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Wall is the improvement of investment climates by other means, Klausowitz for dummies.
The Scott Horton Show.
Taking out Saddam Hussein turned out to be a pretty good deal.
They hate our freedoms.
We're dealing with Hitler revisited.
We couldn't wait for that Cold War to be over, could we?
So we can go and play with our toys in the sand, go and play with our toys in the sand.
No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.
Today, I authorize the armed forces of the United States to begin military action in Libya.
That action has now begun.
When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.
I cannot be silent in the face of the greatest purveyor of arms in the world today, my own government.
All right, you guys, on the line, I've got the great Chris Woods, formerly with the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, and now he runs Air Wars.
And he's got the great Sam Oakford and others there with him as well.
Welcome back to the show, how you doing, Chris?
Thanks for having me on.
Yeah, good, thanks.
Very busy here in a fairly grim way of counting bodies, but yeah, things are good here at Air Wars.
Yeah, well, so that is the thing.
You guys count the individual reported strikes and deaths, civilian and otherwise, the casualties here in which all of the wars now?
I know Iraq and Syria at this point, but- Yeah, Iraq and Syria, and also Libya now.
We're expanding at the moment to keep an eye on what's going on in Libya.
As you might have seen, the first airstrikes of the Trump presidency in Libya over the last week or so.
And we've been concerned for a while about things going on there, not just international strikes actually, but domestic airstrikes as well, big problem for civilians.
So working with a couple of American organizations to build up a knowledge of Libya and help us understand better what's going on there.
So yeah, three wars that we're covering at the moment and that's enough to keep us occupied.
Right, and there's been just a little bit of activity in Pakistan, at least a couple of drone strikes this year under Trump, right?
At least one.
There have, yeah, but Pakistan really has fallen away now.
And two reasons for that.
One is Al-Qaeda was effectively destroyed.
The old Al-Qaeda Central, it ceased to exist.
And so, you know, that was the primary driver for a number of years for those CIA strikes in Pakistan.
The war really shifted in Obama's time to one against the Taliban.
And that was really to do with the fighting across the border in Afghanistan.
The reason, one reason there are so few drone strikes within Pakistan anymore is that most of those Taliban are now openly operating within Afghanistan.
They have no need to hide in the tribal areas anymore.
And it's a sign of really how big a problem the insurgency is within Afghanistan now.
And it was interesting, all of the rhetoric from President Trump recently about Pakistan is not translating into more drone strikes.
There's, you know, simply put, there's not much for them to strike there.
Yeah, well, I guess that's the good news, relatively speaking.
All right, now, I guess we gotta talk about, well, first of all, before we get into the war against the Islamic State, let me ask you about the under-reporting problem.
This is always kind of the back of my mind whenever I talk with you.
And I forget if we've discussed this specifically before, but there have been accusations that have nothing to do with you or any of your work, but against similar sort of work done by a group called Iraq Body Count, who did such a great job, really, of keeping track as best they could of every reported death and firefight and casualty and whatever that they possibly could during Iraq War II.
But then, of course, their numbers came up very limited because there was no way to keep track of really all the violence that was going on in all the different parts of the country and all the places where there were no reporters.
And so they ended up kind of being accused, I think, of underplaying or softballing, sort of, and saying, oh, yeah, no, only a few tens of thousands of people had died, when clearly hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people had died.
And I wonder if you find that that's a real problem for you, too, that the best that you can do is come up with sort of a little bit of a slice of a picture of what's going on while the rest escapes you or not.
Well, I think you put your finger on it, really.
And we've never claimed to be putting out definitive numbers for the civilians being harmed in conflict.
And, you know, there is strong statistical evidence to say that this form of casualty counting has historically underreported fatalities.
So, you know, we've always accepted that.
But the issue here is, you know, you have to think back a couple of years ago when we started out with air wars.
This was a time when the US military and America's allies were brazenly claiming that their magic bombs no longer harm civilians at all.
Right.
And, you know, they didn't admit their first civilian casualty, I think, until nine months into the war, by which point they carried out thousands of strikes and, in our view, had killed quite a number of civilians.
So...
Not very plausible deniability there, huh?
No, no.
