After killing dozens of Syrian civilians in a
2019 bombing, the US military exonerated itself
and concealed evidence. It's the latest scandal
for a shadowy US war in Syria that has evaded
oversight.
By Aaron Maté
November 16, 2021:
Informationclearinghouse.info
-- The
New York Times has exposed one of the US
military's worst massacres and cover-up scandals
since My Lai in Vietnam.
On March 18, 2019, amid a battle with Islamic
State fighters, the US Air Force bombed a crowd of
civilians taking shelter near the town of Baghuz,
Syria, killing a reported 70 people. The attacks
occurred within a 5-minute span: an initial strike,
and then another with heavier bombs as survivors
fled. The Times' Dave Philipps and Eric Schmitt
report:
Without warning, an American F-15E attack
jet… dropped a 500-pound bomb on the crowd,
swallowing it in a shuddering blast. As the
smoke cleared, a few people stumbled away in
search of cover. Then a jet tracking them
dropped one 2,000-pound bomb, then another,
killing most of the survivors.
US military personnel in Qatar watched the attack
in real time via a surveillance drone at the scene.
The high-definition footage showed that only two or
three armed men were near the crowd, and were not
engaging in any kind of combat activity that would
have justified a defensive military strike.
“Who dropped that?” a confused analyst typed
on a secure chat system being used by those
monitoring the drone, two people who reviewed
the chat log recalled. Another responded, “We
just dropped on 50 women and children.” An
initial battle damage assessment quickly found
that the number of dead was actually about 70.
Instead of accountability, "at nearly every step,
the military made moves that concealed the
catastrophic strike," Philipps and Schmitt write.
The site of the bombing was bulldozed; the unit that
conducted the strike vindicated itself; key evidence
was buried; military logs were altered; and
investigations were stalled and subverted. Although
the Pentagon's independent inspector general managed
to launch a probe, "the report containing its
findings was stalled and stripped of any mention of
the strike."
The bombing was called in by a classified special
operations unit, Task Force 9, which led US ground
operations in Syria. Two months after the March 2019
massacre, the task force completed a civilian
casualty report on the strike that claimed that only
four civilians were killed. It also determined that
the strike was lawfully conducted in self-defense.
The Baghuz killings likely only came to light
because of whistleblowers who challenged the
cover-up from within. Lt. Col. Dean W. Korsak, an
Air Force lawyer present at the Qatar air base when
the massacre was observed, immediately ordered
officials to preserve evidence, including video, and
urged superiors to open a war crimes investigation.
When they refused, Korsak alerted the Pentagon's
independent inspector general.
Earlier this year, after two years of inaction,
Korsak shared details about the cover-up with the
Senate Armed Services Committee.
"I’m putting myself at great risk of military
retaliation for sending this," he wrote. "Senior
ranking U.S. military officials intentionally and
systematically circumvented the deliberate strike
process."
…[Korsak] wrote that a unit had intentionally
entered false strike log entries, “clearly
seeking to cover up the incidents.” Calling the
classified death toll “shockingly high,” he said
the military did not follow its own requirements
to report and investigate the strike. There was
a good chance, he wrote, that “the highest
levels of government remained unaware of what
was happening on the ground.”
When Korsak alerted the Air Force's Office of
Special Investigations, an Air Force major replied
that the office would likely only probe the massacre
if there was a "potential for high media attention,
concern with outcry from local community/government,
concern sensitive images may get out."
The Senate Armed Committee reached out to Korsack
after being approached by another whistleblower,
Gene Tate, an investigator at the Pentagon's
Inspector General office. Tate told the Times that
he witnessed similar stonewalling and censorship.
"Leadership just seemed so set on burying this.
No one wanted anything to do with it," Tate said.
"It makes you lose faith in the system when people
are trying to do what’s right but no one in
positions of leadership wants to hear it."
After raising concerns at multiple levels, Tate
says that in October 2020 "he was forced out of his
position and escorted from the building by
security."
In response to the New York Times, Central
Command acknowledged the Baghuz massacre for the
first time. But it continues to deny the civilian
toll, insisting that just four civilians were
killed. According to the Times, a US military
statement claimed that 60 of the dead may have not
have been civilians, "in part because women and
children in the Islamic State sometimes took up
arms."
