In this op-ed, Azmia Magane explores Trump’s warfare tactics and their deadly toll on civilians.
During his bid for the presidency, then-candidate Donald Trump repeatedly bragged about his brilliant “secret plan” to wipe out ISIS — a plan that, if it even existed, critics were understandably skeptical of given Trump’s lack of military experience. In November 2015, he revealed that his winning strategy would be to “bomb the sh*t out of 'em.”
A month later, in December 2015, Trump advocated for the use of war crimes to defeat ISIS, saying that the U.S. would have to “take out their families” and that he’d “knock the hell out of” ISIS: "You have to take out their families, when you get these terrorists, you have to take out their families. . . . When they say they don't care about their lives, you have to take out their families," Trump said, as he complained about the “politically correct war” the U.S. is fighting in the battle against ISIS.
Judging by Trump’s comments, it seems as though by “politically correct” he was referring to the United States making efforts to protect civilians.
But the thing is, even Obama’s legacy of drone warfare could be called anything but “politically correct.” Obama’s remote-controlled killing program seldom hit its targets with the “surgical” precision claimed; reports based on (unverified) classified documents examined casualties resulting from targeted air strikes during a five-month period in Afghanistan and found that 90 percent of victims were not the intended targets. These numbers were hardly an outlier. Reprieve, a human-rights group, examined data compiled by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism regarding strikes in Yemen and Pakistan, and it came to similar conclusions: Staggering numbers of civilians were being killed in devastatingly inaccurate strikes meant to target militants.
Trump has not been shy about making it his mission to outdo his predecessor, Obama, at everything — be it jobs or deportations — and apparently this extends to killing civilians. An investigation by Airwars, a non-governmental monitoring group, for the The Daily Beast published last month estimated that during Obama’s presidency, 2,300 civilians were likely killed in Iraq and Syria in U.S.-led coalition strikes. Meanwhile, Trump nearly surpassed that formidable figure in his first six months in office. The Airwars investigation estimated that since Trump has taken up residence in the White House, civilian deaths in Syria and Iraq are occurring at the rate of a dozen – yes, 12 — per day.
This means that in Iraq and Syria, more civilians have been taken out under Trump in his first six months in office than under Obama in his entire two-term presidency, during which he was at war every day for eight years. This path that Trump is taking is not only alarming but also hypocritical: Trump previously bashed Obama’s actions in Iraq as “reckless.” And he's lambasted the United States for “all those Iraqi kids who’ve been blown to pieces,” saying that “all of the reasons for the war were blatantly wrong” and that it was “all for nothing.”
Although Trump has amped up U.S. air wars — causing a catastrophic number of civilian casualties in the process — Trump’s strikes still aren’t as successful as Obama’s when it comes to taking out higher-profile tactical targets such as ISIS leadership. In the last six months of Obama’s presidency, U.S. forces killed 80 ISIS leaders. Meanwhile, Trump’s first six months in office have led to the deaths of 50 ISIS leaders, while simultaneously amassing unprecedented civilian carnage.
Also, it should be noted that while the war on Iraq was said to be illegal by then-U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, the same has been said of U.S. involvement in Syria, as The Nation’s Phyllis Bennis pointed out. The United States has no legal reasons to be involved in Syria in the first place, under either international law, as explained by international law professor Curtis F.J. Doebbler, or U.S. domestic law, according to Senators Tim Kaine and Rand Paul.
Despite the significantly notable increase in civilian deaths, according to both the U.S. military’s conservative data and the numbers provided by Airwars, U.S. Secretary of Defense James Mattis has insisted that there have been “no changes to our continued extraordinary efforts to avoid innocent civilian casualties.” During sworn congressional testimony, Mattis denied any “change to our rules of engagement,” such as adopting Trump’s stated tactic to “take out their families.”
Recent U.S. strikes suggest otherwise, though: The Washington Post cites a U.K.-based group, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which alleges that in May, U.S.-led strikes hit a compound in Syria known to house the families of ISIS fighters, killing more than 100 people; 42 of them were children. In a post on the group’s website, the strike was declared “the largest massacre against [ISIS's] families in Syria.”
Multiple legal experts told the Post that such deliberate targeting of civilians — whether they’re the families of ISIS fighters or not — would be a violation of international law, specifically, the Geneva Conventions. Airwars has meanwhile suggested in a statement that protections for civilians have been “scaled back” under Trump.
“With three full months of air strike and civilian casualty data from Donald Trump’s presidency, we are now seeing the emergence of clear trends. Around Raqqa in particular — where most strikes are by the U.S. — we are seeing high civilian casualties where six months ago we would not,” said Airwars director Chris Woods in a statement on the group's website.
Mattis’s comments about the U.S. military making “extraordinary efforts” to avoid the loss of civilian lives is further discredited by reports that U.S.-led forces dropped white phosphorus bombs on civilian areas in both Raqqa and Mosul in June — which was most likely a war crime, according to Amnesty International. White phosphorus is a deadly chemical weapon, capable of burning through flesh and bone. There’s no easy treatment or antidote available, so even minor burns are often fatal. Its use almost always constitutes a war crime and its only practical application is as a “smoke screen” to cover movements on the battlefield; obviously troops deploying this tactic would first ensure that they’re shielded in tanks or other armored vehicles. International humanitarian laws confirmed by the United Nations state that white phosphorus should never be employed in the vicinity of civilians, because they have no recourse available to protect themselves.
The director of the Syrian Network for Human Rights, Fadel Abdul Ghany, told The Daily Beast that he thinks the United States is looking for a faster way to take out ISIS, sacrificing “the expense of accuracy, and therefore at the expense of the loss of more lives,” in the process.
A researcher for Human Rights Watch, Belkis Wille, told The Daily Beast, “Remarkably, when I interview families at camps who have just fled the fighting, the first thing they complain about is not the three horrific years they spent under ISIS, or the last months of no food or clean water, but the American air strikes. Many told me that they survived such hardship, and almost made it out with the families, only to lose all their loved ones in a strike before they had time to flee.” And aside from the skyrocketing civilian casualties, a top U.N. official revealed that a further 160,000 people have been forced out of their homes in Syria due to U.S. air strikes.
The resulting collateral infrastructure damage due to Trump’s brilliant “plan” to “annihilate” ISIS is still unknown, but what’s certain is that there’s nothing brilliant, or even particularly remarkable, about bombing for peace. Although the U.S. prides itself on democracy, freedom, and human rights, realistically, we are a nation founded in genocide, slavery, segregation, income inequality, war, and upholding white supremacy. We seldom afford our own brown and black citizens the freedoms that we audaciously advertise overseas. In the name of deliverance and liberation, we topple regimes, destabilize and destroy entire societies, and kill civilians with what seems to be near impunity. Our disastrous foreign policy desperately needs to be rethought — and right now I can give you 12 reasons a day why.
Related: Obama's Drone Warfare Is Something We Need to Talk About
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