But in fact, you have to remember until Australia last week became the first non-US ally to admit harming civilians, Australia just admitted to killing eight civilians in two strikes earlier this year, all of America's allies in the coalition were still claiming that their bombs and missiles were somehow magical and didn't harm civilians.
So Britain, France, Australia, Canada, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, are all still claiming that their bombs are perfect.
So that's the context in which air wars emerge, really.
It's like, okay, that's what the coalition is claiming or not claiming, what are Iraqis and Syrians themselves reporting?
So what does air wars do?
We monitor what Iraqis and Syrians themselves are reporting from the ground in the affected communities that are being bombed.
So it's not air wars making these allegations, it's ordinary Iraqis and Syrians.
And our researchers who are primarily Iraqis and Syrians, 99% of their sourcing is in Arabic, scour media, social media, NGOs, militant releases, military releases, and so on every day, and gather that information together and try and understand what's being reported from the ground.
So what we're trying to do is give a baseline, if you like, what have Iraqis and Syrians themselves reported?
Now, our own minimum estimate is that at least 5,500 civilians have been killed by the coalition.
And this is in the Islamic State war since summer of 2014, you're saying?
That's right, yeah.
But in fact, the top-end allegation for all of the sources that we tracked is more than 22,000 civilians killed by the coalition so far.
Much, much higher number.
We are actually quite conservative in our assessments, I would say, just in terms of gauging initial credibility and so on.
So when the coalition attacks us, as they really aggressively do these days, and says, oh, air wars numbers are just way too high.
In fact, we think they're way lower, probably, than the real number.
And there are some warning signs as well.
So for example, half of all of the events that the United States has admitted, where it's killed or injured civilians in Iraq and Syria, were never publicly reported by Iraqis and Syrians themselves.
So that's about 65, 70 incidents of those admitted directly by the US were never publicly reported.
That means that in the chaos of war, a significant number of incidents are just not getting reported out.
So that's a warning flag for us, that we're under-reporting the deaths.
I think the other thing that concerns us greatly is that until very recently, many more strikes were going into Iraq than Syria, but we were actually recording many more deaths out of Syria than Iraq.
So it was the other way around.
The reason we think for that is that the quality of casualty recording in Syria is much, much better than in Iraq.
And there are historic reasons for that to do with the revolution and the fact that these citizen monitoring groups sprang up in places like Raqqa, in Deir ez-Zor, in Aleppo, that were tracking civilians killed by everybody.
And so Syrians have been doing this for six, seven years.
They're very good at it.
There are Hollywood movies made about some of these groups.
They do a good job.
In Iraq, civic society never really flourished after the 2003 invasion.
It never really took hold.
And even when we did see citizen monitoring emerge in places like Mosul, after the so-called Islamic State occupied the city, back in 2014, unfortunately, Islamic State infiltrated those groups and murdered most of the citizen activists involved.
I mean, an absolute tragedy, actually.
So...
Well, and just overall communication out of Mosul was much tighter than coming out of Syria.
So we could be looking at a really significant under-reporting for Iraq, as well, versus Syria.
We could be missing many, many cases.
So...
I think that's very important, that that's the approach that you take.
I think, back then, the Iraq body count types, I guess I don't remember specific examples.
I think I seem to remember that their attitude was, no, you can't prove any more people died than in our thing.
Like, they weren't saying, yes, it's a conservative approach because we just wanna be absolutely bulletproof here, but yeah, it could be much worse, like you're saying.
They were more like taking the position that they were in a position to debunk those who said that casualties were greater.
That kind of deal, so...
Yeah.
I think all we can say to journalists is, look, here is every single allegation we know of.
Here's every single source.
If you don't agree with our numbers, look at, go look at it yourself, make your own assessment.
But, you know, if you want an absolute baseline, here's how many civilians we think, as a bare minimum, have died.
And I think that gives journalists, NGOs, and others something to work with, you know?
Yeah.
And many, many times, by the way, Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, Commission of Inquiry for Syria, they've used our archives, for example, as a sort of baseline to go back and do field investigations.
And many, many times, these allegations that we're tracking, they've gone in, they've substantiated on the ground.
