08/03/15 – Chris Woods – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
And on the line I have Chris Woods.
He is the author of Sudden Justice on the drone wars and formerly with the Bureau for Investigative Journalism.
He's now at airwars.org.
Welcome back to the show, Chris.
How are you?
I'm very good, Scott.
Thanks for having me on.
Very happy to have you back on the show.
Hey, man, tell me all about Air Wars, first of all, here.
Well, we've been around almost as long, I suppose, as the airstrikes bombing Islamic State in Syria and Iraq.
We set ourselves up shortly after they began back last August.
I think there's been this obsession, really, with Western governments of these air-only wars recently and all sorts of outrageous claims about how we don't kill civilians in these wars anymore.
I don't personally believe that based on years of covering conflicts, we thought it important to start tracking the war.
And then about six months in, we got some good funding from a charitable foundation here in the U.K. and have employed staff in Iraq and also in Europe who have been tracking claims of civilian casualties from those airstrikes.
And we published our first big report on that today.
And surprise, surprise, it turns out that the two civilians the coalitions so far admitted to killing, well, we've killed an awful lot more than that.
It's looking like around 500 civilians killed so far in coalition airstrikes over the past year.
All right, now, and that's in Iraq and Syria combined?
That's right, yeah.
All right, and now, so as far as the reports, it looks like there are two or three different ones here, right?
One is civilian and friendly fire, but then the other is cause for concern.
I guess one is for the year 2015 and one is for since the start of the war.
Help me out.
So, yeah, we published three things today.
The first is our overall report, which analyzes all of the airstrikes since last year.
And that's a 30-page report you can find on our website.
Then we've also published our complete data.
So for both 2014 and 2015, you can go on our website and you can find every single incident where it's been alleged that civilians or friendly forces have been killed by the coalition.
You'll find photographs, biographical evidence, videos, and links to every single claim of those reports.
And also we grade them.
Many of the reports are challenging, to say the least.
They're often poorly reported or contested.
We're not claiming that civilians died in all of these events, although we do think they died in many of them.
And so you put all of that together and I think it gives us the most comprehensive picture we've had yet about civilians killed by the coalition across these two countries.
That's still a fraction of the civilians being killed by the Assad regime, by the Iraq government, by so-called Islamic State, which are killing civilians, and there are thousands in Iraq and Syria.
But it is, you know, hundreds of dead civilians is an issue, we think.
And it's certainly something our militaries and politicians need to be paying more attention to.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, so now, as you kind of began with the faith that these politicians have in air power, at least they have political faith in air power to show that they're doing something, even if it's not getting guys killed, which is what they're really afraid of at this point, which at least that's good that, you know, the populations of the Western countries have their leaders afraid.
They're going back to this Bill Clinton cruise missile policy.
But so the ineffectiveness, I guess, aside, maybe we can get back to the ineffectiveness of all this or even the counterproductive nature of it all.
But can you give us a ballpark of just how many strikes we're talking about, what percentage of the time they're killing innocent people?
Because it doesn't sound like, you know, Nixon carpet bombing North Vietnam here.
Yeah, this is very different kind of warfare from that that our parents and grandparents were used to.
You know, air power used to be about indiscriminate slaughter.
And in a sense, it still is for the Assad regime in Syria, for example.
That's most civilians are killed in Syria by the Assad regime deliberately killing civilians in airstrikes.
The kind of aerial warfare the West fights these days is quite different.
We use precision munitions.
And also, we don't carry out so many strikes.
We don't need to carry out carpet bombing anymore because small numbers of bombs can usually achieve the same effect.
So we've seen 6,000 airstrikes in the first year of the coalition's air war.
And of those, we've identified around 140 potential incidents of concern.
So around 6,000 airstrikes, we think five to 600 civilians killed in those.
That's still a lot.
But historically, you know, measured against other wars, that's a declining curve, I suppose.
And now how hard do you have to dig to find all this?
How forthcoming is the empire about all this on their end?