The Times uncovered additional evidence that the
cover-up is part of a broader pattern of US forces
ignoring safeguards against attacking civilians in
Syria, and hiding the death toll.
According to the Times, some officials believed
that Task Force 9, the unit behind the strike, "was
systematically circumventing the safeguards created
to limit civilian deaths… by late 2018, about 80
percent of all airstrikes it was calling in claimed
self-defense."
Previous mass casualty causing military
operations in Syria have also evaded scrutiny. As a
New Yorker report observed in 2020, US bombings
in Syria have "reduced parts of the country to
wasteland." In Raqqa, US adopted "a strategy of
physical annihilation applied against a city that
still harbored a significant civilian population",
causing an "utter decimation" that "might be unique
in this century."
According to the Times' exposé on Baghuz, US
officials assessing civilian deaths in places like
Raqqa "did not investigate on the ground and often
based their findings on how many dead civilians they
could definitively identify from aerial footage of
the rubble."
The
New York Times has exposed one of the US
military's worst massacres and cover-up scandals
since My Lai in Vietnam.
On March 18, 2019, amid a battle with Islamic
State fighters, the US Air Force bombed a crowd of
civilians taking shelter near the town of Baghuz,
Syria, killing a reported 70 people. The attacks
occurred within a 5-minute span: an initial strike,
and then another with heavier bombs as survivors
fled. The Times' Dave Philipps and Eric Schmitt
report:
Without warning, an American F-15E attack
jet… dropped a 500-pound bomb on the crowd,
swallowing it in a shuddering blast. As the
smoke cleared, a few people stumbled away in
search of cover. Then a jet tracking them
dropped one 2,000-pound bomb, then another,
killing most of the survivors.
US military personnel in Qatar watched the attack
in real time via a surveillance drone at the scene.
The high-definition footage showed that only two or
three armed men were near the crowd, and were not
engaging in any kind of combat activity that would
have justified a defensive military strike.
“Who dropped that?” a confused analyst typed
on a secure chat system being used by those
monitoring the drone, two people who reviewed
the chat log recalled. Another responded, “We
just dropped on 50 women and children.” An
initial battle damage assessment quickly found
that the number of dead was actually about 70.
Instead of accountability, "at nearly every step,
the military made moves that concealed the
catastrophic strike," Philipps and Schmitt write.
The site of the bombing was bulldozed; the unit that
conducted the strike vindicated itself; key evidence
was buried; military logs were altered; and
investigations were stalled and subverted. Although
the Pentagon's independent inspector general managed
to launch a probe, "the report containing its
findings was stalled and stripped of any mention of
the strike."
The bombing was called in by a classified special
operations unit, Task Force 9, which led US ground
operations in Syria. Two months after the March 2019
massacre, the task force completed a civilian
casualty report on the strike that claimed that only
four civilians were killed. It also determined that
the strike was lawfully conducted in self-defense.
The Baghuz killings likely only came to light
because of whistleblowers who challenged the
cover-up from within. Lt. Col. Dean W. Korsak, an
Air Force lawyer present at the Qatar air base when
the massacre was observed, immediately ordered
officials to preserve evidence, including video, and
urged superiors to open a war crimes investigation.
When they refused, Korsak alerted the Pentagon's
independent inspector general.
Earlier this year, after two years of inaction,
Korsak shared details about the cover-up with the
Senate Armed Services Committee.
"I’m putting myself at great risk of military
retaliation for sending this," he wrote. "Senior
ranking U.S. military officials intentionally and
systematically circumvented the deliberate strike
process."
…[Korsak] wrote that a unit had intentionally
entered false strike log entries, “clearly
seeking to cover up the incidents.” Calling the
classified death toll “shockingly high,” he said
the military did not follow its own requirements
to report and investigate the strike. There was
a good chance, he wrote, that “the highest
levels of government remained unaware of what
was happening on the ground.”
When Korsak alerted the Air Force's Office of
Special Investigations, an Air Force major replied
that the office would likely only probe the massacre
if there was a "potential for high media attention,
concern with outcry from local community/government,
concern sensitive images may get out."
The Senate Armed Committee reached out to Korsack
after being approached by another whistleblower,
Gene Tate, an investigator at the Pentagon's
Inspector General office. Tate told the Times that
he witnessed similar stonewalling and censorship.
