All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
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All right, you guys, on the line, I've got Chris Woods from airwars.org, previously with the Bureau for Investigative Journalism, and what he does is he counts drone strikes.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Chris?
All right, Scott.
Nice to be back on.
It's a bit cold and freezing here in London, but otherwise good.
Well, I'm very sorry to hear that.
It's cold but sunny here in Austin, Texas, so just to rub it in your face a little bit.
It's high 50s, really nice.
Great to talk to you again.
Listen, you're in the news here because there's important news.
The Pentagon released to your group all kinds of new detailed statistics about strikes and casualties in Iraq War Three.
Is that correct?
Yeah.
So, a very substantial improvement in U.S. transparency and accountability for civilian harm.
We've been working behind the scenes with the U.S. military for several years now, trying to get them to release some very precise locational data about where they kill civilians, where they kill civilians in Iraq and Syria since 2014, the intervention against a so-called Islamic State.
And they have now released that very important data to us, but also it's now all in the public domain.
We've published a new section on our website making all of that data available, which we hope will make life a lot easier for Iraqis and Syrians trying to understand how and where their loved ones were killed and injured in combat actions in both Iraq and Syria.
So, it's a big breakthrough.
We're very pleased that the U.S. military decided to release this data.
They gave us 99 percent of the information we asked for, the data we asked for.
We'd still like the coordinates to be even more precise, but this is a pretty good starting point, we think, and one we'd like to see rolled out in other U.S. conflicts and also by the U.S.'s partners as well.
So, it's a good breakthrough.
So what did you learn that you didn't already know?
So the challenge we've had, so the U.S. and its allies have admitted almost 350 separate incidents now across Iraq and Syria dating back to 2014, conceding the deaths of more than 1,400 civilians.
And we appreciate those admissions.
It's far below our own estimates, but still those are public admissions.
The challenge we've had is that the way that the U.S.-led coalition tends to release that information is in press releases or in statements and monthly casualty reports, which give very little information.
So they might just say, in Mosul, on date X, one of our strikes killed 15 civilians.
Now, on that same day, air wars may have tracked a dozen, sometimes even more, individual civilian harm events just in that one city.
And we don't necessarily know which event it is, or indeed it could be a brand new event, one that wasn't reported publicly and for which we have no entry in our database.
So over recent years, we've worked with the coalition and said, look, you're admitting these events.
You need to tell us where they are.
And beginning about three years back, they began very discreetly releasing this information, this locational information in a very ad hoc way initially to us.
They used to send us very sort of adapted versions of the public press releases they were sending out on which they would sort of scribble the geolocation codes for the civilian harm events and cross-reference them with our own incidents.
And on the understanding, we would make that information publicly available.
So we've been doing that on and off for several years now, and they systematized that process about 18 months back, which we very much welcomed.
But there was still a block of around 130 events that they've never given us the location for.
And again, we reached out, we held meetings at the Pentagon and we also spoke with Inherent Resolve and said, you know, come on, finish the job, give us this additional data.
And they did, which we were very pleased about.
And now all of that data is public, apart from just three incidents that we're holding the coordinates on.
So it's a very significant transparency breakthrough.
Of the 340 events they've given us, the locations for 70 are precise to just one meter.
So really, it's exactly where the harm occurred.
And then the other 270 events are accurate to within a box of 100 by 100 meters.
That's not so good.
There's actually no reason they shouldn't give us the one meter coordinates.
They just decided not to several months into the process, and we'll be pushing for them to improve on that.
But it really is an important breakthrough that we can't find any example of any previous war where any belligerent has released this kind of close location or data.
And when we're talking about affected communities, you know, the first step is to know where and when their loved ones were or sometimes weren't harmed and who was responsible for that.
And this data is a significant step forward for that process now.
Now, so when you say that your estimates are much higher, that's in casualties or in actual counts of strikes as well?
Well, we don't disagree with them on the number of strikes because that's their that's their tally, not ours that we go with.
So they've they've said that they've conducted more than 30,000 airstrikes in Iraq and Syria since 2014.
But we do majorly disagree with them on the death toll.
So they admit to a minimum of 1,400 civilians killed over over the past six plus years.
Airwars has tracked almost 30,000 locally alleged deaths from coalition actions.
Civilians?
That's right.
Civilians killed by international coalition actions in Iraq and Syria.
Those are the local allegations.
And based on our own methodology and reviews, you know, we put a lot of effort into researching these events.
We think the likely death toll from coalition actions is somewhere between eight and 13,000 deaths rather than the 1,400 the US-led alliance is publicly admitting.
