09/15/15 – 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.
Scott Horton show.
First guest today.
Oh, I guess our only guest today is going to be our friend Chris Woods.
Author of Sudden Justice and now at Air Wars dot org, you can also find tons of his previous journalism at the Bureau for Investigative Journalism.
Welcome back to the show.
Chris, how are you?
Thanks, Scott.
Yeah, very good.
Very busy at the moment, as you can imagine.
But good.
Yeah.
Well, there's lots of air wars going on, aren't there?
There aren't.
They seem to be multiplying by the week at the moment.
Yeah.
Boy, I'm about to have to sneeze.
So I'm going to turn it over to you.
Tell us about this new report that you have here for the month of August.
So yeah, at Air Wars, we've we've been putting together a monthly report looking into what the international coalition has been doing in Iraq and Syria.
And the air war there continues to get more intense, as I'm sure your listeners know.
Since August of 2014, this international coalition of 13 partners now has been attacking Islamic states across both countries.
We're now told that more than twenty two thousand four hundred and seventy eight bombs and missiles have been dropped on Iraq and Syria, six and a half thousand airstrikes.
The bulk of those, by the way, by the United States, we did the numbers for Syria.
Ninety nine percent of all of the airstrikes in Syria last month were by the US.
They're not really a coalition there at all, Scott.
Really it's a unilateral conflict involving the US, although we're told that Australia and France are keen to get into that fight in the coming days.
And of course, the UK only recently carried out its first targeted assassination away from the battlefield.
I mean, Syria is obviously a battlefield, but not for Britain.
The British parliament voted that the UK government couldn't carry out airstrikes in Syria without its express permission.
The British government did that anyway.
So lots going on.
On the other side of that coin, we've got civilian casualties.
These continue to mount.
You wouldn't necessarily know it from reports in the US, but we logged twelve incidents of concern in August.
Four of those were particularly worried about.
One involved the deaths of seven children, including six little girls, sadly, from one family and another incident, 18 people killed.
We think when a public celebration was bombed in Mosul, one of those incidents was self-reported by the Danish military.
We're encouraged by that.
It's the first time any of these coalition members have publicly said, by the way, we think we may have killed or injured civilians.
They did that just after an event on August the 30th, and that's an investigation that's still going on.
So lots of change, lots of movement, lots of bombs.
You know, that's interesting.
You bring up Denmark.
Did they have in their parliament some kind of declaration of war against the Islamic State or they're just under the NATO charter or whatever?
I mean, the Islamic State hadn't attacked the United States, so I don't think the US invoked the NATO charter, did they?
I think Turkey tried to, but against Assad or something.
Under what legality and what all different countries are in there anyway?
So we've had 13 countries in.
In fact, Denmark's pulling out on October the 1st.
Belgium has already left the coalition, but it's almost a sort of airstrike musical chairs.
We've got Turkey coming in at the moment, and of course, independently of everybody, it looks like we'll have Russian jets coming in to bomb ISIL and defend Assad later this month.
The skies above Syria in particular are getting very dangerous, and in fact, the coalition or rather John Kerry State Department warned Russia just last week there was a risk of conflict with the coalition.
So the idea of a Russian coalition war over Syria is really what we don't need at the moment.
So the countries that we have, we have the UK, United States, obviously, France, Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands, Australia, Canada, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Ghetta, and Jordan, and Turkey has just come in in the last few weeks.
So it's a big spread of countries.
They all go in for different reasons.
Some have voted in their national parliaments to engage, but on other occasions, they don't at all.
Australia announced it's about to start carrying out airstrikes in Syria.
They've been bombing in Iraq for the last year, but they're now moving across to Syria.
They did not consult their parliament.
That's caused quite a bit of upset across Australia.
So each country's in there fighting for slightly different reasons.
They're all there to defeat Islamic State, they say.
But under different rules of engagement, using different aircraft, none of them formally under any UN or NATO rulebook.
So it's a very complicated business.
It's really, if you like, an ad hoc alliance of 13 members, nominally under a couple of UN resolutions that call on the international community to defeat Islamic State.
Yeah.