"Leadership just seemed so set on burying this.
No one wanted anything to do with it," Tate said.
"It makes you lose faith in the system when people
are trying to do what’s right but no one in
positions of leadership wants to hear it."
After raising concerns at multiple levels, Tate
says that in October 2020 "he was forced out of his
position and escorted from the building by
security."
In response to the New York Times, Central
Command acknowledged the Baghuz massacre for the
first time. But it continues to deny the civilian
toll, insisting that just four civilians were
killed. According to the Times, a US military
statement claimed that 60 of the dead may have not
have been civilians, "in part because women and
children in the Islamic State sometimes took up
arms."
The Times uncovered additional evidence that the
cover-up is part of a broader pattern of US forces
ignoring safeguards against attacking civilians in
Syria, and hiding the death toll.
According to the Times, some officials believed
that Task Force 9, the unit behind the strike, "was
systematically circumventing the safeguards created
to limit civilian deaths… by late 2018, about 80
percent of all airstrikes it was calling in claimed
self-defense."
Previous mass casualty causing military
operations in Syria have also evaded scrutiny. As a
New Yorker report observed in 2020, US bombings
in Syria have "reduced parts of the country to
wasteland." In Raqqa, US adopted "a strategy of
physical annihilation applied against a city that
still harbored a significant civilian population",
causing an "utter decimation" that "might be unique
in this century."
According to the Times' exposé on Baghuz, US
officials assessing civilian deaths in places like
Raqqa "did not investigate on the ground and often
based their findings on how many dead civilians they
could definitively identify from aerial footage of
the rubble."
Underscoring the bipartisan mission, Stroul's
rationale was expressed more crudely by President
Trump in January 2020,
when he told Fox News that he had backed off a
withdrawal from Syria in order to "to take the oil.
I took the oil."
The US Congress is so committed to deploying US
troops to steal Syrian resources that it refuses to
even debate it. In September, a
proposed amendment from
Rep. Jamal Bowman (D-NY) that would require
Congressional authorization for the U.S. military
force in Syria
was defeated 141-286.
Although the U.S. military launched operations in
Syria in 2014, this vote marked the first time that
either chamber of Congress has taken a recorded
floor vote on whether to authorize the deployment of
hundreds of troops there.
The Congressional endorsement of continued
military occupation in Syria pleased the Biden
administration, which "doesn't want a cap on
military operations in Syria,"
Politico reported. "The United States is in
Syria for the sole purpose of enabling the campaign
against ISIS, which is not yet over," a National
Security Council spokesperson claimed, omitting the
hegemonic motives previously admitted by Stroul and
Trump.
The Congressional abrogation of its oversight and
war authority powers in Syria follows its
decade-long rubber stamp on arguably the most
catastrophic and deadly US operation of them all:
Timber Sycamore, the multi-billion dollar CIA
program that armed and trained insurgents seeking to
overthrow Syria's government.
Just like the cover-up over the Baghuz massacre,
US officials concealed the costs and consequences of
the massive covert CIA operation.
Timber Sycamore proved to be "one of the
costliest covert action programs in the history of
the C.I.A", the
New York Times reported in 2017, after Trump
ordered its cancellation. With "a budget approaching
$1 billion a year," or "about $1 of every $15 in the
CIA’s overall budget," the CIA armed and trained
nearly 10,000 insurgents, spending "roughly $100,000
per year for every anti-Assad rebel who has gone
through the program," the
Washington Post revealed in 2015. Citing a
"knowledgeable US official," the Post's David
Ignatius
reported in 2017, the "many dozens of militia
groups" given "many hundreds of millions of dollars"
by the CIA "may have killed or wounded 100,000
Syrian soldiers and their allies over the past four
years."
As David McCloskey, a former CIA analyst who
worked on Syria during the program's early years,
told me in a recent interview for The Grayzone,
the US continued this program despite the internal
understanding that "al-Qaeda affiliated groups and
Salafi jihadist groups were the primary engine of
the insurgency." The US government's tacit alliance
with Al Qaeda, McCloskey said, was "a tremendously
problematic aspect of the conflict."