Well, very unforthcoming, unfortunately.
And one of the things we've done is to look at each of the 12 coalition members and see how transparent and accountable they actually are in their bombings.
And of the 12, we found that only Canada regularly reports on where and when it's bombing in Iraq and Syria.
Every other member of the coalition, and it's a steep sliding scale from the U.K. and the U.S., which are reasonably transparent but have some significant failings, down to the bottom with countries like Australia and Bahrain, which report virtually nothing.
And we think that's absolutely unacceptable because, as the coalition tells us, each country doing these bombings is individually liable for the civilians it kills in Iraq and Syria.
So how can these affected civilians possibly have recourse to justice if nobody will tell them who bombed them?
I mean, that's a ridiculous situation.
Yeah.
Well, and speaking of which, you know, when you mentioned Canada participating in this, I mean, I think maybe most people remember that they didn't participate in Iraq War II.
Now here they are, or two and a half, or whatever you call it.
Now here they are for Iraq War III, and you mentioned Australia as well.
Who else is actually in the coalition actually flying planes, not just on paper, but participating in the war?
Yeah.
So actually bombing in Iraq and Syria today, we have the United States, obviously responsible for the vast proportion of airstrikes.
Then we have the U.K., France, Belgium, Netherlands, Australia, Denmark, Canada, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and United Arab Emirates.
And we've heard, obviously, recently Turkey started carrying out its own airstrikes.
Turkey isn't part of the coalition, and we've recently been told that it's not cooperating with the coalition, really.
So they're carrying out their own airstrikes on Islamic State and on the Kurds independently of the coalition.
We also have Israel jumping in there as well.
Israel carried out airstrikes in Syria just the other day.
So it's turning into a free fall, really.
Against Hezbollah, or against the Islamic State?
That was against Hezbollah in Syria.
So it is getting very complicated there right now.
All right.
I'm talking with Chris Woods from airwars.com.
And by the way, I owe you an apology for not getting to Sudden Justice yet.
I've got a pile to read here that I'm just terrible at getting to.
But it is, you know, on the top of the short pile, there are other bigger piles.
So you could be in a worse spot, Chris.
Yeah, it's perfect beach reading, obviously, Scott.
Who wouldn't want to read about drains and targeted killings?
Well, no, I do.
It's just a matter of getting to it, I swear.
Because, honestly, I mean, the reason I kind of interrupt the actual discussion here to talk about that is because I want to highlight your work for people and all that you did at the Bureau for Investigative Journalism.
There are very few who are even attempting to do this kind of meticulous work that you're doing, tracking the deaths from the drone wars.
And that means in Afghanistan, or is it just Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, or is it Afghanistan, too?
Yeah, the book looks quite heavily at places like Afghanistan and Iraq as well and tries to fill in that missing picture of what the drains have been doing on the regular battlefield as well.
Yeah, there you go.
So this is a lot of really important work, and it doesn't get nearly the amount of attention that it deserves.
So, you know, I hope people go and check it out.
Now, by the way, I guess all the stuff at the Bureau for Investigative Journalism is all still there on their site, right?
And then plus there's the book, obviously.
But as far as people accessing all this stuff online, do you have your own personal site, too?
No, just airwars.org.
Airwars.org, that's the new one.
And that's the one we're talking today about the new study on civilian casualties and friendly fire deaths.
It's Chris Woods, and we'll be right back after this.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
You know, I hardly ever mention this because it pales in importance, really, to so many other aspects of it.
But we are talking about a completely unauthorized, undeclared war being waged by the United States and its allies against the Islamic State right now.
And you know what?
Even in my ears, compared to, as we talked about, you know, I mentioned Vietnam there, that kind of thing, 500 civilian casualties doesn't sound like that many.
But, of course, it all depends whose 4-year-old is getting bombed to death, right?
That's the question.
As soon as you realize you're talking about individual human beings, then 500 is a huge number, right?
Right?
So let's talk about that.
Why don't you tell us some of the stories about who got bombed by the Americans crying whoops?