Well, at least there's a little bit of humor in the fact that the Americans are incensed that the Russians want to go and do what ostensibly the Americans are doing themselves, fighting the Islamic State.
Only the Russians will say it's for Assad, and the Americans insist still on regime-changing Assad.
But they've got the same enemy here.
So it's only America's insane policy of still trying to debauthify the government in Damascus after all these years that put us in conflict with the Russians on this at all.
You'd think they'd be inviting the Russians into NATO and say, let's all go bomb the Islamic State together, you know?
I think that the horror that the State Department has is if somehow by this Russian intervention, the Assad regime survives.
And just to be clear, you know, Islamic State is a horrific terror-based organization.
But the number of civilians it's killed in Iraq and Syria is a fraction of the civilians butchered by Assad.
Assad deliberately targets civilians in rebel-held areas.
That's not just areas held by Islamic State, but also Nusra Front, the Free Syrian Army, the Kurds, and so on.
Thousands and thousands and thousands of Syrians have died as a result of the Assad regime's airstrikes.
So I can understand the state being concerned about Russia bolstering Assad or keeping him in power longer.
But this is the problem.
You know, we are players in a five or even six-way civil war in Syria right now.
And it's never been clear to me what our overall aim is.
By defeating Islamic State, we may guarantee the victory of the Nusra Front, which of course is the local al-Qaeda affiliate, or even the Assad regime.
I just don't understand how that makes military sense.
And what we never hear, of course, Scott, is about civilians on the ground.
We never hear about peace.
We never hear about the plan to stop this fighting.
It's always about the bombs, always about war.
Yeah, of course.
Well, and when it comes to civilian casualties, airstrikes aside, if the regime falls, I mean, I don't know about Assad, this or that.
Of course, there's a new report out today about how the Russians offered to get rid of Assad back in 2012.
And the Americans said, no, they'd rather have a war, I guess.
That's in The Guardian today.
But if his regime falls, then that'll just be the start of the civilian casualty count when it comes to the crucifixions and beheadings and suicide bombings and the rest of the war that the jihadists would bring to all the Shia, the Druze, the Christians, and even the vast numbers of Sunnis that still support the regime.
You're absolutely right.
I mean, you have to take Assad out of the equation and realize that there are 40 percent of Syrians who are from a position against those who've risen up against Assad.
Forty percent of the entire remaining population, really the whole area around Latakia, most of Aleppo, millions of people.
And Al Jazeera has had chat shows where the host has talked about genocide against these people as if this is something entirely natural to discuss.
One of the most shocking things I've ever seen on TV.
Some of the more radical Islamist groups openly discuss, as you say, how they will behead and crucify the civilians in this area.
So whether you like Assad or not, he is helping to preserve the lives of those people at the moment.
And if Assad falls, as you say, Scott, what we're seeing now could just be a fraction of the deaths to come.
It is a terrible, terrible situation.
And I don't want anybody to misunderstand me here, like I support Assad or think the U.S. government should support Assad or anything, but we sure as hell shouldn't be backing the rebels against him and shouldn't have been the last four years.
I mean, truth, you're correct about the civilians, his military slaughters, but this war would have been over in 2011 if America, Turkey, Saudi, Qatar and Israel weren't supporting the bin Laden night headchopper crazies this whole time.
And so now we're in this position where, you know, the war would have been over, you know.
Now we're we got what, a couple hundred thousand killed at least and maybe many more than that coming up.
And we got to go to break.
But when we get back, more on the air wars with Chris Woods from Air Wars dot org.
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All right, Joe.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton and yeah, it's my show, the Scott Horton Show here on Liberty Radio Network.
Noon to two eastern time, 11 to one Texas time.
I'm talking with Chris Woods from Air Wars dot org.
They've got their new report out for August Coalition Strikes and Civilian Casualty Claims in Iraq and Syria, August 2015.
And man, there's so many different things to talk about here, Chris.
I want to ask you partially about the what you know of or what you have heard, what you think of, what's the basis for the intelligence that is being used for the targeting here?
