days.
And in fact, we think airstrikes are up 40% in year two versus that first year.
But what's really got us worried is the rise in civilian deaths over the same period.
We've seen a much, much steeper rise in likely civilian deaths, a 92% jump on the first year.
And we are now tracking, we think, around 1,500 civilians killed by the coalition since their actions began.
The coalition itself admits to just 55 deaths.
So an enormous difference between what we're seeing on the battlefield and what they claim to be happening.
Well, and now so let's talk a little bit about the methodology there.
You know, I know that the military actually publishes quite a bit of their own statistics, at least about what strikes take place, if not the results of them.
But when they're counting up 55 and you're counting up 1,500, obviously you're counting from different source materials.
So what's the discrepancy there?
I mean, other than them just lying, which is something else.
Well, I mean, part of the discrepancy is their whole counting process.
I was invited to CENTCOM headquarters in Tampa a few months back and had a very detailed briefing there.
And during that, they admitted to me that they hadn't even assessed 60% of the civilian casualty allegations on the table.
So at that point, we were tracking, I think, 430 cases and they'd only looked at 160 of them.
So they just hadn't even assessed the majority of civilian casualty allegations.
We hope they're trying to address that now.
But also the way that the coalition assesses these events is pretty surface, really.
They tend to dismiss the allegations very, very quickly.
They don't consider external evidence.
They don't conduct interviews.
They don't do follow up on the ground.
That's more understandable.
This is a hot war.
And, you know, they weren't using organizations like ours to cross-reference.
I mean, we run an enormous public database of every single known allegation against the coalition and against Russia.
We track Russian strikes as well.
They weren't using us.
So I think it's a sort of they choose to look in a particular direction.
And what they see is what they assess.
But where they're looking is very, very narrow indeed.
But, you know, where we're looking on the battlefield, we're seeing a very different picture.
And, by the way, we estimate a minimum 1,500 civilians killed by the coalition.
There have been more than 4,000 civilians alleged killed overall.
So our numbers could be very conservative.
It's not entirely clear.
Yeah.
Well, and sounds like, yeah, the truth must be somewhere in between those two numbers, the higher two there.
I'm actually I hate to I don't want to use the word impressed or whatever.
You know, I have to say at least somewhat pleasantly surprised something.
And I don't know the right words for it.
But, man, a two-year air war, you could have a lot worse deaths than this.
I mean, in Iraq, where, too, there was airstrikes going on all the time and people just getting obliterated by the thousands.
So, you know, especially these guys are, you know, they're only sort of kind of an army.
Right.
I mean, if they have fixed positions somewhere, you can bomb those.
But a lot of times the Islamic State targets are, you know, completely immersed within civilian populations.
No.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And that's that's becoming a much bigger problem.
So I'm not trying to give the Air Force too much credit here, but still, if you told me it was 15,000, I wouldn't have, you know, raised an eyebrow.
You know, they're taking a lot of care.
They're taking way more care than Russia and the Assad regime and the Iraq government were also carrying out airstrikes.
But in our view, they're not taking enough care.
And the problem is getting worse.
So the last month, July, we saw that the highest number by far of reported civilian casualties from the coalition.
Most of that was focused on a very brutal assault on a town called Manbij in northern Syria.
Lots in the news about the siege of Aleppo being carried out by Assad and Russia.
Very little about a siege being carried out by the Americans and their allies on a nearby town.
And hundreds of civilians, we think, have been killed by the coalition in that campaign.
And that worries us because, you know, as we move into year three, the war is going to increasingly shift to the big cities and towns still occupied by Islamic State.
Up to two million civilians still inside Mosul, for example.
When they come to make that move on Mosul, the U.N. is already warning of a potential humanitarian catastrophe.
You know, we are very alarmed at the civilian casualty numbers the coalition is now generating in campaigns like Manbij when they're going in hard on the towns because civilians are dying in big numbers.
And that has to change.
Now, listen, reports out of the Battle of Ramadi say that basically they just erased the city off the face of the earth.
Man, there's nothing left.
And I guess presumably most of the civilians fled before the place was completely annihilated.
But can you tell us, you know, how many civilians died in that?
Do you know or, you know, some kind of ballpark?
And then secondly, was it the U.S. Air Force that completely flattened the city or was it the Iraqis or who did that?
So, yeah.
It sounds like it was carpet bombing, right?
Like they just completely just bombed.
Not carpet bombing, no.
But it got trashed by everybody.
Most of the civilian population did flee before the main assault, although the best estimate I've seen, which came out of Associated Press, was that around 600 civilians died in the campaign to liberate Ramadi.
Not just in airstrikes.
