For Pacifica Radio, Armistice Day, November 11th, 2018.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
All right, y'all, this is Anti-War Radio.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
I'm the author of the book, Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I'm the editorial director of antiwar.com.
You can find my full interview archive, more than 4,800 interviews now, going back to 2003, at scotthorton.org.
All right, y'all, introducing Andrea Carboni from Akled Data.
It's A-C-L-E-D, akleddata.com.
How are you doing?
Welcome to the show.
I'm very well, thank you.
Thanks for having me here.
Very happy to have you on the show.
Apparently, this organization has been around for a while and doing important work, but I only learned of it from reading Patrick Coburn.
I learned a lot of things reading Patrick Coburn.
And he said, hey, look, finally, you know, an institution, institutional enough that you people can't ignore it, says that the number of combat fatalities, civilians and otherwise, I think, as you say in here, you can't differentiate, is at least 50,000.
And then he says that you told him it was, you estimated even higher than that.
But so I guess, can you take us through how you know what you know about that?
And especially the part about estimating an even higher number to Patrick there?
Yeah, sure.
So the number.
Oh, and I should have said, I'm sorry, I should have said we're talking about the war since 2000, March 2015, right?
Yep.
So the number 56,000, which this week, I think it's closer to 57,000, refers to the number of combat fatalities.
So both combatants and civilians killed in Yemen since 2016, up to last week.
Uh, we are currently reviewing the kind of reports and data for 2015.
And that's why I estimated that based on the current trends, then the total number since the beginning of the Saudi-led intervention in Yemen will be closer to 80,000 than to 60,000, as we've estimated until now.
Well, as you know, we've been covering this, the war this whole time, of course, and it's been obviously a major sticking point.
This number of 10,000, that's been regularly cited for years and years on end.
And it came from the UN.
And in fact, I talked with Jamie McGoldrick on the show, and he said, Oh, I'm sure it's higher than that.
I never said that.
It's certainly not or anything that I was just saying that was how many I could prove so far.
And that has been, I've come to understand very powerful propaganda in a way.
Maybe it was because people didn't seem to have better numbers to cite, but it made it seem like 10,000 is really not that bad for a big, terrible years long war.
So, you know, it really kind of helped to diminish the importance of what was really going on over there this whole time.
Yeah.
I mean, the problem was not with the figure itself in the sense that when it was first released, I think it was either 2016 or early 2017.
It was, I mean, the UN unknowingly, actually, it was an underestimate.
They said, actually, we are collecting data from medical facilities and health centers that they provide us with data.
But of course, they already knew that, I mean, many people, they don't make it to a medical center.
They may die either in fighting or if they are civilians, you know, they may not have the resources, the money or transportation to get to a medical center.
So they already knew that.
The problem, I think, was with the media that have been using, that has, you know, the real number of people killed in Yemen since the beginning.
So since 2014, 15, depending on whether you're counting the civil war or the Saudi-led intervention.
So, I understand why, of course, I mean, the UN has been using that figure because, of course, they have to rely on official estimates.
What we do is, of course, not providing an official number, is surveying like international media and even more kind of local news outlets to try at least to count how many people have been reported as dead.
These, of course, has a number of limitations, which include, for instance, biases or underreporting.
So we know that even our figure may be an underestimate.
But as also Patrick Cockburn actually mentioned in his article, using this figure has kind of helped many, you know, many governments, particularly in the West, to postpone, let's say, any sort of intervention on their partners, including the Saudi-led coalition, to stop the intervention and, of course, to shrug off responsibilities because, you know, Western countries are involved, the U.S., the U.K., Italy, France, you can name those, in providing weapons, technical assistance and other forms of military assistance to the coalition.
Yeah, I mean, that really is, and I don't think anybody ever meant for that to be the case.
You know, as you're saying, hey, they had to do the best that they could, but then that served to be kind of the basis for playing down the brutality of the war this whole time.
Meanwhile, people who are really paying close attention and don't have an agenda to try to justify anything are looking at this in frustration for years in a row, you know, seeing the importance played down in that way.
So now, you talked about, you know, you cite local news sources and as many different news sources as you can, counting casualties from different attacks and that kind of thing.