Because a bunch of planes, I mean, even drones are basically deaf, blind and stupid up there in the air flying around with a bird's eye view and don't know anything.
And F-16 going, you know, half a mock or whatever.
Yeah, they're even less capable than that and flying at even higher altitudes.
So and I don't think I mean, there have been some obviously there's special forces embedded with the Kurds or whatever.
We're talking about airstrikes in Mosul and Ramadi and Fallujah, where there are not reported to be any American special forces or spies with laser pointers.
And I wonder who you think is telling them, here's who you need to bomb.
It depends really where we're talking about the airstrikes.
So in northern Syria at the moment, for example, there's a major Peshmerga offensive, the Peshmerga, the YPK on that side of the border.
They've captured a lot of territory across northern Syria since they broke out of the siege of Kobani earlier this year.
So many of those airstrikes are guided in by the Peshmerga on the ground, just as the Peshmerga across the border in Iraq guide in airstrikes.
And there's a major Iraq army offensive going on around the city of Tuz in Iraq at the moment that again will have more traditional ground spotters calling in those strikes.
The rest of the strikes, as you say, Scott, Mosul, Ramadi, Fallujah, Raqqa, al-Hasakah, all of these cities and towns, the names we've come to know so well, those are strikes, they're targets of opportunity or they're intelligence-led strikes.
There is clearly human intelligence coming from the ground.
I mean, the coalition is without a doubt taking out some of the senior leaders of ISIL in both Iraq and in Syria, often very targeted strikes on moving vehicles and so on, taking out named leaders.
So it can't all be aerial only.
There has to be human intelligence coming out.
Bridges hit, operational bases destroyed and so on.
Other kinds of strikes, we have the planes roving around looking for targets.
I think those kind of strikes are the ones that are most dangerous for civilians on the ground.
We often see civilians caught up in those, killed by shrapnel or a vehicle goes into the kill box at the last minute.
And in fact, Airwars published just last week actually with major international media partners, we were given a declassified CENTCOM document which showed how CENTCOM had investigated 45 alleged incidents of civilian casualties in this air war.
Sadly, it had dismissed almost all of them within 24 to 48 hours without really properly investigating them.
But what that did show is that in a quarter of those cases, they've been internally reported by the coalition itself.
So this was pilots, navigators, intelligence analysts internally saying, actually, we think there was a problem on this strike.
We saw these two motorbikes come into the kill zone or we're not quite sure if there was a child in this bunker.
So I mean, clearly the coalition takes it seriously, but the quality of the intelligence is still less than we would hope for.
And one thing we track at Airwars is the monthly data that CENTCOM releases on.
In military terms, it's called ISR, Intelligence Surveillance Reconnaissance.
This is the lifeblood of modern conflicts, aerial surveillance.
This is how you decide what to target.
And more than a year into the war, Iraq and Syria are still lagging way behind ISR provision in Afghanistan.
Now, that may sound like a really technical term and a technical point.
But when you've got no spotters on the ground, that ISR is vital.
And we don't really understand why the coalition has got so little ISR in there, even a year on.
We think part of the problem is the US military is stretched so thin now across so many theaters of conflict.
And of course, the US is the primary supplier of high quality ISR that it simply doesn't have the kit to go around.
It's in Mali.
It's in Libya.
It's in Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Egypt, and God knows where else.
So I think, you know, they're up against the buffers on this.
And we saw, you know, just a few weeks ago, the Pentagon announcing it was doubling again the US drone fleet.
I think that's entirely what this is about.
You know, it's not what they said.
I missed that.
Yeah, they're going to double again.
Sorry, it's up by 50%, so it will go from 60 drones that can be simultaneously fielded in any one hour up to 90.
So it's a 50% boost up to 90 caps.
But that actually is, there's four or five drones for each of those combat air patrols.
And that's only including the Reapers and the Predators.
That's not necessarily all the millions of other kinds, right?
Exactly.
That's just armed drones.
So yeah, it's a complicated war, this, and it's being fought on lots of different fronts and lots of different ways, some of it quite traditional, troops on the ground, other parts of it, intelligence driven strikes, and then you have this third layer, which is targets of opportunity.
