WASHINGTON (AFP) – The
Pentagon launched a fresh probe Monday into a 2019 airstrike that killed civilians in Syria, two weeks after a New York Times investigation reported the U.S. military concealed dozens of non-combatants’ deaths.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin instructed Army General Michael Garrett to “review the reports of the investigation already conducted into that incident” and “conduct further inquiry into the facts and circumstances related to it,” Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said.
Garrett’s three-month review will assess “civilian casualties that resulted from the incident, compliance with the law of war, record keeping and reporting procedures,” Kirby added.
It will also probe whether measures taken after the earlier investigation were effectively implemented, if “accountability measures” should be taken and if “procedures or processes should be altered.”
According to a Times investigation published mid-November, a U.S. special force operating in Syria — sometimes in complete secrecy — bombed a group of civilians three times on March 18, 2019, near the Daesh bastion of Baghouz, killing 70 people, mainly women and children.
The Times report says a U.S. legal officer “flagged the strike as a possible war crime” but that “at nearly every step, the military made moves that concealed the catastrophic strike.”
The Times found the strike “was one of the largest civilian casualty incidents of the war,” but was never publicly acknowledged by the U.S. military.
“The death toll was downplayed. Reports were delayed, sanitized and classified. United States-led coalition forces bulldozed the blast site. And top leaders were not notified,” the report said, adding findings of a Pentagon probe were “stalled and stripped of any mention of the strike.”
The U.S. and its allies invaded Syria in 2014 under the pretext of fighting the Daesh terrorist group. The outfit had emerged as Washington was running out of excuses to extend its regional meddling or enlarge it in scale.
The military interference was surprisingly slow in confronting the terrorists, despite the sheer size of the coalition that had enlisted scores of Washington’s allied countries.
Numerous reports and regional officials would, meanwhile, point to the U.S.’s role in transferring Daesh’s elements throughout the region and even airlifting supplies to the terror outfit.
In 2017 and in the height of the coalition’s military campaign in Syria, Russia drew a parallel between the destruction that was being caused by the U.S.-led forces and the wholesale bombing campaign on the German city of Dresden during World War II.