So that's, you know, sounds like a pretty exhaustive process you're putting into it.
Are you also in contact with local journalists on the ground or whoever else, employees or contractors or anyone on the ground who are trying to do their own counting for you, too, or not?
So, as Aklit, we actually work on, I think now more than 70 countries, maybe closer to 80.
So in Africa, Middle East, Asia as well, we are expanding to other like Latin America, Latin and Central America, Europe as well.
So we don't have the resources to have primary sources on the ground, journalists or, you know, any other informants, because that would be a huge effort that we can sustain at the moment.
However, we work, for instance, in collaboration with the Yemen Data Project.
You had Iona Craig with you on the show, and we work to, you know, share data as much as possible and to, you know, to help with each other, to improve our efforts, to announce even, you know, if there are people that know that there are media that are doing a great job in reporting what's happening in Yemen, we try to always improve, you know, our work doing that.
So we're very open to actually improving feedback also from users of different, you know, political leanings.
And they say, you know, you may be forgetting these.
So we try to include as much as possible, provided that it doesn't affect the quality of the work we do.
I wonder if you think that there's a possibility that it's even much worse.
For example, Iraq body count, they did meticulous work to count the dead in Iraq, but that meant that, of course, they were really flying blind and necessarily were missing many violent deaths that took place during that civil war, you know, through no fault of their own, they were still doing their best, but their number couldn't help but be extraordinarily low.
So I wonder if your work, the way you describe it sounds pretty analogous to theirs, really hunting down, trying to get the names and exact numbers for each and every attack and kind of compile it in that way.
Well, yeah, we, I mean, our methodology is based on underestimating when possible.
Using always the most conservative estimate.
Right.
We don't want to inflate- Rightfully so.
Yes, of course.
What's of course, it's already kind of a bad situation.
I mean, in Yemen, but it also applies elsewhere in Nigeria, Somalia or Afghanistan.
So of course, I mean, first of all, we don't include, or better, we include only, you know, fatalities that are the direct result of conflict.
So we are not including in our account people that have been, you know, killed by diseases, malnutrition, and, you know, because of the humanitarian crisis that has been going on now in Yemen for many years.
So that's already, you know, if you add those to our estimates, you get a much higher number in the numbers of probably hundreds of thousands of people killed during this period.
And then you have to consider, of course, the media may not report on everything.
You know, there are areas that are kind of a black hole for the media.
You know, there are just maybe there's just one or two media reporting on, I'll tell you an example, across the border with Saudi Arabia, that's very difficult for the media to access and for us to actually report very reliable data as we can do, for instance, in Hodeidah, where all the media attention is concentrated right now.
I think we are underestimating fatalities for sure.
Yeah.
Hodeidah right now, there's a massive attack going on, a new escalation from what had been, I guess, a pretty stalled campaign by UAE and Sudanese forces on the ground there.
And that kind of thing, or I guess there's a new wave of Sudanese reinforcements that have come and made some advancements.
Are you getting new, I guess, you just said you're updating these numbers daily, and it sounds like by quite a bit each day.
Yeah.
So Hodeidah has been definitely the driver of most violence that we've seen over the past 10 months.
So since, at least since December, since Saleh was killed, and there was a first offensive in southern Hodeidah, and then the offensive was renewed in June on the city specifically, in the airport, and then now specifically on the city.
There were figures cited by Save the Children using our data that showed how the number of civilian casualties since June had increased by 160%.
So there is an increase in fighting for sure.
We've seen cases, I mean, of urban fighting.
So right into the city, it's like now it's in the outskirts of the city.
It's a very slow advance.
And as many observers had predicted, any advance in Hodeidah was likely to actually become very violent because the Houthis are unlikely to just surrender.
They've repeated that in many cases.
So both sides are actually fighting very hard to either retake the city or to keep it.
Of course, this fighting is impacting on civilians too.
So we've read reports in the past few days of shelling or airstrike actually hitting civilians.
But also like the Houthis, they've been responsible for shelling residential villages, for storming hospitals.
And there are reports by Amnesty International, among others, saying the Houthis have occupied a hospital.
So with the possibility that they may use the people there as human shields.