And in fact, the UK Guardian reported just a few weeks ago, that 90% of the strikes in total, were actually targets of opportunity across Iraq and Syria.
That is challenging stuff.
Yeah.
Well, and so I wonder, you know, you have the list of at least the admitted strikes that they do, airstrikes that they do, that CENTCOM publishes and all that.
And I guess your task is really to try to correlate that with whatever other information you can get coming out of Iraq and Syria about those same strikes, and see if you can, you know, find much information.
But there's very little reporting going on out of the Islamic State right now, right?
So how difficult is it for you to pin down how many civilians killed are we really talking about here?
It sounds like we're talking 10s of civilians in 1000s of strikes that doesn't seem right.
Well, it's interesting in Syria, we have a much easier job.
And part of the reason is that when the Arab Spring happened, and then the and then the civil war broke out a year later, monitoring groups inside Syria sprang up to record the casualties of the civil war.
And then when ISIL appeared, when Islamic State appeared, they just added ISIL to that list.
And then when the coalition came along and started bombing in Syria, they just added us to the list.
So we just became another belligerent, whose bombings were being measured.
So the reporting even in cities like Raqqa, al-Hasakah, is not bad, actually, there are groups in there risking their lives to get this information out.
Not just of course, about those killed by Islamic State, but also by the Assad regime and by Daesh themselves.
So the quality of information from Syria is we find much better.
We've I think, so far, we've named in our data, which is called often from these monitoring organizations, we've we've named in our own data, I think, about 320 of the civilians reported killed.
And it's helpful, because of course, when you name a civilian, you get biographical details, photos, and so on, it's, you know, it's no longer a statistic, it's also much harder to fake an actual named person.
And I'm sorry, I said tens when I, you know, clearly, we're talking hundreds and hundreds.
We are talking hundreds.
Absolutely.
Our minimum estimate is that at least 550 civilians have been killed by the coalition in Iraq and Syria to the end of August.
It's still a fraction, a fraction of the civilians killed by the Assad regime.
And to come back to your point, you know, how accurate can these be?
And so on.
What's what's bizarre about the war in Syria, in particular, is it's almost like we have an old style air war and a modern air war running side by side.
Often the coalition and Assad will bomb the same cities on the same day, one using indiscriminate barrel bombing and fuel air bombs and so on.
The other using more precise weapons.
And certainly what we hear from the ground is that those coalition bombs are causing far fewer civilian casualties.
But they're not called causing zero civilian casualties, which, of course, is the line that the coalition is pretty much pushing.
Still, the coalition still only admits to two likely civilian casualties in more than a year of bombing.
It's absurd, of course, absolutely absurd and frankly, insulting not just to Iraqis and Syrians, you know, the reality, but also to Americans, Brits, Australians who were expected to believe this guff.
But now, Chris, now, OK, so the hard math and the numbers aside here, I'm just asking, you know, on the record here, but not not your your science and your journalism, but your knowledge and your wisdom and your gut feeling about what's going on here.
Do you think that five hundred is probably pretty low, but you just can't show any higher than that?
Or you think that that's really about right?
We can only go on the evidence that we have.
We can't.
You know, we get criticized for being low.
Our response to that can only be, you know, we have we have researchers, Arabic researchers, Syrian researchers, Iraqi researchers scouring media, scouring social media, talking to people, trying to find every claim and then assess it.
So we're finding as much as we can.
We can't invent this stuff.
So the numbers are telling us, you know, five hundred minimum.
But then having said that, when that CENTCOM report came into our hands a few weeks ago, a quarter of those cases had never been publicly reported.
So there are bound to be cases we're not aware of.
And there are vested interests on all sides here wanting to play down these civilian casualties or play them up depending on the faction.
So it's very difficult, but we think it's worth doing.
Yeah, well, it's incredible journalism and another spectacular interview.
Thank you very much, Chris.
I really appreciate it.
Thanks for having me, Scott.
All right.
So that's Chris Woods.
He's at Airwars.org.
His book is Sudden Justice, and you can also find a tremendous archive at the Bureau for Investigative Journalism.
We'll be right back.
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