US support for an Al Qaeda-dominated insurgency
was privately acknowledged at the highest levels in
the Syrian war's early years. In February 2012, Jake
Sullivan -- now Biden's National Security Advisor --
wrote to Hillary Clinton: "AQ [Al Qaeda] is on
our side in Syria."
Although Sullivan made that admission in secret,
the most publicly blunt acknowledgement of the US
"side" in Syria came two years later from his
current boss. In Syria, there was "no moderate
middle," then-Vice President Joe Biden told a
Harvard audience in 2014. Instead, Biden said, US
"allies" in Syria "poured hundreds of millions of
dollars and thousands of tons of weapons into anyone
who would fight against Assad. Except that the
people who were being supplied were Al-Nusra, and
Al-Qaeda and the extremist elements of jihadis
coming from other parts of the world."
Biden's only error was omitting the extensive US
role
in concert with its "allies."
The CIA and its allies' arming of a jihadi-dominated
insurgency prolonged the Syrian war and led to
untold atrocities. In the coastal Latakia region, a
Human Rights Watch investigation found that
US-armed insurgents were responsible for "the
systematic killing of entire families." The
US-backed insurgents there were bent on "sectarian
mass murder",
Robert F. Worth of the New York Times found:
In Latakia, some people told me that their
city might have been destroyed if not for the
Russians. The city has long been one of Syria’s
safe zones, well defended by the army and its
militias; there are tent cities full of people
who have fled other parts of the country,
including thousands from Aleppo. But in the
summer of 2015, the rebels were closing in on
the Latakia city limits, and mortars were
falling downtown. If the rebels had captured the
area — where Alawites are the majority — a
result would almost certainly have been
sectarian mass murder. Many people in the region
would have blamed the United States, which armed
some of the rebels operating in the area.
Congress is mandated to oversee CIA programs like
the covert dirty war in Syria. But instead, "there
is no evidence that the intelligence committees ever
used their powers to prevent, seriously modify, or
terminate this fatally flawed operation," former
Congressional staffer Stephen Weissman
wrote in
Foreign Affairs
last year. Even when the House Intelligence
Committee voted in 2015 to cut the CIA program's $1
billion budget by 20 percent, Weissman observes,
"the actions of the committee’s Senate counterpart
were never made public, so it’s possible that even
that modest reduction never went into effect."
Congress has also rejected oversight when it
comes to the impact of its crippling sanctions on
Syria. The Caesar Act, approved by voice vote in
December 2019, aggressively seeks to prevent Syria's
reconstruction and has, in the
unapologetic words of former Trump envoy James
Jeffrey, "crushed the country’s economy." In 2020,
then-Rep. Tulsi Gabbard
advanced a measure that would require regular
reports on how sanctions impact civilians of
targeted states like Syria. But the proposal was
ultimately stripped by the Senate.
The prevailing rejection of accountability for US
warfare in Syria is so extreme that not even
high-level whistleblowers and explosive evidence can
ensure public scrutiny. Whereas two brave US
military officials managed to expose the massacre in
Baghuz, the US media -- including the New York Times
-- continues to ignore the OPCW scientists who
challenged a US-backed cover-up at the world's top
chemical weapons watchdog.
The US, Britain and France bombed Syria in April
2018 after accusing it of committing a chemical
weapons attack in Douma that same month. Leaked OPCW
documents later revealed that the inspectors who
investigated the scene in Douma found no evidence of
chemical weapons use. Their findings instead suggest
that the incident was staged by insurgents to frame
the Syrian government. But the team's
original report was doctored, censored, and
ultimately kept from the public. A US delegation was
also brought in to meet with the inspectors and try
to
influence the probe in its favor. Although a
series of explosive OPCW leaks have been released
since May 2019, primarily at
WikiLeaks and
The Grayzone, Congress and US media outlets
have refused to even acknowledge the scandal.
By revealing that the military murdered dozens of
civilians and then concealed the crime, the New York
Times' Dave Philipps and Eric Schmitt have
pierced the media and Congressional blockade
surrounding US operations in Syria. After a decade
of covert dirty warfare; devastating military
strikes; and crippling sanctions on Syria, there are
many more scandals to come to light.
https://mate.substack.com/
Registration is necessary to post comments.
We ask only that you do not use obscene or offensive
language. Please be respectful of others.
