A 2017 decision to encircle the Islamic State’s capital at Raqqa inhibited the possibility of civilian escape corridors, a Pentagon-sponsored report found.
A Pentagon-commissioned report concluded that the US military could have done more to prevent harm to civilians during the pivotal battle for the Islamic State’s (IS) capital city at Raqqa, Syria, in 2017.
A study released by the Rand Corporation March 31 said decisions by top US officials inhibited the ability of noncombatants to escape the IS-held city under heavy bombardment.
Among the fateful decisions was a refusal to introduce a large number of American ground troops and to allow lesser trained and lightly armed Kurdish-led militias encircle the city instead.
“Pushing [IS] out of Raqqa and into terrain that was more sparsely populated would have allowed more fighters to escape and potentially lengthened the campaign,” the report read. “But the risk of civilian harm in Raqqa and other more heavily populated areas would clearly have been reduced.”
Reliable Sources. The report’s authors relied on data from the US-led coalition, Amnesty International and Airwars, a UK-based nongovernmental organization (NGO), as well as from the Western-backed Kurdish-led alliance of local militias known as the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), which fought against IS in house-to-house battles for more than four years across the country’s northeast.
Amnesty International and Airwars reported in 2019 that the US-led coalition killed more than 1,600 civilians during the battle for Raqqa, mostly in air and artillery strikes — a figure roughly 10 times higher than that acknowledged by the coalition at the time.
“Many of the [US-led coalition’s] air bombardments were inaccurate and tens of thousands of artillery strikes were indiscriminate,” senior Amnesty researcher Donatella Rovera said at the time of the 2019 report.
Flawed process. Rand’s study partially attributed the coalition’s undercounting to its tendency to rely on aerial imagery due to lack of personnel on the ground following the battle, as compared to other US-led military campaigns, such as in Afghanistan and Iraq.
"[I]n Raqqa, the coalition did not conduct in-person site visits or interview witnesses to collect more information about civilian casualty incidents, and it did not leverage its partner force, the SDF, to detect civilian casualties that may have occurred," the study read.
An investigation on the scale of previous US military inquiries "would have been quite difficult in Raqqa, where the US ground presence was limited to a few hundred [Special Operations Forces] and the US military did not have a host government to work with," the researchers concluded.
The Barack Obama administration's deliberately small footprint in the war against IS in Syria, which continued during the Trump administration, has been credited with preventing significant American military casualties. But more than 10,000 Kurdish-led fighters died in the campaign, and its true civilian death toll may never be fully accounted for, given difficulties in distinguishing the victims from those of IS and other factions in Syria's wider civil war.The Rand report also found flaws with the coalition’s procedures for categorizing civilian casualties, and noted international NGOs had difficulty contacting the coalition to report such incidents.
Though the US-led coalition had a team dedicated to documenting civilian casualties, its personnel "received little to no training on the duties that they would be expected to perform, lacked experience dealing with civilian casualties, and sometimes received inadequate guidance," the study found.
The coalition's data on its own air and artillery strikes was also incomplete, and team members on some occasions were unable to access operational records stored on classified networks.
Moreover, discrepancies found by coalition investigators attempting to match claims of civilian casualty incidents to known US strikes led to undercounting.
The coalition's team "would take reports of civilian casualties that may have occurred and compare the details to operational records of corroborating strikes or actions. But nomenclature surrounding the terms strike, engagement, and munition... caused confusion," the report read.‘War of annihilation.’ Ultimately, it was the nature of the battle — including the pace of the US-led campaign, the lack of formal humanitarian escape corridors and IS’ willingness to use human shields — that accounted for the overall death toll, the report argued.
In 2017, Washington accelerated the multinational campaign against IS in Syria following a series of brutal terrorist attacks in Europe. Then-US Defense Secretary James Mattis famously described the new approach a “war of annihilation” from which jihadist fighters were not supposed to escape.
The tactical pivot was driven by a desire to end IS’ violence and wrap up the war more quickly, the Rand study noted, “but this shift may have prevented the creation of civilian exit corridors and driven ISIS deeper into the densely-populated heart of the city.”
It continued, “Many of the circumstances around the battle for Raqqa — though perhaps unique in their details — portend the types of situations that are likely to arise again in the future: ruthless and committed adversaries, high-intensity urban combat environments, and complex geopolitical dilemmas.”
The authors of the 138-page report described no instances of US forces violating the law of war in the battle, but suggested future harm could be reduced if US forces receive better training on the complexities of urban warfare in heavily populated areas.
The researchers also faulted the United States for providing only one hour of mandatory training to SDF recruits on ethics, human rights and the law of war, though they noted that the Kurdish-led force took steps to protect civilians, including by engaging tribal representatives to encourage people to flee the city.
The report, which was sponsored by the Pentagon’s policy office, comes two months after US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin ordered an internal review of civilian casualties policies following news reports that revealed embarrassing details of US airstrikes that killed civilians in Syria and Afghanistan.
Press Secretary John Kirby vowed March 31 that Pentagon officials would learn from the lessons included in the Rand study.
Kirby told reporters that it “will be one of the key resources considered in developing our own civilian harm mitigation response and action plan.”
“There have been lessons learned. There have been after-action reports done now that we’ve just wrapped up 20 years of war,” he said.
A task force led by the Pentagon’s top official for special operations, Christopher Maier, is expected to come up with new Department of Defense-wide policy recommendations in the coming months to reduce future civilian harm.