The Secret Death Toll of America’s Drones

By Staff, The New York Times

The Pentagon claimed American airstrikes in Somalia have killed no civilians since US President Donald Trump accelerated attacks against Shabab militants there two years ago.

Amnesty International, however, investigated five of the more than 100 strikes carried out in Somalia since 2017 by drones and manned aircraft, and in just that small sampling found that at least 14 civilians were killed.

The Pentagon confessed that airstrikes by the American-led coalition fighting Daesh [the Arabic acronym for terrorist ‘ISIS/ISIL’ group] killed at least 1,257 civilians in Iraq and Syria as of the end of January.

However, Airwars, a university-based monitoring group, estimates that those strikes killed at least 7,500 civilians in those countries.

Those disparities show how poorly the American public understands the human cost of an air war fought largely by remote-controlled drones. Drones have been the main weapon in the counterterrorism fight for more than a decade.

They kill extremists without risking American lives, making combat seem antiseptic on the home front. But the number of civilians killed in these attacks is shrouded in secrecy.

Trump made it even harder to lift that shroud, by allowing the Central Intelligence Agency to keep secret how many civilians are killed in the agency’s airstrikes outside of the Afghan, Iraqi and Syrian war zones — in places like Yemen, the lawless border region of Pakistan and North Africa.