Here, Chris.
Yeah, and Scott, I think you've really put your finger on it there.
A lot of the casualties of these strikes, unfortunately, as so often in these wars, are women and children.
You know, there's a comment from one of the generals running this air war that Islamic State wrapped itself around the civilian populations of Iraq and Syria, and that's where the coalition has had to go.
And, you know, this is a different kind of war than we were fighting in Afghanistan, which is a mostly rural country, poorly populated country.
Most of the airstrikes in Afghanistan, for example, were targeted strikes.
They were planned.
What we're seeing in Iraq and Syria is targets of opportunity.
This is aircraft hunting for targets in the towns and cities of Iraq and Syria.
And, unfortunately, that's where the civilians are getting killed.
And I have to say, you know, some of the material our researchers are having to deal with here in Iraq and in Syria is some of the worst I have ever seen.
Some of the most graphic, some of the most violent, you know, just too many pictures of dead kids coming out of these airstrikes.
And I think it is pretty disgraceful for the coalition not to be more forthright about those people it's actually killing when it makes mistakes.
Because you can absolutely bet that Islamic State, that al-Nusra Front, the Al-Qaeda faction out there, they are making propaganda after these civilian deaths.
And the coalition response is to stick its head in the sand and pretend they're not happening.
And I don't think that's doing them any favors whatsoever.
Yeah.
Well, so can you tell us some of the stories about, you know, the ones that you uncovered?
Yeah.
I mean, it's not just ourselves.
Of course, there are other monitoring groups in Syria and in Iraq.
I mean, one of the worst was a temporary prison in Syria, which the U.S. actually bombed in December, on December 28th of last year.
They hid that fact for two weeks.
They didn't admit that they'd actually bombed this location.
And in fact, it took the news agency McClatchy a lot of pressure on CENTCOM before they finally admitted it was them.
On that occasion, we think at least 58 civilians died.
It was an Islamic State building, but it was also being used as a temporary prison.
It was full of men and women and teenagers who'd been picked up for petty crimes by Islamic State for things like smoking on the street or not having a beard.
And these poor men and women were in this temporary prison, and the U.S. put a bomb through the roof.
And we think 58 civilians killed on that occasion.
Another terrible event in Iraq just a few weeks ago, on June the 3rd, at a place called Hawija in Iraq, where the U.S. again bombed an IED factory, an improvised explosive device factory, where Islamic State was making bombs to send out and kill people.
Unfortunately, there was so much explosive on the scene that the secondary explosions that came from that attack decimated the entire neighborhood.
And in fact, one of the survivors has described his neighborhood as looking like it had been hit by a nuclear bomb.
And when you see the photographs, you know exactly what he means.
And the estimates from that strike are up to 70 civilians killed in that one event.
Now, we still don't know the exact number, but we do know that CENTCOM has now launched a formal investigation and has conceded that civilians almost certainly died in that event.
So we do know on that one they are paying attention.
But on so many other events that we looked at, sometimes it's just one or two people.
Often, other times, it's dozens.
You know, we've identified 140 events.
We know that CENTCOM has investigated 10.
That's a ridiculous gulf between the public understanding and what CENTCOM is actually doing about it.
Yeah.
And now, so what's the proportion of strikes in Iraq compared to Syria?
I guess mostly in Syria, it was all centered around helping the YPG fight in Kobani, right?
Yeah.
And initially, it was about 50-50 between Syria and Iraq.
And there was, of course, a huge number of airstrikes went into Kobani, as you say, helping the YPG.
More than 1,000 of all the airstrikes in Iraq and Syria took place on Kobani over that three-month period.
Since then, or at least until the last month, airstrikes in Syria really dropped away.
Partly that's because America's allies pretty much deserted it in Syria.
All of the Arab nations switched their attention to Yemen.
And they've been bombing the crap out of Yemen for the past few months and killing an awful lot of civilians there, by the way.
So the U.S. has been pretty much on its own in Syria since the new year.