You know, there's, you know, Iraqis and Syrians are telling us about their own personal tragedies.
And we should listen to them.
I think, you know, they have a right to be listened to.
Yeah, well, especially when the United States of America, I mean, you're a Brit, so same difference, right?
Our countries, our governments, are the ones who have done this to them.
You know, back and forth, and from sideways, and this whole time in the 21st century and before that.
So if it's any civilian, you know, regular citizen's responsibility to care about this stuff, it's your neighbor's and mine, yours and mine.
So yeah, great work.
Now, so let's talk about Mosul.
There was a huge campaign that lasted, what, three quarters of a year.
Yeah, it was a long, long battle.
To rouse the Islamic State out of Mosul.
Now, they had fled from Fallujah and Ramadi after putting up a little bit of a fight, and then they'd taken off to Mosul.
But Mosul, they decided to really make a last stand there.
And I'll tell you, I'm sure you know, Patrick Coburn has it from Kurdish intelligence sources that he seemed to think sounded about right to him, that there were as many as 40,000 killed in that attack.
And that he's saying, I mean, the city is still just full of rubble, buried bodies all over the place.
The stench of death is everywhere.
The air attacks is one thing, but also the Iraqi military's just pounding the city with artillery for nine months.
And just, there's the absolute massacre of massacres.
So I wonder, you know, what all light you can shed on that, whether those numbers sound right to you.
I know, again, your approach is a bit different than that.
But tell us what you know about the Battle of Mosul here.
Well, the question of how many died, well, first of all, I think we can agree that thousands of civilians died at Mosul.
It was a 10-month battle, a ferocious battle, months longer than the Battle of Stalingrad, you know, to put this into some sort of historical context.
But having said that, you know, proportionally far fewer died than, you know, those big historic city battles of the Second World War.
One reason for that is the vast majority of people from Mosul were able to escape.
You know, 1.8 million people fled the city, I think, in the end, to camps around.
So most people got out alive.
They didn't manage to escape with much else, but they got out alive, and that was a result, I think.
And I think it was one of the reasons the battle lasted so long, is that they took the time to get people out.
They didn't just level the city, at least until the end.
The problem was that an awful lot of civilians were still there, and were trapped there, being held against their will by a so-called Islamic State, and being used as involuntary human shields, as they like to say, and also the firepower got heavier and heavier, and particularly as the battle moved to the old city.
So for the coalition only, as many as 8,000 fatalities have been alleged from coalition air and artillery strikes at Mosul.
That's what Iraqis themselves reported out.
As you say, Patrick Coburn has published this one article claiming that the toll was as high as 40,000.
That's not a tally that's really been repeated widely elsewhere, and talking to civil defense in the city, and many media have, and they're the people pulling the bodies out, the toll, they seem, you know, numbers vary.
But anywhere from eight to 20,000 is the number that is doing the rounds in Mosul at present.
Why is it so difficult to pin down the number more precisely?
Well, it's because it's pretty much a state secret in Iraq.
The Iraqi government does not want to give numbers, partly because they played such a big hand in those high casualties, and the coalition just defers to the Iraqis and is not supporting calls by Amnesty, by Human Rights Watch for an independent investigation into how many died at Mosul and what went wrong, and something clearly went wrong.
70% of the old city was destroyed.
In fact, there was a report just a couple of days ago saying the governor of Nineveh province, so the overall province where Mosul is, has actually asked the UN if the entire historic center of Mosul can be bulldozed, and they start again, which the people of Mosul are in uproar about because they want to hang on to the few structures that they have left there and rebuild the old city as it used to look.
So the number who died at Mosul is a very political issue, and as I say, there's no real clarity.
High-end estimate, 40,000.
Low-end estimate that I've seen, 8,000.
That would seem to be the bare minimum.
The coalition has admitted, I think, 300 fatalities, and I've not seen numbers for the number of civilians that Iraqi forces say that they killed.
So again, we're seeing this huge difference between what's being reported out publicly by those communities affected and what's being owned by the militaries involved in these operations.
Well, one thing that really bothers me there is what you said in present tense about pulling the bodies out.