That's killed by Islamic State, killed by the Iraq military and by the militias, and killed by the coalition.
We don't know quite how those numbers break down.
But most of the civilians, I'm told, got out of Ramadi.
Unfortunately, Islamic State learned from that.
And what they're doing now, and we're seeing this in Hawija in Iraq, we're seeing it in Manbij, is Islamic State is trapping civilians in the towns and using them as human shields.
And that is leading to much worse civilian casualties.
We know, because it's been reported from multiple sources, that they are gunning down civilians if they try to escape.
They're booby-trapping roads and places for possible exit.
There's a terrible story just last week out of Syria, where a coalition airstrike, which had probably caused civilian casualties, created a great deal of dust and smoke.
And some civilians in the town tried to use that as cover to break out of the town.
Not to rescue the dead and injured, but actually to use it to try and escape.
And unfortunately, they were fired on by Islamic State.
So this war now is moving into a new phase, a much grittier, nastier phase.
And the risk to civilians, in our view, is getting much, much worse.
And that concerns us deeply.
Yeah, I know we talked with Mark Perry on the show last week about the plan.
It's supposed to be for October.
They're not exactly sure, but they want to attack Mosul in eastern Islamic State and Raqqa in western Islamic State at the same time.
And those are the last two major cities there, right?
But that really raises a question of where those civilians are supposed to go if they even have a chance to flee.
Well, that's exactly the point being raised by the UN, which is on a big fundraising campaign at the moment.
It's asking for hundreds of millions of dollars to just prepare for the civilians.
Story out just today, the villages and towns around Mosul, which is being, you know, the noose is really tightening there now.
Twenty eight thousand internally displaced Iraqis in just one camp at the moment.
Three thousand came in just over the weekend.
Large numbers of very vulnerable women, children and men coming in from these emptying towns and villages.
And unfortunately, what we saw in Anbar with that big assault over the summer is almost no provision was made for these people.
People out in the desert with no cover, no food, no water, very, very vulnerable civilian populations.
And, you know, the size of the civilian population in Mosul, to stress again, we're talking at least one and a half million Iraqis trapped in that city.
So if the if the coalition goes in, you know, gung ho, a lot of civilians are going to die.
They have to take a careful look at how they're going to manage this campaign.
I don't know what the answer is, but the answer can't be to go and bomb the heck out of Mosul.
Just there are just too many civilians there for that to happen.
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It was the last time or one of these times I interviewed you.
We focused or you at least in your answers had focused a little bit more on people dying at the hands of Russian airstrikes as the results of Russian airstrikes.
And I got a lot of negative reaction to that.
Of course, there's so much anti-Russia propaganda is, you know, a little bit out of control.
And I guess people took that to mean, you know, if you say anything about what the Russians are doing, that's negative.
Then you're part of the narrative against Russia or whatever.
And I just wanted to point out how that's so clearly not the case and how you, you know, are trying to take and as objective.
I mean, you're subjectively against killing people.
But other than that, you're trying to be, you know, a real reporter about how you count these things up.
And, you know, I have no idea exactly maybe what biases for or against the Russians you may have.
But they don't seem to have any effect on your work as far as I can tell whether, you know, what you say, you know, coincides with what some of Russia's accusers false and otherwise say, you know, at the same time.
And I do understand, Chris, and maybe you could address.
Let me let me say one more thing about let me say one more thing about that for you to address to that.
You know, if it's 2002 or 2003, you could be a good human rights advocate, but you'd be doing a disservice to the people of Iraq.
If you were making a big deal about Saddam Hussein's human rights abuses right when Bush is using that line to lie us into war to make their lives that much worse.
So, you know, the HRW and Amnesty International sometimes are the worst warmongers in the name of stopping human rights abuses.
So there is something to the perspective of people being suspicious when they hear, you know, these kinds of reports about countries who are official adversaries of our government here in the US.
Yeah, I mean, I get that.
And it's one of the reasons why, you know, we use identical methodologies to track the coalition and the Russian strikes, identical modeling, you know, looking looking in detail at both.
And we are not influenced by what either of those countries or those those those those power blocks want us to say, you know, and, you know, the kind of tracking we use it, it can be quite rough and ready.
You know, we track the allegations, but it's interesting when Russia when the ceasefire kicked in in Syria way back in February feels like a long time ago.
Now, Russia had a partial drawdown of its of its aircraft.
We saw an immediate 75 percent drop in allegations of civilians killed by Russia, and that's sustained for three months.
And we were very public about that.
We printed those those those those comparative tables month on month.
We've we've gone out and we said, look, the numbers are consistently down for Russia.
They're still bad, by the way, but way down on where they were.
