Hi Kiran, thank you for taking the time to read my article. Just wanted to make a few remarks.
It is fair to criticise Airwars' methodology but their flaws apply uniformly, which still makes comparing various armed parties a valid exercise. It seems that your focus on methodological flaws only applies to coalition airstrikes, not to the Russian ones.
You write "According to the US State Department, 90% of Russian air strikes were not targeting IS or Al-Qaeda assets in Syria, but instead moderate anti-regime groups." Given that the US was actively trying to overthrow the Syrian government while simultaneously arming the rebels, their designation of several groups as "moderates" is not reliable at all. David Petraeus (admittedly retired by this point) even suggested recruiting fighters from al-Nusra and ISIS to fight against both Damascus and ISIS.
The comparison between (the First Battle of) Grozny and Fallujah is also not particularly useful. Sure, Fallujah had far lower deaths because they emptied the city before much of the fighting. A closer comparison would be Mosul, where far more people died than in Fallujah (roughly 10,000, which is more than died in the Second Battle of Grozny) and where ten times as many civilians died than the coalition acknowledged. This is without even noting the obvious difference in post-war reconstruction in Grozny and any Iraqi city bombed by the US.
Furthermore, if we want to expand on the humanitarian challenges due to the American fighting in Fallujah and their use of things like depleted uranium, birth defects in the city went on to be more prevalent in the Iraqi city than in Hiroshima.
The claim that "it does not require any research or deep analysis to know that American airstrikes are more precise than Iraqi artillery fire" might be true but that just furthers strengthens the point that the strikes in Libya, where the US-led intervention was almost entirely from the air or sea, was far deadlier than US-led coalition in Iraq.
You are also incorrect in attributing most of the deaths in Libya to the Turkish air force and the rival groups because I am only looking at the stats from 2011 during which the Turks were far less involved. Airwars has separate data sets for Libya 2011 and Libya 2012-present. My piece only relies on the first one.
.Regarding double-tap strikes, the United States has also conducted those around the world.
Finally, on the issue of proportionality, it is unclear if proportionality is particularly relevant to the question of lethality for civilians. Even if the United States is more proportional in its use of force, it can still be the case that their airstrikes are far deadlier for civilians. Given that the Ukrainian military is far bigger than the Libyan military was in 2011, it would lead to the assumption that proportionality would allow for Russian strikes to be significantly deadlier for civilians. Since we don't know what the overall combatant deaths are, we also cannot assert that the United States is more proportional in their use of force. Looking at conflicts overall, the Syrian Civil War has a lower civilian to combatant death ratio than the US war in Iraq, while the Russo-Ukrainian conflict has an even lower civilian casualty rates.
Even if we assume that the US is more proportionate (an assumption we cannot make without data to substantiate it), being a civilian in an area bombed by the US could still be more dangerous. It is remarkable how many foreign leaders regularly visit Ukraine compared to Iraq.
Of course! Your article raised some interesting questions. To address the points you bring up:
The flaws apply uniformly, but that does not enable comparison. If (as I argued) the "fair" grading is too broad, then one side with many cases that should not have been counted will appear the same as one with many cases that are definitely fair to count. This is to say in extremis that if the US-led coalition killed nothing but child soldiers and the Russians did nothing but bomb hospitals, Airwars would show the same result.
The predominance of ideologies in Syrian rebel groups is not the point I was making, but rather the difference between them and the apocalyptic tactics of IS.
Regarding Fallujah vs. Grozny, is it not a relevant difference in practice to empty a city rather than flatten it? Mosul's an incredibly poor point of comparison as it was primarily a ground operation by Iraqi government, paramilitary, and Peshmerga forces. The US was part of the coalition supporting the attack, but I can find no statistics for casualties caused by US strikes specifically. The 10,000 number you're using includes civilians killed by IS action during the battle, whereas Russian bombardment is known to have caused "tens of thousands" of deaths in Grozny. Rebuilding efforts are just not part of the conversation. The Nazis might have one day built a beautiful city where Warsaw once was, after all the Poles were dead of course. It's an extreme example, but illustrates the point that infrastructure investments aren't a remedy (or even incompatible) with slaughtering civilians.
