Report: Hundreds of Civilians Killed in 71 US Airstrikes on ISIS

Centcom Not Even Investigating Most Incidents

Reports of civilian deaths in US airstrikes against ISIS started pretty much the same day the strikes did, and over a year into the war, the US is accused of killing hundreds of civilians over the course of 71 different incidents.

Monitoring groups have upheld these allegations, but US Central Command is not only continuing its blanket denials, in most cases they say they aren’t even bothering to investigate the claims because they assume them to not be “credible” in the first place.

All told, Centcom has copped to two civilians deaths in a single incident, and published the results of an investigation into only that one incident. They claim to have investigated 10 of the 71, but some are “ongoing” and others wrapped up without any published report.

Centcom insists, perhaps fairly, that they can’t exactly interview witnesses in these strikes, but then goes on to assume that all of the allegations are lies, while bragging about their war being their “most precise ever” on the grounds that they’ve only conceded a couple of civilian deaths.

This is just adding to the questions about Centcom’s “information management” in this war, which has also led to Pentagon investigations about them deliberately altering intelligence reports to make the war sound like it’s going better than it actually is.

Author: Jason Ditz

Jason Ditz is Senior Editor for Antiwar.com. He has 20 years of experience in foreign policy research and his work has appeared in The American Conservative, Responsible Statecraft, Forbes, Toronto Star, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Providence Journal, Washington Times, and the Detroit Free Press.