Unfortunately, those numbers began tracking up again very heavily.
June, July, as the campaign, the siege of Aleppo intensified.
So we're led by our findings, not by our expectations.
And that's the difference.
You know, we're we're investigative journalists and professional researchers trying to look at this critically and fairly and to understand from the perspective of civilians on the battlefield who's killing them.
And, you know, we're not we're not we haven't we haven't taken sides here.
But we do think those civilians in Iraq, in Syria deserve a voice.
And they very rarely get a voice.
You know, we've got the coalition claiming at the moment it kills one civilian in every 260 airstrikes.
We think they kill one in every nine airstrikes, if not worse.
So, you know, there's a huge difference between what we think and what the coalition thinks.
And, of course, if the coalition is getting it as wrong as we think they are, that has very bad implications for civilians on the battlefield, because the coalition Russia, they're effectively they're effectively blind to the presence of civilians.
And kill large number of the numbers of them as a result.
Yeah.
Well, you know, one of the first things I thought when I saw this this yesterday, a couple days ago, when I got this email from you was the number 14,500.
Wait, wasn't the CIA official estimate that there were about 30,000 fighters?
And so are we trying to kill these guys one at a time?
Each IS fighter gets a 500 pound bomb until we're done with this thing.
And in how many years?
And, you know, of course, I know they have conscription.
And I know that Patrick Coburn and others estimated that at one time at least they may have had as many as 100,000 fighters.
But it just seems strange to me that they're saying, yeah, here we are.
It's been two years.
We've dropped 14,000 bombs on al-Qaeda in Iraq.
Grown up, basically, is all we're talking about still here.
And, you know, yeah, I mean, I guess you could, as you did, you could cite the quote unquote progress in Tikrit, Fallujah, Ramadi.
But on the other hand, they do still hold these cities in Raqqa and Mosul.
And, you know, just doesn't seem like very much progress for the amount of, you know, obviously the total number of people killed when you're talking about 14,000 airstrikes.
Yeah.
It's a heck of a lot of munitions.
14,000 airstrikes, 52,000 bombs and missiles.
That is an awful lot of firepower.
It's a complicated war, as you know.
I mean, there's not a conventional enemy, as you've already said, mostly in civilian areas.
Raqqa, you know, very heavily populated Syrian city.
Mosul, as we've already talked about, you know, even if there were conventional American ground forces in Iraq, in Syria, what would they do?
You know, how would they capture these cities?
Very, very difficult.
You know, it's attrition.
It's siege.
This is this.
These are forms of war that we haven't really fought since Vietnam.
I mean, and I'm trying to think, even in Vietnam, were there sieges that the U.S. fought?
I mean, we maybe have to go back to Korea since the U.S. has fought this kind of war.
It's also having to rely on proxies on the ground, and those proxies are challenging at times.
You know, in Syria right now, we've got the U.S.'s favorite proxies at the moment, and it does change.
The favorite proxies right now are the Kurds, who they call bizarrely the Syrian-Arabic coalition.
They're neither Syrian nor Arabs, actually.
They're mostly Iraqi Kurds, but those proxies are fighting for control of mainly Arab villages.
This is getting quite messy.
You know, in Iraq, we've got the Iraq Army, which is much better now than it was when it was routed two years ago, one year ago, but still supported by, you know, these really heavy Shia militia, you know, some of whom are a little better than death squads.
So it's not a clean war.
It's not an easy war, and, you know, air only can only deliver so much.
You know, what just broke the siege of Aleppo was not air power.
It was boots on the ground, you know.
On that occasion, Syrian rebels who came in from both sides, air power had almost no effect in the breaking of the siege of Aleppo.
Despite, you know, a superpower being lined up against those rebels, they did it.
They broke apart a sad siege.
So air power has its limits in Iraq and Syria, as we're finding out.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, when you talk about the different Kurdish militias and the Shiite militias fighting this, the Peshmerga units and the YPG and the Asaib al-Alhaq and Bata Brigade and whoever, all these guys, real questions when, you know, I think still remain open about, I don't know, maybe there's already a bit of an answer about Tikrit, that they kind of let those people come home.
I still think it's a pretty open question as to whether they let the people of Fallujah come home or whether they're going to expand the borders of Shiastan another 40, 50 miles to the west now.
And then same goes for, you know, Ramadi and Fallujah.
I mean, I guess the Iraqi Kurds would probably be crazy to try to keep Mosul for their own.
But I don't know if they kick the entire civilian population out and they have an alliance with the Shiite militias to occupy the place and keep the Sunnis from coming home.
I don't think we're looking at that, really.
I mean, I hear these stories, but let's remember that the Sunni are one third of the population of Iraq.