Almost 100% of airstrikes in Syria are by the U.S. only.
The tempo in Syria has really picked up, though, again in the last months.
We have seen the Arab nations starting to bomb again.
And Canada has carried out a couple of airstrikes recently in Syria again.
And unfortunately, no surprises really, the reports of civilian deaths have also started to track upwards as well.
I mean, there's just a direct correlation.
You bomb more, you kill more civilians.
It's that simple.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, so now there's short-term gains to be pointed out here.
But then, of course, the question is, is it worth that at all?
I mean, assuming the premise of the war in the first place.
But you could point to American airstrikes helping the YPG in keeping the Islamic State out of Kobani as being effective.
Airpower on its own, just hunting and killing targets, as you talked about, that's not really going to help.
But in terms of backing up militias on the ground with airpower, that makes sense.
If we're backing militias, say, for example, Shiite militias in Fallujah being led by Iranians on the ground, they could win that tactical victory.
Theoretically, if we drop enough bombs on their behalf, it seems like in Libya, at the end of the day, I guess eventually they'll take it.
But then it still raises all kinds of further questions, though, about, like you said, the propaganda being used, or the effect of the killing of innocents in the propaganda and the effect of, in that example, taking the side of the Shia or taking the side of the communist Kurdish fighters there, and how that plays into the Islamic State's narrative about why the Sunnis of former Iraq and Syria need them.
Because it's America and the Shia and the Israelis against us, and these kinds of narratives.
And then we just go and prove them right, and we don't hit them hard enough to destroy them.
That would take invasion or nukes, so we can't do that.
And so instead we bomb them just enough to make them more powerful.
And that's even Kimberly Dozier, who's pretty much got a Pentagon point of view a lot of the time, here writing for the Daily Beast, says, we didn't kill ISIS, we made them stronger.
That's all we've done is help them solidify their position over the last year of this.
So 500-something dead civilians for nothing, Chris.
Well, I think that's a really strong argument.
And the Human Rights Watch has done some really important work on this about the power vacuum on the ground.
When you have these air-only campaigns without your own forces on the ground, you've got to rely on proxies.
And what Human Rights Watch has shown is that in Iraq in particular, what happens?
Well, the coalition drives out Islamic State, and then who moves in and fills that vacuum?
Shia militia, which are now occupying predominantly Sunni Muslim areas, and they want revenge.
And what we're finding in many of these areas that the Shia militia are going into is they're committing war crimes.
They're burning the villages to the ground.
They're committing atrocities against the people, and they're ethnically cleansing.
So, you know, some of the partners we have in this war are really problematic.
Now, I know the coalition argues against that.
They say, look, we've killed 15,000 Islamic State fighters in the last year.
But then all the estimates say Islamic State is as strong today as it was a year ago.
So does that mean we haven't killed 15,000 fighters or that they can simply make more fighters than we can kill?
And how are they making those fighters?
What's radicalizing those people, those men in those areas of Iraq and Syria?
That's a big question.
And, you know, we have a big problem here in Europe at the moment of European second, third-generation Muslims drawn to Islamic State.
What is that message that's drawing those people?
What's the narrative Islamic State's able to play that radicalizes young men and women to draw them into this area, to recruit them to Islamic State and its values?
I mean, that's a really difficult one for our politicians to answer, I think.
Right, because the answer is obvious.
They don't even want to bring it up.
The answer is obvious.
When our governments kill their civilians.
That's what it's always been since this time 25 years ago onwards.
That's what it's always been.
And you know what?
I've kept you overtime into this break and I realize now that I was supposed to let you go more than 15 minutes ago, Chris.
I'm very sorry.
Thank you so much for your time and come back on the show.
It's great to talk to you.
Please go ahead.
It's always a pleasure, Scott.
Thanks very much for having me on.
Thank you.
All right, y'all.
That's Chris Woods.
He's the author of Sudden Justice.
We'll be right back in just a second.
Hey, y'all.
Scott Horton here.
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