And, you know, you and I have talked about this several times, Scott, about why there are those big gaps between public and military estimates.
But we hope that, you know, the Pentagon continues to put resources into understanding that gap.
And again, you know, the previous U.S. wars, there's just been no admission of civilian harm.
So even getting the U.S. military, and it is primarily U.S. admissions, to say that they've killed 1,400 civilians in a current war is again a major breakthrough and one that, you know, we would be keen to see adapted for and adopted for other conflicts as well.
If you don't admit there's a paradox.
Do I understand it right that it sounds like maybe with the data that they've given you, that you can close that gap, that they admit that they did do a strike here, here and here, where you already knew that they had, but they claim, well, there were civilian casualties in this one, but you already know that there were civilian casualties in the other two as well, that you can kind of maybe go through this and get it all straight, no?
It does help to a degree.
I mean, most of these civilian harm events we already know about.
So they're called the credibles.
That's what the coalition calls them, that they are deemed to be credible events.
So we already knew about these events.
The big challenge was we didn't know exactly where they were in some cases.
In other cases, we, Amnesty International, the New York Times, others had done really important locational work ourselves and shown the US military where the civilians were killed and injured.
And in fact, that often led to a determination that an event was credible.
The great work, if you remember from the New York Times a couple of years back with Asma and Anand, who did that great piece, The Uncounted, looking at civilian deaths in Iraq.
They did amazing geolocational work on that, which made it difficult for the coalition then to deny those deaths once they began investigating.
But it's really all about getting this information out into the public domain.
And I think Air Force made a really successful case to the Pentagon to say that you're omitting the deaths.
There's no dispute that civilians died in these incidents.
There's also no value withholding the information you already have, which is where you killed those civilians.
So it is, you know, slowly and surely, you know, we've been able to get the Pentagon to be more transparent about the civilian deaths it causes in wars.
The big gulf still is between their understanding of what their bombs and missiles do and the people on the ground's understanding.
And that's something, you know, we and our partners in the US continue to work heavily on with the Pentagon to get them to review their methodology and approach.
And as you know, Scott, the civilian casualties in, for example, the cities of Mosul and Raqqa, which came under very heavy attack when ISIS was driven out, were absolutely devastating.
Thousands of civilians killed in those two cities.
And, you know, we're still trying to get the Pentagon, the US military to do a much better job of understanding the deaths it caused in those two city assaults, for example.
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Well, and if we go back to Iraq War Two, there was, you know, always the surveys of the excess death rate, which included people who were dying of just deprivation, as well as people who were actually shot and killed or blown up in the war.
And then you also at the same time, you had a project, the project Iraq Body Count, where they were going and trying to only count people who they could verify from two different independent sources existed, and now were killed, and this kind of thing, and ended up with, of course, a much lower number.
And so they're both right.
But it's just a question of which angle are you looking at it from?
And how specific are you being?
And I think you guys are much closer to the Iraq Body Count model here, where you're being overly careful, and then, you know, wearing it on your sleeve that yes, these are conservative estimates, because you don't want to get out over your skis, you want to be able to prove every bit of what you do have.
But that necessarily means that you're undercounting, right?
You're absolutely right.
And now we've always been very, very clear.
Ours is just one methodological approach.
What we, what Air Wars was created to address, if you remember just a few years back, Scott, we lived in this crazy world where militaries would just claim they had these magic bombs and missiles that weren't killing any civilians.
You know, they weren't.
They were just ignoring what John Brennan said.
Yeah.
And the name Iraq Body Count comes from an American general in the occupation of Iraq who said, we don't do body counts, which, of course, Wikileaks then showed was actually untrue to that.
The American military was secretly counting those it was killing.
So Air Wars was set up to really see if we could find some baseline numbers.
So based on the public reporting of the communities that were being bombed, how many civilians were those communities telling us were being killed and injured?
So that's the approach that Air Wars has.
But it's just one methodological approach.
You can go in and you can do field investigations as Amnesty do, as the New York Times does.
And then a very important study, for example, Johns Hopkins University went into Mosul after the Battle of Mosul and surveyed 1,200 households in the city.
That's a much more classical epidemiological study.
And there they found that one in two households in Mosul had lost someone.
Someone had been killed based on that very large sample.
And the highest number of deaths resulted from airstrikes.
So each of these approaches brings a different piece of the jigsaw.
And it's when you put all of those pieces together that you end up with your most comprehensive understanding.
And as you say, as you said at the beginning, Scott, there are much broader effects of wars when a hospital is destroyed, how many civilians suffer life changing consequences or even die because of lack of medical care, when the water sanitation plant goes down, when schools are destroyed.
