#Us drone strike on isis series#
#Us drone strike on isis free#

That’s what a free press at its very best does. “I cannot say that this process was pleasant,” Pentagon Press Secretary John Kirby said in response to the Times’ award-winning coverage.

#Us drone strike on isis series#

Image: Courtesy of KhanĪfter the blockbuster series won the Pulitzer, the reporters even earned a rare compliment from the US military itself. The Pulitzer Prize Committee noted Azmat Khan’s role as contributing writer in its 2022 award to the Times for International Reporting. Likewise, Pentagon officials dismissed claims of civilian deaths at a place in Iraq called “Al-Bab Al-Gharbi,” because they looked for – and failed to find – two separate locations called “Al-Bab” and “Al-Gharbi.” For instance, reviewers abandoned an inquiry into a claim about 30 deaths in the Mosul neighborhood of Siha because they could not find a place with that name – but the Times team quickly found it listed as “Sihah” on Google Maps, and also found news reports with the “Siha” English spelling with simple Google searches. Casualties in several towns were not assessed at all because military reviewers either confused them with other villages with similar names that were not targeted, or claimed they could not even find the towns on their maps. Likewise, the Times uncovered similar bias and incompetence in the casualty review process. (Hear reporter Azmat Khan discuss how these biases affected US airstrike targeting in the clip below.) The second was contextual ignorance, where flawed “patterns of life” theories were used to predict civilian movements, and little attention paid to behavior tied to predictable events like Ramadan, midday heat, and civilians ordered to move by ISIS fighters.

The first was confirmation bias, in which everyday objects and activities were often misinterpreted as the kinds of weapons or suspicious movements that preoccupied strike officers. The Times revealed two mutually-reinforcing errors among many strike planners. The Times investigation was based on ground reporting at the locations of more than 100 civilian casualty sites in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan, interviews with military insiders and witnesses, leads from databases like Airwars, and an analysis of a trove of confidential military assessment documents obtained through the US Freedom of Information Act. One important approach to this investigative field was pioneered by journalists and researchers from two UK-based nonprofit groups: The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ) - a GIJN member organization which has used public documents, press reports, and some original sources to track drone strikes in the Middle East since 2010 – and Airwars, a watchdog that has used a wide variety of sources, including Arabic-language social media and NGO reports, to document civilian casualties from airstrikes and artillery in the region since 2014.

In its citation, the Pulitzer board lauded the “courageous and relentless reporting that exposed the vast civilian toll of US-led airstrikes, challenging official accounts of American military engagements in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan.” The newspaper’s damning, eight-part series sent shockwaves through the US Department of Defense and, earlier this month, won the Pulitzer Prize in the International Reporting category. Based on its exhaustive analysis, the Times concluded that “the American air war has been plagued by deeply flawed intelligence, rushed and imprecise targeting, and the deaths of thousands of civilians.” These were just two of more than 1,300 incidents of alleged civilian casualties examined by a team at the Times in an exposé on the US-led coalition air war against ISIS in the Middle East since 2014. The target: a man - later found to be an aid worker - who had been tracked by a Reaper surveillance drone and seen loading objects into a car that were wrongly interpreted by distant analysts as bomb parts. On August 29 of last year, 10 people - all civilians - were killed by a drone-fired Hellfire missile launched into a courtyard in Kabul, Afghanistan. The paper reported that about 70 people, including dozens of civilians, were likely killed in that single, catastrophic blunder. Far away, at a US military air operations center in Qatar, one “confused analyst” monitoring drone surveillance typed “Who dropped that?” into the secure messaging system, according to The New York Times. On March 18, 2019, a US fighter jet seeking ISIS terrorist targets dropped a bomb on a large crowd of women, men, and children near the town of Baghuz, Syria – and another coalition aircraft then dropped two more bombs on the survivors.