Pentagon Report Claiming US Military Killed Just 12 Civilians Last Year Met With Skepticism

An annual report that the Pentagon published Tuesday claiming that the U.S. military only killed 12 noncombatants last year received skepticism from civilian casualty monitors, who perennially accuse the United States of undercounting the people that its bombs and bullets have killed.

The U.S. Department of Defense “assesses that there were approximately 12 civilians killed and approximately five civilians injured during 2021 as a result of U.S. military operations,” the report—the fifth of its kind—states.

However, the U.K.-based monitor group Airwars counted between 12 and 25 civilians that the U.S. forces likely killed, sometimes working with coalition allies, in Syria alone last year, with another two to four people killed in Somalia and one to four killed in Yemen.

“Once again the confirmed civilian casualty count is below what communities on the ground are reporting,” Airwars director Emily Tripp told Al Jazeera.

Airwars does not count civilians killed or wounded in Afghanistan, where all of the 2021 casualties that the Pentagon acknowledged occurred. These incidents include an errant August 29 drone strike that killed 10 people—most of them members of one family—including seven children.

No one faced accountability for the attack, which Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair Gen. Mark Milley first described as a “righteous strike.”

However, nearly 20 witnesses who spoke to CNN after a suicide bomber killed more than 100 Afghans and 13 U.S. troops on August 26 during the rushed American withdrawal from the country said that U.S. and British troops opened fire on the panicking crowd, killing and wounding many civilians.

“They were targeting people. It was intentional,” said one survivor. “In front of me, people were getting shot at and falling down.”

Although the U.S. military claimed that the bombing caused all of the casualties at the airport that day, a doctor working at a local hospital said that “there were two kinds of injuries… people burnt from the blast with lots of holes in their bodies. But with the gunshots, you can see just one or two holes—in the mouth, in the head, in the eye, in the chest.”

The Italian-run Emergency Surgical Center in Kabul said it received nine bodies with gunshot wounds following the bombing.

Despite all this—and forensic analysts’ assertions that so many people could not have been killed by a single bomb—a spokesperson for U.S. Central Command refuted the claim that U.S. troops shot civilians at Kabul’s airport, attributing eyewitness accounts, including by people who were shot, to “jumbled memories.”

U.S.-caused civilian casualties have declined precipitously with the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, although deadly incidents still occasionally occur. The initial annual Pentagon civilian casualty report, released during the Trump administration’s first year, admitted to 499 civilians killed by U.S. forces. The true figure is believed to be much higher.

Last month, human rights groups cautiously welcomed news that the U.S. military—which has killed more civilians in foreign wars than any other armed force on Earth in the post-World War II era—published a plan aimed at reducing noncombatant casualties.

Originally published at Commondreams.org.