United States defense officials admitted that the American military covered up airstrikes launched in the last days of the battle against the Islamic State group based in Syria that killed dozens of civilians.
At the time, members of the once-fierce caliphate were trapped in a dirt field near a town called Baghuz. A United States drone was circling high above in the sky, looking for military targets but only found a large crowd of women and children huddled against a riverbank.
Civilian Casualties
Instead of letting the civilians, a U.S. F-15E attack jet, without warning, bombarded across the drone's HD field of vision using a 500-pound bomb. Later on, another jet swooped by and dropped a 2,000-pound bomb followed by another.
The incident, which occurred on Mar. 18, 2019, was observed by uniformed personnel who watched the live drone footage in stunned disbelief. They were monitoring the situation at the U.S. military's busy Combined Air Operations Center at Al Udeid Air Base located in Qatar, Yahoo News reported.
U.S. military officials have tried to defend the attack as "legitimate" by identifying 16 of the 80 people killed as being members of the militant group and four as civilians. However, they were unable to conclude on the remaining victims of the blast with one spokesperson saying that it was "highly likely" that these people were civilians.
Military commanders ignored alarms that were set in the aftermath of the bombings, and officials allegedly removed any mention of the strike in a subsequent investigation into the incident by the defense department's inspector general. It was also revealed that no thorough independent investigation was conducted regarding the incident.
"Leadership just seemed so set on burying this. No-one wanted anything to do with it," said Gene Tate, an official who was working on the case at the time and revealed that he was forced to quit his job, BBC reported.
The first statements to reveal the events leading up to and after the strikes were not disclosed until Saturday. Some U.S. officials, including military and CIA personnel, had begun questioning the legitimacy of the strike. They wondered whether or not it constituted a war crime and if there was a deliberate effort to cover up the truth of the incident.
Disclosure of the Strikes
It was previously reported that military officials allegedly wanted to bury the incident and hide any evidence of the strike. Multiple investigative reports also scrutinized the happenings of the incident as being "delayed, sanitized, and classified."
Speaking on the condition of anonymity, a U.S. military official said that the units involved in the strike included elite personnel from the 5th Special Forces Group of the American army. They are believed to have immediately reported the possibility of civilian casualties internally following the bombings.
The United States Central Command that is responsible for overseeing military operations in the region where the strikes were launched never released details of the incident, the anonymous official said. Additionally, the military did not explain why the strike was only recently disclosed nor did it address whether or not the incident will be reviewed or investigated, the Washington Post reported.
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