We Can't Say We Didn't Know by Sophie McNeill

Author:Sophie McNeill
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ABC Books
Published: 2020-02-04T00:00:00+00:00

Iraq and Syria, early 2017

One night, eight-year-old Hashim Abdul Fattah Al Ali was sitting with his family in their home in the town of Abu Kamal in Deir Ezzor province, Syria. That same evening a coalition warplane took off from a base somewhere in the Middle East and headed towards Hashim’s village. Suddenly, they dropped their load, an airstrike slamming into a target not far from Hashim’s house, causing a massive explosion. Little Hashim lost his life. But there was no blood; he reportedly died of a heart attack. The little boy was literally scared to death.4

By early 2017, there had been more than 17,000 coalition airstrikes on ISIS-held cities and towns across Syria and Iraq in an attempt to wipe out the jihadists.5 But millions of innocent civilians were living in the same locations, trapped under the militants’ rule – how many of them were also being killed in this massive bombing campaign?

At desks in the UK, Turkey, Jordan and Iraq, a fastidious team of researchers was trying to answer that question. They are part of Airwars, a non-profit NGO tracking coalition airstrikes on ISIS. Led by British investigative journalist Chris Woods, a team of eight researchers spent hours each day painstakingly sorting through whatever information they could glean: combing through mobile phone videos, Facebook posts, local media reports and official US military information to paint a picture of what was happening on the ground and just who was being killed.

‘Everyone in Iraq and Syria has a cell phone. Everybody is taking videos, photographs, uploading stuff onto the internet. So we know a great deal about civilians – how they’re dying, where they’re dying, when they’re dying,’ Woods explained.

Their assessment of what was happening on the ground was grim – by February 2017, Airwars believed over 2500 civilians had been killed in coalition bombings since their air campaign on ISIS had begun in mid 2014. The team had compiled hundreds of cases of civilians allegedly killed in Syria and Iraq from coalition bombings, with the names, ages, locations and details of how those civilians were dying. They hoped their collation of data and the evidence of civilian deaths would force coalition nations to be more careful in their targeting as they ramped up their airstrikes on Mosul. ‘It’s become much more difficult for militaries to ignore that information now,’ Woods said.

One of the cases the Airwars team was investigating was an airstrike on 13 December 2016 that obliterated two neighbouring houses in Al Sukar neighbourhood in north-east Mosul. Footage of the site sent from family members trapped in Mosul and passed on to relatives in Canada shows desperate rescuers frantically trying to dig through the rubble and remains of the collapsed buildings. Eleven members of one family were killed, with five children among the dead.

Airwars ensured these civilians were not anonymous: 78-year-old grandfather Ahmed Nather Mahmood; his 68-year-old wife, Badreah; their son Shehab and his wife, Amear, and their children, Ahlam and Ali; and Ahmed’s daughter Ekhlass and her children, Malak, Athear, Ali and Mohannad.

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