As far depleted uranium is concerned, there's not really any strong evidence that its military use has led to widespread effects. See: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3492088/ That it's uranium makes people uncomfortable, but it's toxic like lead, not irradiating.
When I look at the 2011 stats on Airwars, it says there are 13 "fair" or "confirmed' incidents attributed to the US or the US led coalition. This might be a problem with their filtering, but scrollign through the pages, I'm seeing only various Libyan groups, the Turkish Military, the UAE, some unknowns, and even one attributed to the Egyptian military. So the dataset and death-toll for Airwars 2011 numbers are predominantly from incidents that had zero US involvement.
Proportionality is always relevant to discussions of civilians. If your enemy if fighting regularly, in uniform, from fighting positions far from civilians, any civilian casualties you cause are likely to be a consequence of either recklessness or intentionality on your part. If your enemy places human shields in each of their fighting positions (as IS did) or places military infrastructure in civilian areas and prevent evacuation, then it becomes inevitable that legal, proportional, and moral acts of self-defense will cause civilian casualties.
This is to say, how much danger civilians are in is dependent on the actions of both combatants. IS endangers civilians deliberately in a way Ukraine does not. Thus, even if the US killed more civilians fighting IS than Russia did Ukraine, that is still likely an indictment of Russia. The question is whether those civilian deaths were avoidable through a more humane (or simply legal!) targeting policy.
This is really the ultimate question: is the targeting policy 1. ethical? 2. enforced? Looking at raw numbers of civilians killed or even on a "per incident" basis, does not give us as complete an understanding than an examination of actual practices (which is where the proportionality metric is relevant).
Thanks for taking the time to respond! Some additional thoughts and responses.
The study you link to for depleted uranium only looks in the aftermath of the First Gulf War, whereas the major rise of birth defects has mostly been post-2003 where there was greater use of depleted uranium for a longer period of time. Of course, there are other contaminants, but it does appear that US military presence did contribute to increased birth rates.
Sure, IS may have been more apocalyptic than the other groups but referencing the State Department in asserting that 90% of targets were non-IS/al Qaeda (assuming this is even true, since one is right to be skeptical of US claims in Syria), it gives the impression that the Russians were exclusively targetting civilians. Even if the US is targetting more IS than Russia, it does not tell us anything about the proportion of legitimate vs illegitimate targets.
As for proportionality, do you have a particular reason to think that the dynamics of the battlefield the Russians were facing in Syria were fundamentally different from that of the US in Iraq and Syria? You mention Aleppo at the end of your article but it strikes me that this was a classic example of a non-regular force heavily embedded in a densely populated urban environment not too dissimilar from Mosul.
Your reply included the line "IS endangers civilians deliberately in a way Ukraine does not. Thus, even if the US killed more civilians fighting IS than Russia did Ukraine, that is still likely an indictment of Russia." I agree with the first half, which is why I do not compare US in the Middle East and Russia in Ukraine but rather compare US in Syria and Iraq with Russia in the Middle East.
I agree with the line "The question is whether those civilian deaths were avoidable through a more humane (or simply legal!) targeting policy." I think this is where the US falls short in Libya especially given that that the proportionality argument is harder to make when NATO had overwhelming force and NATO was not threatened at all by Libyan forces.
As for your Libyan figures, I think it is an an issue of filtering since there are tonnes coded as "NATO forces" in the individual incident cases but NATO is not an option for the filtering. However, looking at this (for March-December 2011) I see lots of NATO incidents. Of course, these could all be Turkey but given that NATO carried out 7000 sorties and the US was the country with the most sorties, I think it is fair to extrapolate some of the NATO figures with the caveat that this could be pulled up or down by other countries.