I mean, the battle's been over for a couple of months, but that's the level of destruction that they're still working on this.
They're not anywhere near done, or do you know how near done?
No, and many of the bodies may simply never be recovered.
A lot of the sites have just been leveled by bulldozers.
The corpses just left underneath the ruins permanently.
It's possible that those bodies will never be recovered.
The destruction was so total.
That's proving a major trauma for families.
And, you know, entire neighborhoods were destroyed.
The destruction was really quite shocking at the end.
It was actually quite a small area, a concentrated area, and, you know, so many bombs, missiles, rockets, artillery shells were going in.
And then, of course, there'd been reports that the order was put out to kill those remaining.
That's been contested by the Iraqis, but, you know, some pretty atrocious videos emerged quite shortly after the final fall of ISIS, showing civilians and suspected ISIS fighters being murdered.
So a grisly end to a very long and tough battle, and I suspect that number of civilians killed will be an open wound between Sunni and Shia populations in Iraq for generations.
All right, hang on just one second.
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Yeah, all right, now, so let's move the story a little bit further to the West now.
In the war for Raqqa, you have incredible coverage.
Again, here, everybody, Airwars.org, where you guys cover every bit of what you can find out.
And you say here that the bombing of Raqqa is far outpacing the war in Afghanistan right now, even.
Yeah, well, we got some numbers out of the coalition about how many munitions they dropped on Raqqa for August, which is the last month we got from them.
Just under 6,000 bombs, missiles, rockets, artillery shells went into Raqqa in August.
When we checked, that was 10 times more munitions than were fired by all U.S. aircraft across all of Afghanistan for the same month.
And that was at a five-year high for Afghanistan.
Right.
The numbers are just crazy, and the destruction at Raqqa is just staggering.
I'm looking at an aerial view on your website right now.
I can't believe it.
Well, I can, but I haven't seen this.
Yeah, I think the BBC got hold of those satellite images.
And the first of the two images that the BBC ran was only taken in mid-June.
So the destruction is basically entirely down to the assault, which began June 6th.
A city has been destroyed.
Certainly, all local monitors are in agreement that more than 1,000 civilians have died in coalition air and artillery strikes on Raqqa.
The coalition has admitted to just five deaths so far and two injured civilians.
So, you know, that is such a vast gulf between their understanding and everybody else's.
And this time, it's not just, you know, the monitors reporting this and local civilians.
It's also the U.N.
It's Amnesty.
It's Human Rights Watch.
It's U.N.
Commission of Inquiry.
Medicines on Frontier is concerned about it.
UNICEF.
I mean, everybody on the ground is coming back with the same message.
You know, this assault is having a devastating effect on civilians.
And there was a call by the U.N. for the assault to be paused a few weeks ago to give civilians a chance to escape.
And the coalition refused and said if they paused, it would simply mean that ISIS would dig in even further and even more civilians would die in the long run.
So, really a devastating assault on Raqqa.
You can see the images yourself.
BBC just put out a number of extraordinary reports from the city showing, you know, it's just gone.
And it's gone in just a few months.
It's, you know, most of Raqqa is gone.
And then, but so the Islamic State is still there and no opposing force has moved in yet, right?
Well, yeah, the SDF, the Syrian Democratic Forces, which is primarily Kurdish, but with, you know, with other Syrian units as well, they are in there and they are fighting street to street.
As far as we can tell, they've captured about 70% of the city so far.
Oh, okay.
I didn't realize they had gone that far.
Man, I'm so far behind on this stuff right now.
Yeah, so they have about 70% of the city.
According to the coalition itself, in the small area that ISIS still controls, there are still 20,000 trapped civilians.
And that's where the real horror story begins because they're living in basements.
There's no food.
There's no water.
There's no medicine.
If they try and escape, ISIS shoots them down.
And, you know, the dead are being left where they fall.
It is appalling.
The number of reported fatalities out of Raqqa has fallen quite significantly in September against August.
August was just the worst we'd ever seen.
Raqqa, you know, I think almost 500 civilians by our count probably died in Raqqa just in August from coalition actions.
That seems to have dropped quite considerably, and we think the munitions numbers are probably coming down.