So there are all these what we call reverberating effects of war, which are almost immeasurable, the scale of them sometimes, particularly in a conflict the size of the war against ISIS, which saw vast levels of combat, you know, some of the worst fighting since World War II in that war.
So, yes, we've always been very, very clear.
Air Wars is just one approach.
We are conservative.
And we've always been clear about that.
But we have to find a way to at least come up with some baseline numbers to push back against those military claims of zero civilian dead.
If you think back to the second Iraq war, the Iraq occupation, estimates of civilians killed in that war ranged anywhere up to a million.
And nobody really knew what the true toll was.
And it also depended what you were counting.
Did you count the terrible loss of life of Sunni and Shia populations after the civil war broke out because Al-Qaeda came into the vacuum?
You know, you know, those who died and became sick?
Did you count those?
And of course, you know, when you're counting the excess death rate from Iraq War II, you're comparing it to the era of the blockade of the 1990s before that.
And when you're counting the excess death rate from the blockade, you're comparing it to the 1980s when America was supporting Iraq in the horrible Iran-Iraq war, which, you know, devastated their economy and their country in so many ways.
So when was the last time you even had a period of normalcy in Iraq to compare anything to?
Yeah, you're absolutely right.
And, you know, I think Iraq is slowly recovering, although, of course, this year we've had the huge upheavals of the street demonstrations, very, very violent repression.
You know, one of the saddest things about Iraq is that civil society has never really been able to flourish there in the wake of the 2003 invasion.
You know, one of the grim quirks of the war is so when we're measuring civilians harmed in Syria, there's actually a lot of local community reporting across Syria.
So when the revolution, the uprising happened in 2011, we saw those those communities that broke away from the Assad government flourished, really.
And we got a lot of local groups that began reporting civilian harm, first from the civil war, then from the intervention of ISIS, then the coalition, then Russia, then Turkey.
And, you know, so civilian deaths in Syria are really well documented, and that's driven by local communities.
When you move across to Iraq, it's a completely different picture.
There is rarely civil society.
There's almost no functioning local media.
Around 40 percent of all the civilian deaths the coalition has admitted in Iraq weren't publicly reported by anyone.
They were only known because, you know, pilots and analysts came forward to admit a problem after the strike.
That's amazing.
That's amazing.
You would think that, you know.
Well, I mean, I guess if you're talking about there, you know, most of this air war is taking place in western Iraq, in the predominantly Sunni areas under the control of the Islamic state, that there wouldn't be too much communication in and out of those places.
But, yeah, it seems like, you know, at least the Shiite side, the government side would be keeping track to some degree or something.
I guess not.
But, yeah, I mean, ISIS was murdering journalists, murdering researchers, murdering, you know, there was a group in Mosul.
I think, you know, I've talked about this before, a group of young kids who were tracking the war in Mosul.
And ISIL infiltrated the group and pretty much killed all of those teenagers.
You know, I mean, it was so so reporting was really tough.
And so, you know, it's a concern we have is that, you know, there may be significant underreporting of civilian deaths in Iraq in particular compared to Syria.
We did an interview recently with the mayor of Hawija.
We published a big study with the Dutch not for profit Pax recently looking at the devastating effects of wide area weapon use in cities.
And as part of that, we interviewed the mayor of Hawija.
And so, you know, your listeners can find that on our website.
And, you know, he talks about, you know, five years on from a Dutch airstrike that killed 70 civilians in a single single airstrike.
You know, the city is still devastated, still hasn't recovered.
You know, nobody's received any compensation.
Whole chunks of the city are just still not functional.
They've only just got some of the water supplies back on.
So, you know, we when the fighting moves on, we tend to forget about these places.
But of course, the effects last for years and years.
Well, look, we've been bombing Iraq for 30 years next month.
30 years.
The only time they stopped was in 2012 and 13.
But even then, there were still some drone strikes.
And then 2014, they start right back up again with Iraq war three.
It's been 30 years running now.
That's crazy, isn't it?
Tell you what.
And you know, what's funny about that, too, is when the Soviet Union was falling, if you had told people that now we're going to go to war against Iraq for 30 years, they would have said, what?
Why?
What the hell did they ever do to us?
Are you kidding me?
You mean Saddam Hussein, Ronald Reagan's guy?
What are you talking about?
Anyway, you know what's fun?
I'll always say this and I should say this in every interview.
If you haven't read it or if you haven't read it this year, everyone go back and read The Redirection by Seymour Hersh in 2007.
That's the story of America's Middle East policy in two chapters in the last 20 years here.
One fought a war for Iran.
Oops.