Regarding some of the double taps, there have also been multiple instances of those targeting first responders or known civilians. As the Guardian reports: 'A secret video showing US air crew falsely claiming to have encountered a firefight in Baghdad and then laughing at the dead after launching an air strike that killed a dozen people, including two Iraqis working for Reuters news agency, was revealed by Wikileaks... One of the helicopter crew is heard wishing for the man to reach for a gun, even though there is none visible nearby, so he has the pretext for opening fire: "All you gotta do is pick up a weapon."
Returning to Grozny and Fallujah, I think the comparison fails for a few different reasons. First, they are simply very different types of battles. For a comparison to be apt in terms of targetting, it would make more sense to compare battles that are similar, no? Wouldn't make sense to compare the raid on bin Laden with the landings in Normandy. The Russians have also carried out evacuations whereby the empty towns before fighting. Second, I am even willing to grant that Fallujah caused fewer deaths than the First Battle of Grozny, but I also don't think the Russian army of 1995 is the same one as in the 2010s or the one in the 2020s (likewise for the US). After all, the First Battle of Grozny was closer to the Vietnam War than the present day. I could likewise point to how the annexation of Crimea was done with no deaths compared to Fallujah, but that comparison would be not be very apt. Additionally, I think rebuilding does signal their intent vis-à-vis the population, since you imply in your piece that Russia is inherently bent on causing as many deaths as possible and not caring about civilians at all.
Airwars’ incident logs aggregate claims in local media of which they offer a rough assessment of. In most of these incidents in Syria forensic evidence is not accessible, therefore one is often not able to fully confirm the actors responsible, the number of civilian casualties, combatants killed, the nature of the target, etc. Their incident descriptions are written in a way that make this clear. As someone that does related work I’m not aware a methodologically superior way of collecting such data in such contexts. From there they and others conduct longer and more detailed investigations into incidents where stronger evidence is available. Adding a proportionality metric or some sort of checkbox for civilian vs military target would be asinine conjecture in many of these incidents. The incident description references such details with the appropriate caveats based on the sources available.
As I said, I think Airwars is useful, but not for comparing the relative lethality of air strike practices.
My investigation was limited in scope, but Airwars counting the deaths of child soldiers as civilians seems unjustifiable. Likewise, the incident in which two men were killed, which are not asserted to be civilians by the sources in the report and denied entirely by the coalition is counted towards the total.
Inevitably there are going to be cases where reasonable minds can disagree about grades. But since there’s already that subjective level of judgment, flagging cases as potential incidents of targeting civilians or disproportionate use of force.
On the other hand, it’s important to distinguish cases in which responsibility for civilian deaths fall on the bombed rather than the bomber. Using human shields for assaults like IS does is nonsensical to code as civilian deaths for which the coalition is responsible. If Airwars aims to change bombing practices, attributing responsibility (based on information available) is necessary.
This is all to say, the collection and investigation I do not have problems with. It is the coding and aggregation that limits its usefulness as analysis and advocacy and can be misleading.
not interested in you and the other guy's ideological back and forth. The bottomline is last year the DoD acknowledged its civilian casualty policy and post-strike assessments to be lacking (the latter barely existent) over the course of the anti-IS campaign, due to investigations and lawsuits by journalists utilizing Airwars' data, leading to department wide revamping of policy.
Hell of a thing to comment on a critique specifically on the other guy’s article.
You seem incapable of comprehending that I have acknowledged the usefulness of Airwars in general, and am critiquing their grading/total count specifically. Gesturing at the effects of raising attention is not a defensive of specific errors in methodology.
Hi Kiran, thank you for taking the time to read my article. Just wanted to make a few remarks.
It is fair to criticise Airwars' methodology but their flaws apply uniformly, which still makes comparing various armed parties a valid exercise. It seems that your focus on methodological flaws only applies to coalition airstrikes, not to the Russian ones.