So it's a very tense situation.
And no one really knows how the Houthis are able to keep the city.
But definitely we can say it's actually, it's going to be, it's already, but it's going to be a very violent battle.
All right.
So here's who all sponsors this show.
First of all, Mike Swanson in his great book, The War State, about the rise of the military industrial complex after World War II.
An excellent history there.
And get all of his investment advice at wallstreetwindow.com.
Then there's Roberts and Roberts Brokerage, Inc., where you buy your precious metals.
And that's at rrbi.co, rrbi.co for all your gold, silver, platinum, palladium, et cetera.
No dev, no ops, no IT.
A great book about how to run your technology business like a libertarian.
No dev, no ops, no IT by Hussain Badakhshani.
It's really great.
I mean, I'm no businessman and I really enjoyed reading it.
So I think you should check that out.
And also Kesslin Runs, the great new novel by our friend Charles Featherstone.
It's in the very near future and only slightly dystopian.
No, maybe worse.
Kesslin Runs.
And also check out horizon.global.
That's Zen Cash.
They're changing.
They're not just a digital currency.
They really are working hard on becoming a new platform for all different sorts of blockchain type secure applications.
And so for all you techies who really understand, check out all you need to know at horizon.global.
Libertystickers.com for your anti-government propaganda.
Tom Woods Liberty Classroom to fill your brain with good stuff.
Follow the link from my site so I get the kick back there.
Scott Horton.org and check this out at expanddesigns.com.
You can get a brand new 2018.
Hey, it's 2019 model website there and get a $500 discount.
If you use expanddesigns.com slash Scott.
Well, and of course the American Secretary of Defense and Secretary of State said it's time to start winding this thing up in a month or so, right at the start of this attack.
So in other words, go on ahead and do this, even though we want a negotiated settlement within a month's time anyway.
Yeah.
I'm sorry.
I know that's kind of outside of being a statistician or whatever, but how outrageous is that?
What the hell?
This massive new assault here.
I guess what the coalition has actually, how the coalition has interpreted those words is like a green light to actually take a chance for retaking Hodeidah until peace talks were supposed to start again, according to the words of the Secretary of Defense.
There were actually, I think it was today, this morning that the special envoy of the United Nations Secretary General, he said that actually peace talks are not going to take place until the end of the year.
So actually they are postponing the beginning of the peace talks because right now there's no end of the conflict inside it, like very close and immediate.
Yeah.
Well, yeah.
And there's certainly no closer to reinstalling Hadi on the throne, which is still the stated goal of the campaign, right?
Well, yeah, of Operation Restoring Hope.
So the second part of the Saudi-led intervention, so the first one was actually just lasted one month.
So it was stopping the Houthis from taking Aden.
And then the operation changed name.
So it became Restoring Hope.
And the idea was we should just reinstate Hadi and restart the political process.
The problem is that that operation has been going on for now it's three years and a half.
So Hadi is, of course, as weak as he was at the time, maybe weaker.
And I mean, the events will tell if he's going to be president.
But he's, I mean, many observers are noting that actually he's the president of the internationally recognized government of Yemen, who spends, you know, just no more than 100 days in Yemen every year.
So it's a kind of a paradox, of course.
Well, you know what?
I'm sorry, but I'm just dying to ask you about Somalia and Iraq War II and Afghanistan too.
Are you a specialist on those?
No, no.
I used to work actually on the Africa side of the project.
Few years ago, but I'm not an expert on specifically Somalia or Afghanistan.
Okay.
But I mean, do you know about your organization's work on those countries too offhand?
I mean, you got some numbers for me?
I'm very curious.
No one ever really says how many Afghans have died in the thing.
You know, it just mostly goes unmentioned.
There have been a few studies, but I don't know about you guys.
I can check our data.
Not sure if we have updated.
And I'm really interested in the numbers for Iraq War II, and especially if you guys have, you know, 2003 through say 10 or so.
I wonder if you have combat deaths versus, do you guys also try to measure the excess deaths looking back as well?
We don't have data back to 2003.
We only have data for Iraq back to 2016, I think.
Oh, okay.
I've got data for Somalia.
Iraq War III though, right?