But that's probably more a sign of the fact that they've captured, you know, a big chunk of the city now, and there's just less need for that intensity.
Yeah.
Well, all right, so now what about the war against ISIS's break-off group al-Nusra?
I think people often think that ISIS is the break-off from al-Nusra, but really, Nusra is the break-off.
They're still loyal to al-Qaeda, but ISIS came first.
It was just the Islamic State of Iraq.
So, anyway, their break-off group, the al-Nusra Front, they change their name all the time to try to confuse me, but it doesn't work.
And they're over there in control of much of Idlib province and the Syrian government, which is the direct, it's funny, you know, it's kind of ironic.
America backs the Kurds and the Iraqi Shia forces in Iraq against the Islamic State.
But in Syria, we back only the Kurds, and the Shiite forces are the evil terrorist enemy and just as bad or worse, the Alawite government, supposedly, as the terrorists that they're fighting against.
But anyway, they and the Russians and the Iranians and Hezbollah and Hazaras, who America backs in Afghanistan, are also fighting with the Iranians and the Syrian army there against these guys.
And so, I know you keep track of the Russian bombing campaigns and the Syrian government bombing campaigns in the west of Syria as well.
So, can you please fill us in?
Yeah, well, things are moving very quickly, actually.
I mean, a few things.
First of all, interestingly for us, the unilateral US war against Al-Qaeda in Syria seems to be, at the very least, paused at the moment.
That's an interesting development under Trump.
We were seeing a really heavy bout of strikes in the tail end, at the tail end of the Obama administration.
And that's pretty much stopped.
Now, we don't know why that is.
It may be simply- That's interesting, you're saying at the same time he's ordered the CIA to stop backing all of their allies and ultimately them anyway, Ahrar al-Sham and all of their pals, that he's also ordered an end to strikes against them, whereas Obama was backing them and bombing them.
And Trump has called an end to both, is that right?
Well, we're not sure.
Clearly, Russia and the regime on the one side, the coalition, the Kurds on the other, have divided up the map in terms of how to take down so-called Islamic State.
I think all of the coalition focus is now on destroying what's left of ISIS.
As well as Raqqa going on at the moment, there's a major Russian-backed regime offensive on Deir ez-Zor city.
And the regime is coming in from the west to the east and they're pausing at the Euphrates, which runs diagonally down Syria at that point.
And the SDF backed by the coalition is coming in from the other direction and crushing ISIS between them.
We've not seen that sort of joined up tactic before.
There is some friction, definitely.
SDF has shelled regime forces.
Russia bombed some SDF forces the other week.
But nevertheless, there's a pincer movement involving coalition-backed forces and Russian-backed forces.
I mean, we've just never seen that cooperation before.
So it's possible in Idlib, where we're also seeing very heavy Russian strikes.
Just to clarify, what you're saying about Deir ez-Zor there and this pincer movement, this is against the Islamic State.
Further to the- That's against the Islamic State, yeah.
But to the north, it's entirely possible that the Americans have basically just handed over the defeat of al-Qaeda to the regime and basically said, you deal with the regime, we'll deal with ISIS.
Because there's a ferocious Russian-backed assault in Idlib now to capture those areas from so-called al-Qaeda.
Not so-called at all, al-Qaeda in northern Syria, in Idlib.
Yeah, and just to be specific there, their leader is al-Jilani, who's sworn loyal to Ayman al-Zawahiri, the butcher of New York City.
Yes, yeah, absolutely.
I mean, although al-Qaeda central is, I mean, it doesn't really exist anymore.
It's a concept, it's not an organization anymore.
Although then again, swearing by it, or a loyal oath to it, and to their leader, who's still podcasting from Pakistan somewhere, I mean, that's not nothing.
You're right, you're right.
Al-Qaeda has a horrible habit of reinventing itself and metastasizing and all the rest of it.
But yeah, so big, big movements going on in Syria at the moment.
And it's not clear how a lot of this is gonna play out.
I mean, the SDF have recently announced that they're prepared to reach an accord with the Assad government.
That's a major new development.
I think that's also tied in with what's going on around the Kurdish referendum, and plans for Kurdish autonomy, or even independence.
