Beginning in 2014 and 2015 respectively, US and Russian interventions would in time lead to some 75,000 air strikes against Iraq and Syria.
However much the coalition’s actions against ISIS (Daesh) and Russia’s support for Assad differ in intent and context, both have been disastrous for people on the ground; the bombing campaigns alone have killed between 20,000 and 55,000 Syrian and Iraqi civilians.
The alliance’s figure of 1,417 civilian deaths has been widely contested. In December 2021 a New York Times investigation based on a review of 1,300 Pentagon reports concluded that ‘the air war has been marked by deeply flawed intelligence, rushed and often imprecise targeting, and the deaths of thousands of civilians, many of them children, a sharp contrast to the American government’s image of war waged by all-seeing drones and precision bombs.
The coalition claims it values transparency and is willing ‘to work with anyone making allegations or providing new, credible information’, but several NGOs have put forward higher figures for civilian casualties. The Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR), a UN-accredited organisation founded by Syrian opponents of the Assad regime, puts the number of civilian casualties to date at 3,047. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), a London-based group, believes 3,847 civilians, including more than a thousand children, may have been killed in six years of coalition raids.
Airwars has come up with a significantly higher total. Classifying incidents according to how credible they are — information being treated as ‘confirmed or fair’ if it comes from two ‘credible sources’ — it estimates between 8,317 and 13,190 civilians have been killed in Iraq and Syria by coalition bombs. It puts the number of children killed at between 1,765 and 2,363. Of this total, Airwars claims to have identified 3,715 individuals. Its website gives names, witness testimony and sources. Including incidents where evidence is inconclusive or partial, Airwars comes up with an even higher figure of between 19,284 and 29,643 civilian deaths. The upper end of this estimate is 20 times greater than the coalition’s official figure.
Chris Woods from Airwars, who regularly lobbies coalition officials to verify dozens of past incidents, remains convinced ‘the coalition was the primary source of destruction at Raqqa.’ How can we be sure? Woods cites Airwars’s joint investigation with Amnesty International on the bombing of Raqqa. He says, ‘ISIS firepower was significantly limited in Raqqa, and the Syrian Democratic Forces were denied the use of heavy weapons. Based on the available public evidence, there are strong indications both that civilians died at El Bedo and that those deaths were caused either by a coalition air or artillery strike.’
Amnesty International and Airwars estimate that 1,600 civilians died in the city as a result of American, British and French air raids and artillery fire during the coalition-led offensive between June and October 2017 alone.
According to an Associated Press investigation, Iraqi and coalition forces were responsible for at least 9,000 civilian deaths from airstrikes, mortar and artillery fire during the liberation of the city of Mosul. In 2017, however, the international coalition acknowledged only 326 civilian deaths in the fighting. Airwars says more civilians than ISIS fighters died in the battle for Mosul.
‘The French, like the Belgians, Danes and British, don’t want to discuss civilian casualties, because it’s a source of shame,’ Woods says. ‘French officers will acknowledge they caused civilian casualties, but they won’t say where and when, because the coalition is structured in such a way that only the perpetrators of strikes pay compensation [to victims’ relatives].’
Unlike the coalition, Russia publicly maintains that no civilians have been harmed in its six years of operations in Syria. But according to the SNHR, Russia’s bombing campaigns killed 6,867 civilians between September 2015 and June 2021… Airwars says it has collected evidence that, by the summer of 2021, the Russian military had caused between 4,096 and 6,085 civilian deaths in the course of approximately 39,000 airstrikes. It leaves unconfirmed whether an additional 23,062 people died ‘locally from Russian military actions in Syria’.
Independent military expert Anton Lavrov, a consultant for the Moscow daily Izvestia, is dubious about the claim that Russia’s intervention has caused no civilian deaths: ‘This is highly unlikely: the main difference between Russia and the NATO countries is the use of mainly unguided weapons on the Russian side, which cause far more collateral damage than “smart” weapons. That said, since 2015, we’ve seen Russian aviation tactics gradually evolve to increase the accuracy of their strikes and reduce harm to civilians.’
So of 594,000 people allegedly killed on Syrian territory in the decade from the start of the revolution on 15 March 2011 to 14 March 2021, the SOHR claims to have documented — in addition to civilians killed by the Russian army — the deaths of 88,856 civilians attributable to loyalist regime forces, 8,110 to Syrian fighters from rebel factions, 6,418 to ISIS, 1,474 to the Kurds and 12 to the Israeli army. The SNHR likewise claimed impartiality in June 2021 when it attributed 200,209 civilian deaths to the Syrian regime and pro-regime groups, including Iranian militias, 5,043 to ISIS, 4,164 to opposition factions and 1,284 to Kurdish forces. The discrepancies in these estimates stem from the need to obtain evidence or witness statements to confirm whether, and how many, deaths occurred.
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