You write "According to the US State Department, 90% of Russian air strikes were not targeting IS or Al-Qaeda assets in Syria, but instead moderate anti-regime groups." Given that the US was actively trying to overthrow the Syrian government while simultaneously arming the rebels, their designation of several groups as "moderates" is not reliable at all. David Petraeus (admittedly retired by this point) even suggested recruiting fighters from al-Nusra and ISIS to fight against both Damascus and ISIS.
https://edition.cnn.com/2015/09/01/politics/david-petraeus-al-qaeda-isis-nusra/index.html
The comparison between (the First Battle of) Grozny and Fallujah is also not particularly useful. Sure, Fallujah had far lower deaths because they emptied the city before much of the fighting. A closer comparison would be Mosul, where far more people died than in Fallujah (roughly 10,000, which is more than died in the Second Battle of Grozny) and where ten times as many civilians died than the coalition acknowledged. This is without even noting the obvious difference in post-war reconstruction in Grozny and any Iraqi city bombed by the US.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ap-mosul-isis-civilian-death-toll-10-times-higher-us-iraq-acknowledge/
Furthermore, if we want to expand on the humanitarian challenges due to the American fighting in Fallujah and their use of things like depleted uranium, birth defects in the city went on to be more prevalent in the Iraqi city than in Hiroshima.
https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2012/1/6/fallujah-babies-under-a-new-kind-of-siege
The claim that "it does not require any research or deep analysis to know that American airstrikes are more precise than Iraqi artillery fire" might be true but that just furthers strengthens the point that the strikes in Libya, where the US-led intervention was almost entirely from the air or sea, was far deadlier than US-led coalition in Iraq.
You are also incorrect in attributing most of the deaths in Libya to the Turkish air force and the rival groups because I am only looking at the stats from 2011 during which the Turks were far less involved. Airwars has separate data sets for Libya 2011 and Libya 2012-present. My piece only relies on the first one.
.Regarding double-tap strikes, the United States has also conducted those around the world.
https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2013-08-01/get-the-data-the-return-of-double-tap-drone-strikes/
Finally, on the issue of proportionality, it is unclear if proportionality is particularly relevant to the question of lethality for civilians. Even if the United States is more proportional in its use of force, it can still be the case that their airstrikes are far deadlier for civilians. Given that the Ukrainian military is far bigger than the Libyan military was in 2011, it would lead to the assumption that proportionality would allow for Russian strikes to be significantly deadlier for civilians. Since we don't know what the overall combatant deaths are, we also cannot assert that the United States is more proportional in their use of force. Looking at conflicts overall, the Syrian Civil War has a lower civilian to combatant death ratio than the US war in Iraq, while the Russo-Ukrainian conflict has an even lower civilian casualty rates.
Even if we assume that the US is more proportionate (an assumption we cannot make without data to substantiate it), being a civilian in an area bombed by the US could still be more dangerous. It is remarkable how many foreign leaders regularly visit Ukraine compared to Iraq.
Of course! Your article raised some interesting questions. To address the points you bring up:
The flaws apply uniformly, but that does not enable comparison. If (as I argued) the "fair" grading is too broad, then one side with many cases that should not have been counted will appear the same as one with many cases that are definitely fair to count. This is to say in extremis that if the US-led coalition killed nothing but child soldiers and the Russians did nothing but bomb hospitals, Airwars would show the same result.
The predominance of ideologies in Syrian rebel groups is not the point I was making, but rather the difference between them and the apocalyptic tactics of IS.
Regarding Fallujah vs. Grozny, is it not a relevant difference in practice to empty a city rather than flatten it? Mosul's an incredibly poor point of comparison as it was primarily a ground operation by Iraqi government, paramilitary, and Peshmerga forces. The US was part of the coalition supporting the attack, but I can find no statistics for casualties caused by US strikes specifically. The 10,000 number you're using includes civilians killed by IS action during the battle, whereas Russian bombardment is known to have caused "tens of thousands" of deaths in Grozny. Rebuilding efforts are just not part of the conversation. The Nazis might have one day built a beautiful city where Warsaw once was, after all the Poles were dead of course. It's an extreme example, but illustrates the point that infrastructure investments aren't a remedy (or even incompatible) with slaughtering civilians.