So you have data for 2014 through 17.
So that's good.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I can also tell you those.
Yeah.
Like Islamic State.
So it's mostly Iraq and Syria, but I can tell you about Somalia.
So Somalia, we've reported something like 26,000 fatalities.
I think it's mostly concerning Al-Shabaab.
And so that part of Somalia, so mostly Southern Somalia.
And again, these are combat deaths, civilian and riflemen, whoever they are.
Exactly.
So it's all fatalities arising from violence.
And they may include, you know, both civilians and combatants as well.
And that includes also the African Union, the different troops from Burundi and Kenya and Ethiopia.
Okay.
And I'm sorry, what was it again?
27?
For Somalia, we've reported 26,000 of fatalities in something 9,000 of events, 9,000 events collected for Somalia around Al-Shabaab and all this stuff.
Yeah.
I don't know how in the world you go about compiling data from what's going on in Southern Somalia.
I guess there are some reporters there.
I just don't know where to find them, but you do.
Yeah.
I mean, we actually, for all the events we collect, we list the sources we cite.
So it's always kind of very transparent.
So we are kind of showing where we take the data from.
And if there's any necessity, we actually provide users with the original report.
So in that case, it's very transparent and accessible.
So you don't do excess deaths?
Like here's how many people died in the famine of 2011 or that kind of thing?
No, no.
That goes beyond our scope, yeah.
I see.
And again, you would say that that's a conservative estimate, because what are you going to do, right?
You can't estimate up, so you just go with whatever number you can, which is necessarily a low and conservative number.
Yeah.
You know probably better than me, but if fighting is occurring, for instance, in urban areas, in cities where media has better access, whatever, you can estimate that those fatalities are closer to the actual number, the people that have died in a context.
But when it comes to rural areas, in Yemen, this is the case, because most of the population actually lives in rural areas.
And media have, you know, very hard time to get there, to actually report and report often in a very kind of reliable way, because you may have your own guys, you know, you are from the Houthis or from the Saudi-led coalition, you bring your own guys and then those figures may be, you know, biased or whatever.
So for independent journalists, particularly, or for, you know, for many media, it's very difficult to access those areas.
So you have to kind of suppose that these are underestimates rather than overestimates or actual figures.
Well, and still 26,000 dead in violence since the war.
Dead in violence since the war.
And I guess that goes, I'm sorry, man, I'm out of order here.
That goes back to 2006, then the start of the latest version of the war.
Is that right?
I'm checking for Somalia, it's since 2008.
Oh, okay.
So it'd be a little bit, it'd be quite a bit higher than that, because the war really started when Ethiopia and the US invaded Christmas 06.
So anyway, but yeah, still 26,000 people is an absolute horror show.
You know, as a low ball estimate, it doesn't need to be, no matter how much worse it is, it doesn't need to be worse to be horrible enough.
So yeah, I mean, these numbers, I mean, I'm checking now, kind of the Islamic State, so both Syria and Iraq, we've reported 46,000.
And again, this is only a portion because we, I mean, we have to assume these are only a portion there was a report I was reading the other day about mass graves that have been found in Iraq, in, of course, Islamic State controlled territories.
And they were saying, of course, it's very likely they are going to find many more.
And when we talk about mass graves, we are talking about hundreds of people buried there that were not reported before.
Maybe they were kind of forcibly disappeared or whatever.
But, and they are still coming out now.
So years after the Islamic State was actually expelled from Iraq or from other parts of Syria.
All right.
Now, in the last couple of minutes here, can you please talk about this assassinations in South Yemen piece that you have here?
And this is about the kind of intra coalition fighting between Saudi and UAE and the different factions there are backing on the ground there.
Is that right?
Yeah.
I mean, when I talk to actually, you know, experts on Yemen or Yemenis, there is the perception that the coalition that is, you know, known as the Saudi led coalition is actually a Saudi Emirati coalition.
And then these two kind of shareholders, the main ones, are actually, they don't have the same goals in Yemen, the same long term goals, at least in Yemen.
And this is actually quite evident with what the UAE are doing in the south of Yemen.