And then two have been back in Al-Qaeda ever since then to try to make up for that fact.
And then, of course, when the Islamic State came, that was way too much.
Then they had to go back to war for the Shia again to destroy the monster that they created despite them.
It's all in my new book, Enough Already, coming out in a couple of months or so.
Looking forward to reading that, Scott.
I know this is something that you're super passionate about.
It's always great to have these conversations because we don't really talk about the consequences of our actions, as you say, and we don't have that collective memory.
Anyway, wait.
So I want to ask you about this.
Do I have it right that in 2014-15 that the Islamic State basically fled from Fallujah?
And so Fallujah did not get the full carpet bombing treatment.
Well, carpet bombing is a bit of exaggeration for Chris Woods on the line, but they did not get the full Mosul treatment, right?
Because the Islamic State essentially just abandoned their posts there in Fallujah and went on.
Can you help remind me which all cities got it the worst and which ones didn't?
Actually, Fallujah was occupied.
So most of Anbar's major population centers were occupied.
No, but I mean, once the American planes came, didn't they flee rather than fight to, you know, the death there?
There was a there was a withdrawal in the end, but I'm afraid there was a very heavy battle and much of Fallujah was unfortunately destroyed.
Oh, man.
So very significant leveling of Fallujah.
And it's been one of the complaints of the successive governors of Anbar province, which is where Fallujah is, that because it's a Sunni population that the government has been less invested in rebuilding the city.
And, you know, that's been a complaint from many communities in Sunni areas that not only did they pay a price, you know, to have ISIS removed, but the rebuild has been very slow.
There's been reference to these cities as ghost cities.
And indeed, there are still enormous numbers of internally displaced communities and peoples in Iraq.
In other words, there's been no real reconciliation between the victors and the defeated here between the Baghdad government and the areas that had been ruled by ISIS.
Yeah, I mean, I would I would never characterize the Sunni populations as as as defeated because that suggests a sort of complicity with ISIS.
We have to remember that ISIS occupied.
It was an occupying force that the very significant number of Sunnis did not want.
Oh, that's true.
I mean, they had their alliances with the former Ba'athists and the tribal leaders and stuff, though it wasn't, you know, entirely.
I think it was, you know, so it was ISIS that was defeated rather than the Sunnis who were defeated.
And I think that's a really important distinction, you know, and Iraqis.
On the other hand, though, they weren't exactly liberated, were they?
I mean, that's the point is.
Yeah, I think that's a very valid point.
And the representation of Sunnis in in national politics is is is a continuing sore point.
But then representation for stop is a sore point, which is why we've seen these uprisings in in Baghdad, in in Mosul, particularly among the young, because the corruption is so endemic with the with the current government.
And so, you know, there are many, many issues that the poor, poor Iraq faces today.
But yes, one of them still is those those challenges for the minority Sunni population.
And in the war did like just quickly down the list of the the biggest cities in the West there, or at least the predominantly Sunni cities to Crete and I guess Ramadi is like 70, 30 or something like that.
I don't know.
Did they all get bombed as badly as Fallujah and Mosul?
Or I seem to remember there were some of those cities where when the American planes came, that ISIS fled and the cities were basically spared.
I thought that was a story with Fallujah.
But now I know I really need to go back and reread a lot of this stuff.
First, it was it was somewhat episodic.
You know, there were certain city offensives which were driven primarily by ground forces and with the involvement of the PMUs and particularly the popular militia units, which were mostly sort of sheer paramilitaries that they were drafted by the local communities to fight where they were heavily involved.
The US-led coalition generally tended to step back from those city assaults where the PMUs played a big role.
So they you know, there was a tension there for particularly the Americans in being seen to support those pro-Iranian PMUs, which were eventually absorbed into the Iraq army.
They eventually became part of the Iraq army.
If you think back, in fact, to the Soleimani assassination at the beginning of this year, one of the things that outraged the Baghdad government in that assassination was that killed alongside General Soleimani was a general in the Iraq army.
He was the head of a PMU faction, but actually he was, you know, he was officially part of the Iraq military, an ally of the United States.
And that's one of the things that annoyed Baghdad so much about that assassination is that it also killed a very senior Iraqi general at the same time.
Yeah, of course.
Yeah, the Bata Brigade, that's Donald Rumsfeld and David Petraeus's men.
It was David Petraeus that turned them into the Iraqi army in 2004 and 2005.
That was his job.
And by the way, I'm sorry, one more thing here.
I'm trying to go through the site and do some research for the book I'm working on.
And did I read it right that y'all's best estimate of civilian casualties of Russian airstrikes in Syria are in the low thousands?