That's a huge, huge number of people.
I think they're more like a fifth.
Maybe my own thought was it was around a third, but a significant number of people.
And I don't think there's any interest from the Shia to occupy what we used to call the Sunni triangle.
Mosul is a really contentious case, as you know, because it's a three-way split between the Shia, the Sunni and the Kurds.
And as part of that sort of great Kurdish nation-building effort, their attempt to build Kurdistan, they've always had their eyes on Mosul.
But I think one of the things the coalition and the Iraq government have been really careful about is bringing up Iraqi forces from the south.
And also, by the way, Turkey involved in the siege of Mosul.
We keep hearing that the Turks have troops involved in the siege of Mosul.
There's nothing being said about this.
But Turkey, quite deep inside Mosul, we're told, involved in that particular siege.
So it's like the most complicated version of 3-D chess you can imagine.
Well, and that's really why the Islamic State hasn't been destroyed yet, right?
Because everybody who's against them is also against each other, too.
Even Hezbollah and Assad don't see exactly eye to eye on everything.
Yeah, it is complicated.
And that 3-D game of chess, of course, is just for Iraq.
The moment you move over to Syria, it's a completely – and not only is it a 3-D game in Syria, but everyone's playing a different game with different rules.
I mean, who knows?
Is it a five-way war in Syria at the moment, a six-way war?
It's hard to tell.
Now, is it really true the numbers – I mean, obviously, in Iraq War II, the Americans always had an interest in playing down the numbers.
And in the Syria war, of course, they were always trying to demonize Assad and have an interest in playing up the numbers, and, of course, even including blaming all casualties in the war on Assad, no matter if they're counting his own soldiers that died in the thing or not, whatever it is.
So I wonder if you agree with the overall kind of numbers that they say that the Syrian civil war has been as violent as the Iraq war, Iraq War II, when they say millions of refugees and hundreds of thousands, 250,000 people killed or more, some numbers higher than that overall.
What do you think of that?
I would say that the situation in Syria is worse than anything we ever saw in Iraq because big chunks of Iraq did stay peaceful.
I mean, much of Syria is just gone.
Millions and millions and millions of people displaced, hundreds of thousands dead, entire generations traumatized.
That sounds a lot like Iraq.
I mean, there were hundreds of thousands killed in that, for sure, especially in the battle for Baghdad.
I covered Iraq a lot, every year, 2003 through 2009, and you just didn't get that.
Where the destruction was, was very partial and very limited, except for Fallujah.
Fallujah was the big standout.
But really, you just didn't see these cities, partly because you have to remember that the Saddam regime, whatever we think of that war, the Saddam regime collapsed very, very quickly.
So most towns and cities gave up in Iraq without a fight, and that meant you just didn't get this wholesale destruction.
And then when the insurgency kicked in in 2004, it wasn't this kind of civil war scenario.
So the destruction in parts of Syria is absolute.
The impact on the country and its infrastructures is catastrophic.
Iraq was never dismantled and destroyed in that way, ever.
It seems like air power really is what makes the difference, too, right?
I mean, in Iraq War II, like, say, in 2007, you'd have every morning hundreds of bodies, you know, stacked like cordwood on the side of the road, but they were, you know, stabbed or shot or, you know, exploded in the middle of the night in very local-level fighting, as opposed to huge air campaigns like we've seen in Syria, where the buildings get destroyed and they don't get rebuilt.
Yeah, I think that's a great point.
The other thing is civic society kept going in Iraq during the occupation, and during the civil war.
But, you know, big parts of Syria, no infrastructure.
There was some, for those who are interested, IRIN, if you Google IRIN, Syria Civilian Casualties, they did some really interesting modeling showing how air power in Syria, by all parties, coalition, Russia, Assad, has become the most lethal form of death for civilians.
But it wasn't always that way, actually.
In the early stages of the civil war, air power was not killing that many people.
But, of course, the tactics have just changed over time.
You know, Assad, for example, using these appalling barrel bombs on a daily basis on civilian neighborhoods.
But, as you say, Scott, using enormous bombs to flatten entire neighborhoods.
Russia last night, or Syria, we're still not sure which, using incendiaries on a built-up area in Idlib, probably as retaliation for what was going on in Aleppo.
The kind of callousness of those involved in the air campaign has got worse, and the destruction has become, you know, total in some areas.
Thanks very much for your time again.
Appreciate it.
Great having you.
All right, Sheldon, that is Chris Woods.
He's at airwars.org.
And it's the second anniversary of the start of the American and coalition war against the Islamic State.
And you can read all about it there.
They've got a brand new report out with all the statistics for you to read and weep about.
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