As far depleted uranium is concerned, there's not really any strong evidence that its military use has led to widespread effects. See: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3492088/ That it's uranium makes people uncomfortable, but it's toxic like lead, not irradiating.
When I look at the 2011 stats on Airwars, it says there are 13 "fair" or "confirmed' incidents attributed to the US or the US led coalition. This might be a problem with their filtering, but scrollign through the pages, I'm seeing only various Libyan groups, the Turkish Military, the UAE, some unknowns, and even one attributed to the Egyptian military. So the dataset and death-toll for Airwars 2011 numbers are predominantly from incidents that had zero US involvement.
Regarding US use of "double tap" strikes, while they technically fall in that category, they are employed specifically to target combatants, rather than aid workers as used in the Syrian-Russian practice. See: https://pt.icct.nl/article/new-light-cia-double-tap-drone-strikes-taliban-first-responders-pakistans-tribal-areas
Proportionality is always relevant to discussions of civilians. If your enemy if fighting regularly, in uniform, from fighting positions far from civilians, any civilian casualties you cause are likely to be a consequence of either recklessness or intentionality on your part. If your enemy places human shields in each of their fighting positions (as IS did) or places military infrastructure in civilian areas and prevent evacuation, then it becomes inevitable that legal, proportional, and moral acts of self-defense will cause civilian casualties.
This is to say, how much danger civilians are in is dependent on the actions of both combatants. IS endangers civilians deliberately in a way Ukraine does not. Thus, even if the US killed more civilians fighting IS than Russia did Ukraine, that is still likely an indictment of Russia. The question is whether those civilian deaths were avoidable through a more humane (or simply legal!) targeting policy.
This is really the ultimate question: is the targeting policy 1. ethical? 2. enforced? Looking at raw numbers of civilians killed or even on a "per incident" basis, does not give us as complete an understanding than an examination of actual practices (which is where the proportionality metric is relevant).
Thanks for taking the time to respond! Some additional thoughts and responses.
The study you link to for depleted uranium only looks in the aftermath of the First Gulf War, whereas the major rise of birth defects has mostly been post-2003 where there was greater use of depleted uranium for a longer period of time. Of course, there are other contaminants, but it does appear that US military presence did contribute to increased birth rates.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20717542/
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S026974911834243X?via%3Dihub
Sure, IS may have been more apocalyptic than the other groups but referencing the State Department in asserting that 90% of targets were non-IS/al Qaeda (assuming this is even true, since one is right to be skeptical of US claims in Syria), it gives the impression that the Russians were exclusively targetting civilians. Even if the US is targetting more IS than Russia, it does not tell us anything about the proportion of legitimate vs illegitimate targets.
As for proportionality, do you have a particular reason to think that the dynamics of the battlefield the Russians were facing in Syria were fundamentally different from that of the US in Iraq and Syria? You mention Aleppo at the end of your article but it strikes me that this was a classic example of a non-regular force heavily embedded in a densely populated urban environment not too dissimilar from Mosul.
Your reply included the line "IS endangers civilians deliberately in a way Ukraine does not. Thus, even if the US killed more civilians fighting IS than Russia did Ukraine, that is still likely an indictment of Russia." I agree with the first half, which is why I do not compare US in the Middle East and Russia in Ukraine but rather compare US in Syria and Iraq with Russia in the Middle East.
I agree with the line "The question is whether those civilian deaths were avoidable through a more humane (or simply legal!) targeting policy." I think this is where the US falls short in Libya especially given that that the proportionality argument is harder to make when NATO had overwhelming force and NATO was not threatened at all by Libyan forces.
