A Pentagon investigation of the 2019 U.S. military airstrike in Baghuz, Syria, has concluded that U.S. troops didn’t violate any laws of war.
The strike was launched on March 18, 2019, in support of Syrian partner forces who were under fire from the ISIS terrorist group near Baghuz.
Civilians, including women and children, died as a result of the strike, but U.S. troops didn’t deliberately cause the casualties, the Pentagon stated. No one, including the ground forces commander, was disciplined over the operation, the Pentagon said on May 17.
However, the investigation found that the military made procedural mistakes in the aftermath of the airstrikes.
“The process contributed to a perception that the Department was not committed to transparency and was not taking the incident seriously—a perception that could have been prevented by a timely review and a clear explication of the circumstances surrounding the strike,” Austin said.
Pentagon press secretary John Kirby told reporters on May 17 that Austin’s memo “laid out five clear steps that he expects leaders to take to avoid such delays in the future.”
The issue became public after The New York Times published a report on Nov. 15, 2021, about the incident. Austin then ordered Army Gen. Michael Garrett, currently the head of U.S. Army Forces Command, to conduct a separate, independent review of the Baghuz strike, which started about two weeks following the report.
Garrett, in his investigation, agreed with the initial investigation’s conclusion that it was a move of legitimate self-defense in support of Syrian partner forces. According to his investigation, a total of 73 casualties were recorded: 52 enemies were killed and two were injured, and four civilians were killed and 15 were injured.
Of the civilians, one woman and three children were killed, and 11 women and four children were wounded. One of the enemies killed was a child.
He said the ground force commander “did not deliberately or with wanton disregard cause civilian casualties.”
Kirby said on May 17: “Gen. Garrett found that the ground force commander made the best decisions that he could, given the information he had at the time, given a very lethal, very aggressive [ISIS] threat, in a very confined space. It is deeply regrettable. ... We apologize for the loss of innocent life.”
Austin in January ordered the Pentagon to create a new “Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Action Plan” to improve how it can prevent and respond to civilian casualties caused by U.S. airstrikes.
The move came after a U.S. drone strike on Aug. 29, 2021, in Kabul, Afghanistan, that killed 10 Afghan civilians, including seven children. An independent review later that year concluded that the strike wasn’t caused by misconduct or negligence. It found breakdowns in communication and in the process of identifying and confirming the target of the bombing.