So if, let's say, Saudi Arabia has been focusing most of its activity on the Houthis, the UAE pretty much has been helping establishing these military forces in the south, which were intended to contain mostly Islam.
So these, and to fight, of course, Al-Qaeda.
Islah is this party in Yemen linked to the Muslim Brotherhood.
So it's an archenemy of the United Arab Emirates and of course to Saudi Arabia as well.
Since 2016, we've seen an increasing number of people, member, member of Islah and clerics, moderate clerics, even moderate Salafi clerics that have been killed or that have been kind of attempted assassinations against them.
And we've reported, I think, 32 assassinations, like, and more than 50 attempts.
This is troubling, of course, because the perception is that behind these assassinations, there's the UAE or groups that are linked to the UAE in the attempt of wiping out the south from Al-Islah.
And now, so do I understand this right?
I'm sorry to interrupt, but do I understand this right, that even though mostly the Saudis oppose the Muslim Brotherhood, in this case, Al-Islah is the Muslim Brotherhood group there and they are backed by the Saudis and it's the UAE, as I think you're saying, who's targeting them and then they seem to prefer AQAP.
Well, it's correct, yes.
So Islah is a major stakeholder in the Hadi government.
So they collaborate with the Saudis and they've been active in other parts of Yemen where the Saudis are present.
So it's mostly the UAE going after, or at least reported to go after Islah because they are considered to be close, or that's at least a rhetoric, of course, but they are considered to be linked to Al-Qaeda in southern Yemen.
There was this BuzzFeed report where actually the UAE had hired and offered technical assistance in at least one case to American mercenaries that were supposed to kill the leader of Al-Islah in Aden in 2015.
And UAE vehicles were actually, I mean, were present at the site where the mercenaries were trying to plant this bomb and, of course, kill the politicians.
So it's a very troubling trend and it shows, again, how the coalition is intervening in Yemen.
So it's not just about airstrikes.
It's also political interference and what someone has actually considered extrajudicial killings to some extent.
You know what?
I'm really curious about the war against AQAP.
At the same time, we're fighting for them against the Houthis, the American CIA and special operations forces, at least in some cases, have still been targeting AQAP forces.
But I was talking with a Yemeni journalist the other day who said that, you know, oh, really?
You're bombing the UAE's ground army, huh?
Because that's where the AQAP is now.
They've all joined the army working for these mercenary forces.
And so, no, the Americans really are outright backing these guys now and not bombing them.
But I guess I'm thinking your death records would show whether the war against AQAP in the south of Yemen has escalated at the same time that support for their war against the Houthis has.
The role of AQAP is very controversial in the sense that there are many groups linked to AQAP that are working quite closely with forces loyal to the government of Hadi.
So in that sense, they are also aligned with the Saudi-led coalition and with the old partners for the coalition.
This is clear in Thais or in Al-Beida as well.
Of course, the UAE, when they started operations, particularly in 2016, against AQAP, their aim was actually to take AQAP out of Mukalla and Hadhramaut and other southern provinces because they were actually, they had taken over cities.
And again, there was this very recent report showing how AQ, I mean, of course, Al-Qaeda wasn't defeated in fighting.
They actually left Mukalla quite, I mean, spontaneously, let's say.
And many of those fighters were reported to actually now be fighting for forces backed by the United Arab Emirates fighting in Hodeidah.
So there's this kind of paradox that the U.S. has been involved in Yemen fighting against AQAP for years now, but at the same time, they are supporting partners like the UAE.
Right.
Now, specifically, though, is the drone war just cancelled then because AQAP has all really joined the army?
Or are the drones still targeting any of the Al-Qaeda guys in the south?
That part of it is over for now.
The number of drone strikes in Yemen has declined quite significantly since last year.
OK, that's as you would expect in these circumstances.
I just wanted to make sure.
OK, I'm sorry.
I'm out of time.
Thank you so much for your time.
That's Andrea Carboni from Akleddata, A-C-L-E-D, Akleddata.com.
Thanks again.
Thank you for having me here today.
All right, y'all.
That's it for anti-war radio for this morning.
Thanks very much for listening.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
I'm here every Sunday morning from 8.30 to 9 on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA.
Find my full interview archive at scotthorton.org.
See you next week.