I think it was less than 5,000.
Is that right?
It's complicated on Russia because we're confident that the death toll from Russian actions is much higher.
But we're a sort of victim of our own methodology, really.
And the reason for that is when Russia first came into Syria, there was a significant difference between how the Russian Air Force operated and how the Syrian Air Force operated.
And they often conducted strikes separately and so on.
Over time, that has narrowed more and more so that it's almost now indistinguishable between a Syrian Air Force action and a Russian Air Force action.
They're often using the same assets.
They're using the same tactics.
They fly in formation together.
So for local populations, it's become really hard to distinguish whether they, you know, family X just got killed by Russia or by the Assad government.
And so because of that, they're what we call contested events.
But actually, it's completely uncontested that civilians died in these strikes.
And we're actually having a look at this data again, because we do feel we're underrepresenting the deaths from Russian strikes, even though we can't necessarily break out whether it was Russia or the regime responsible.
We can say with confidence that civilians died in event X, Y or Z.
And it's something that we're having a hard look at at the moment.
So I would say that, you know, that estimate of civilian deaths from Russian actions, it is an underreporting.
Sure.
But just like all the rest of it.
Where exactly it lies, we don't know.
Because again, Russia just isn't transparent.
It doesn't tell us where it bombs.
It doesn't tell us who it bombs.
But as far as you can tell, it's the casualties from their air wars in city X in Syria are essentially comparable to the casualties from the American air war in city Y in Iraq.
Yeah.
At the same time.
We've done several studies on this and some of our partners have as well.
And the reasons for that are that even if you're adhering to international law, even if you're using smart bombs, you can't really control the civilian deaths in a densely populated city if you go in and heavily bomb it.
Right.
So so even, you know, when you compare civilian deaths in Aleppo from Russian and regime strikes to civilian deaths in Mosul from coalition in Iraq government strikes, the outcomes are very similar for civilians on the ground.
And we reached a provisional determination, which was that the biggest driver of negative outcome for civilians in urban conflict is not whether you're using dumb bombs or smart bombs, not even whether you're intentionally targeting civilians or claiming to protect civilians.
The biggest driver of civilian deaths and injuries is intensity of bombardment and density of population.
And you those are going to determine how many civilians die in a city, no matter what tactics and approaches you're using as a military.
That's such an important point because it's such an important piece of American propaganda that, oh, man, we make sure to attack a house from the southwest so that we only take out the northeast corner of the house and spare the people on the other.
And like, yeah, sure.
How you know what precision they take with every strike to make sure that only bad guys die, we're supposed to believe.
Yeah.
But of course, the reality is when you're when when city fighting breaks out, what do civilians do when a neighborhood comes under attack?
They hide.
They hide in their homes and they hide for days and they're unobservable.
And so when militaries go in, even if they're using like drones in the sky and they convince themselves that it's fine to take the strike, most of the time they have no idea where the civilians are, how many are close by.
And that's why you time and time and time again, you see these devastating civilian casualties in city, city combat.
And often we don't know about those deaths for days because, you know, the bodies are coming out of the rubble.
So there is you know, there is there's just no good way to fight a city battle.
And Air Wars is part of a growing global network which is challenging military assurances that they can fight city wars without harming significant numbers of civilians.
We don't believe that's true.
In fact, the Ireland, the government of Ireland is leading a major international process at the moment, which we're supporting with many of our partners, calling for a political declaration on the use of explosive weapons in urban conflict.
And we held an event recently where the Irish ambassador leading on that process spoke publicly about that very important campaign.
So, you know, it's something that we're not being idle on.
We, you know, we know the terrible things that are happening and we're trying with our partners and many, many countries now are signing up to this political declaration process.
More than 80 countries have indicated an interest in signing.
And where can we learn more about that?
Is that airwars.org as well?
There's a very good web campaign led by a group called INEW, I-N-E-W, and you can find them on Twitter at INEW.
It's the same team, if you remember a while back, that successfully pulled off the treaty banning the use of nuclear weapons.
Really?
OK.
Yeah.
And they won the Nobel Prize for that a couple of years ago.
These are really smart people.
They know what they're doing and they're running a really effective program, which we hope down the line will result in some controls on how we fight wars in cities.
Man, Chris, I'm so sorry.
I should have scheduled an hour for this, dude, but I am so late.
I am like 10 minutes late.
I got to go.
And it's my fault for talking so much, too.
I'm going to cut all that out.
But you're doing such great work and I appreciate you so much.
It's airwars.org, everybody.
The great Chris Woods.
Thanks again.
Thanks, Scott.
Take care.