As for your Libyan figures, I think it is an an issue of filtering since there are tonnes coded as "NATO forces" in the individual incident cases but NATO is not an option for the filtering. However, looking at this (for March-December 2011) I see lots of NATO incidents. Of course, these could all be Turkey but given that NATO carried out 7000 sorties and the US was the country with the most sorties, I think it is fair to extrapolate some of the NATO figures with the caveat that this could be pulled up or down by other countries.
https://airwars.org/civilian-casualties/?start_date=2011-03-01&airwars_grading=confirmed,fair&country=libya&end_date=2011-12-01
Regarding some of the double taps, there have also been multiple instances of those targeting first responders or known civilians. As the Guardian reports: 'A secret video showing US air crew falsely claiming to have encountered a firefight in Baghdad and then laughing at the dead after launching an air strike that killed a dozen people, including two Iraqis working for Reuters news agency, was revealed by Wikileaks... One of the helicopter crew is heard wishing for the man to reach for a gun, even though there is none visible nearby, so he has the pretext for opening fire: "All you gotta do is pick up a weapon."
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/apr/05/wikileaks-us-army-iraq-attack
Returning to Grozny and Fallujah, I think the comparison fails for a few different reasons. First, they are simply very different types of battles. For a comparison to be apt in terms of targetting, it would make more sense to compare battles that are similar, no? Wouldn't make sense to compare the raid on bin Laden with the landings in Normandy. The Russians have also carried out evacuations whereby the empty towns before fighting. Second, I am even willing to grant that Fallujah caused fewer deaths than the First Battle of Grozny, but I also don't think the Russian army of 1995 is the same one as in the 2010s or the one in the 2020s (likewise for the US). After all, the First Battle of Grozny was closer to the Vietnam War than the present day. I could likewise point to how the annexation of Crimea was done with no deaths compared to Fallujah, but that comparison would be not be very apt. Additionally, I think rebuilding does signal their intent vis-à-vis the population, since you imply in your piece that Russia is inherently bent on causing as many deaths as possible and not caring about civilians at all.
Airwars’ incident logs aggregate claims in local media of which they offer a rough assessment of. In most of these incidents in Syria forensic evidence is not accessible, therefore one is often not able to fully confirm the actors responsible, the number of civilian casualties, combatants killed, the nature of the target, etc. Their incident descriptions are written in a way that make this clear. As someone that does related work I’m not aware a methodologically superior way of collecting such data in such contexts. From there they and others conduct longer and more detailed investigations into incidents where stronger evidence is available. Adding a proportionality metric or some sort of checkbox for civilian vs military target would be asinine conjecture in many of these incidents. The incident description references such details with the appropriate caveats based on the sources available.
As I said, I think Airwars is useful, but not for comparing the relative lethality of air strike practices.
My investigation was limited in scope, but Airwars counting the deaths of child soldiers as civilians seems unjustifiable. Likewise, the incident in which two men were killed, which are not asserted to be civilians by the sources in the report and denied entirely by the coalition is counted towards the total.
Inevitably there are going to be cases where reasonable minds can disagree about grades. But since there’s already that subjective level of judgment, flagging cases as potential incidents of targeting civilians or disproportionate use of force.
On the other hand, it’s important to distinguish cases in which responsibility for civilian deaths fall on the bombed rather than the bomber. Using human shields for assaults like IS does is nonsensical to code as civilian deaths for which the coalition is responsible. If Airwars aims to change bombing practices, attributing responsibility (based on information available) is necessary.
This is all to say, the collection and investigation I do not have problems with. It is the coding and aggregation that limits its usefulness as analysis and advocacy and can be misleading.
not interested in you and the other guy's ideological back and forth. The bottomline is last year the DoD acknowledged its civilian casualty policy and post-strike assessments to be lacking (the latter barely existent) over the course of the anti-IS campaign, due to investigations and lawsuits by journalists utilizing Airwars' data, leading to department wide revamping of policy.
Hell of a thing to comment on a critique specifically on the other guy’s article.
You seem incapable of comprehending that I have acknowledged the usefulness of Airwars in general, and am critiquing their grading/total count specifically. Gesturing at the effects of raising attention is not a defensive of specific errors in methodology.