In June 2018, the United States department of defence confidently told the US Congress that its military operations in Somalia, including air strikes, had resulted in zero civilian casualties in 2017. But it was lying.
A new report by Amnesty International, released on Wednesday, describes a huge increase in the US military’s bombing campaign in Somalia since Donald Trump became president, with more than 100 air strikes by drones and manned aircraft since early 2017.
According to Amnesty’s investigation of just five of these incidents, at least 14 civilians were killed, including five children. The full death toll is likely to be much higher, Amnesty concluded.
“The civilian death toll we have uncovered in just a handful of strikes suggests the shroud of secrecy surrounding the US role in Somalia’s war is actually a smokescreen for impunity,” said Brian Castner, an Amnesty International researcher.
“Our findings directly contradict the US military’s mantra of zero civilian casualties in Somalia. That claim seems all the more fanciful when you consider the US has tripled its air strikes across the country since 2016, outstripping their strikes in Libya and Yemen combined.”
The US conducted 14 air strikes in Somalia in 2016, all ostensibly aimed at members or supporters of al-Shabab, the Islamist group that continues to rule large swaths of the country. That rose to at least 35 in 2017, and at least 47 in 2018, according to Amnesty.
In a response to Amnesty, the US Africa Command (Africom) said Amnesty’s findings “do not appear likely based on contradictory intelligence that cannot be disclosed because of operational security limitations”.
Males targeted
The sudden and dramatic increase in US military involvement in Somalia came in direct response to one of Trump’s earliest presidential directives. The full text of the directive has not been made public; all we know for sure is that it designated Somalia as an “area of active hostilities”, and significantly relaxed the US military’s rules of engagement there.
These have become so loose that almost all military-age men in al-Shabab-controlled areas are now considered legitimate targets, said a retired brigadier general interviewed by Amnesty. Donald Bolduc was the deputy director and then commander of Africom from 2013 to 2017.
Africom has disputed Bolduc’s allegation but refused to say how targeting standards are applied, citing security reasons.
“If General Bolduc is accurate in how the policy is practically applied, then such an approach to targeting would be contrary to international humanitarian law,” said Amnesty.