And there are just these great swirling currents that are very, very unpredictable within Syria.
Iraq is a very binary situation, really.
It's ISIS occupied a third of the country, the government recaptured.
As you know, Syria is just 50 different jigsaws in three dimensions all going on at the same time.
All right, can you tell me a little bit about the newest iteration of the war in Libya under Donald Trump?
Well, it's very limited so far.
So the very last day of the Obama presidency, there was a big airstrike.
The US hit, reported ISIS camp.
ISIS had regrouped south of Sirte, and it was very heavily bombed.
That was in the last hours of the Obama presidency.
And that was it.
That was the last we'd heard of American interventions in Libya until about 10 days ago.
And we've now had two strikes against ISIS.
Didn't come as a great surprise to us.
There've been lots of reports of ISIS reforming.
Big problems.
But again, I think what we're seeing in Libya now is reminiscent of Yemen, really.
In Yemen, you've got the civil war.
You've got the huge tensions between the Houthis, on the one hand, and the loyalists on the other.
In Libya, we've got the tensions between the three factional governments, because it's three governments in Libya.
They can't even agree on that.
But also, there's a sort of parallel war, very similar to Yemen and Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.
In Libya, we've got an American war against ISIS.
Where it gets more complicated with Libya is you've also got Al-Qaeda there, and you've got other militant factions who are aligned to neither.
And as I said, these three competing governments, one of which in particular, the GNA, which is commanded by General Haftar, is really causing concern.
And officially, the US, Britain, supports the LNA, the Government of National Unity, but there's repeated reports that the US and its allies are also working behind the scenes with a rival government, particularly in that rival factions working in tackling Muslim extremists.
But that comes with its own problems.
There was an appalling video emerged a few weeks ago of Haftar's faction mass-executing suspected militants in orange jumpsuits.
Deeply, deeply troubling.
Well, and we gotta mention here that this guy, Haftar, was an exile who lived about 20 or 30 miles outside of Langley, Virginia for 20 or 30 years before he parachuted in to try to become the new dictator.
And they've said, I don't know, maybe plausibly, Chris, that, geez, we hate this guy now and we can't tell him what to do very well.
And as you're saying, they back the opposing governments, but, I mean, come on, he lived just outside of Langley, Virginia.
And he's the, he always seemed to me like he was the attempted correction from the massive error of fighting a war for the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group and Ansar al-Sharia, who are just another name for veterans of Al-Qaeda in Iraq from Iraq War II who had come to Libya, who they fought for in overthrowing Qaddafi.
And then they went, uh-oh, well, we better parachute in a Qaddafi clone, basically another mirrored sunglasses colonel type to keep these jihadis down.
But then that has not worked out too well, I guess.
I mean, it is very messy.
I mean, Haftar's getting stronger there.
I mean, he's got control of most of the oil now.
And I don't guess you really know, but are you under the impression that he's really actually still working for America or he really is not, or do you have any idea?
Well, I think Haftar works for himself.
I mean, he's made strong overtures to the Russians.
You remember the Russians had an aircraft carrier in the Mediterranean last year, and on its way out, it stopped just off the Libyan coast and Haftar paid a visit.
You know, he's playing all sides, really.
This is a man who's set on becoming the new ruler of Libya.
And, you know, it's one of the reasons that we are monitoring events in Libya now is we just don't know how bad things are, but we are concerned at how bad things will get.
Libya could go many ways, but one of the ways Libya could go is another Syria, and that has us very worried indeed.
And it's one of the reasons we're trying to understand much better, you know, what these domestic and international interventions are doing on the ground, particularly as it affects civilians.
It's messy.
It's very messy.
All right.
Listen, man, you do great journalism.
Thank you again, Chris, for coming on the show.
I really appreciate it.
Great talking to you, Scott.
All right, you guys, that is Chris Woods.
He's at airwars.org, and they're getting the work done for you there, airwars.org.
I'm Scott Horton.
That's the show.
Check out all the stuff at scotthorton.org, at foolserend.us.
That's my book, Fools Erend, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
It's on amazon.com.
And, oh, my institute, libertarianinstitute.org, and follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton Show.
Thanks, you guys.
