The case
On the night of March 20th-21st 2017, the Al-Badiya school in al Mansourah, by almost all accounts filled with at least 200 internally displaced people, was struck by the US-led Coalition against so-called Islamic State. This airstrike resulted in a major casualty incident in which at least forty civilians (and as many as 420 according to some sources) were reportedly killed, with dozens more injured.
Site where local residents said they buried dozens of people killed in a March 20th attack on a school in Mansourah that housed displaced civilians.
© 2017 Ole Solvang/Human Rights Watch
The Al-Badiya school, located approximately 1.5 kilometres from the village of al Mansoura, is a large, isolated, three-storey building located in an area that at the time was controlled by ISIS.
Local news outlet Qasioun reported that the school was hit by three Coalition raids around 11pm, other sources like the New York Times specify the time of the attack at “shortly after midnight”. In any case, the strike was scheduled to take place around midnight to minimise potential harm to civilians – as civilians would not be wondering the streets at that time of day. Clearly, the Coalition was not aware of the hundreds of non-combatant civilians present in the abandoned school. IDP families were sleeping in the building when the missiles destroyed the building, rendering it inhabitable. If the Combined Joint Task Force knew about the civilian presence but decided to attack nonetheless, they may have violated the principle of proportionality.
While denying that the locations were military bases, local residents have confirmed that ISIS members had in fact been in the vicinity at the time of the strikes. This became clear after Human Rights spoke to 16 local residents during a visit to Mansourah on July 1st-4th, 2017. ISIS members and their families displaced from Iraq had moved into the school prior to the attack. Some local residents also said that a vehicle equipped with an anti-aircraft cannon had been operating in the area.
Soon after the attack, more detailed reports, including initial tallies of civilians harmed were published. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights – also pointing towards the Coalition – put the death toll at 33, reporting: “One of the activists of the Syrian Observatory witnessed 33 bodies being pulled out of the rubble of the school which was destroyed by the Coalition’s warplanes, before members of the Islamic State came and kept people away. Additionally, two people were pulled out alive.”
The majority of sources stressed that most of the victims were women and children. Smart News was the only outlet providing specific figures, reporting a death toll of seven children and nine women. Smart went on to say that “according to another local source, the Islamic State organization demanded that civilians in the western and southern parts of al-Raqqa evacuate their schools and medical centers because they were being targeted by the coalition ‘for the possibility of being headquarters of the organization.'”
There were some claims of much higher casualties. According to Raqqa Post the death toll may have been as high as 100: “The school hosted more than 50 families from Maskanah, Homs and other places and there are reports, which are not yet confirmed, that over 100 were killed and many more were wounded. Rescue operations are still taking place.” Baladi put the number killed still higher at 200 civilians – “mostly women and children” – with dozens more injured, adding that the school was completely destroyed. Al Natek also put the number killed at 200.
As more reports came in, the claimed death toll continued to rise, with one local Mansoura group alleging that it had reached 275 – and specifically blaming “American warplanes”. Mansoura in its Peoples’ Eyes claimed an even higher figure: “420 martyrs with people still looking for survivors”.
A subsequent report by Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently said that “the initial death toll for the massacre at Al Badiya school in Al Mansoura committed by the international coalition at dawn yesterday is 183. The bodies are still being pulled out and the number is expected to rise as there was 105 families present at the school.”
Clearly, local casualty reports for the al Mansoura event monitored by Airwars varied widely, from several dozen deaths to claims of as many as 400 people killed. Human Rights Watch’s Nadim Houry noted that 40 fatalities, including 16 children, was the baseline after visiting the site twice. “40 are the ones that we were actually able to identify, but the actual number is much higher,” he said.
[List of identified victims by local sources?]
The culprit
Although local sources did not seem to agree on the number of civilians harmed, they unilaterally identified the US-led Coalition as the culprit. However, while the Coalition did not deny striking the location, it did come to a different conclusion on who were actually targeted in the attack.
Coalition commander Lt General Townsend denied that the strike had killed civilians, stating prior to Coalition’s own assessment of the attack that: “We had multiple corroborating intelligence sources from various types of intelligence that told us the enemy was using that school. And we observed it. And we saw what we expected to see. We struck it. We saw what we expected to see. Afterwards, we got an allegation that it wasn’t ISIS fighters in there; got a single allegation it wasn’t ISIS fighters in there; it was instead refugees of some sort in the school. Yet, not seeing any corroborating evidence of that. In fact, everything we’ve seen since then suggests that it was the 30 or so ISIS fighters that we expected to be there.”
The Coalition later reiterated this conclusion in its July 2017 civilian casualty report, when it noted that there was insufficient evidence showing that civilians were killed: “March 20, 2017, near Al Mansura, Syria, via social media report: After review of available information and strike video it was assessed that there is insufficient evidence to find that civilians were harmed in this strike.”
The al Mansoura strike proved further controversial due to the discovery of the involvement of German reconnaissance aircraft. A number of Coalition members, while not carrying out strikes on their own, nevertheless provide intelligence and logistical capabilities to assist bombings by other nations. In September 2017, the the Australian Defence Force reported its involvement in a previous civilian harm event for which it had supplied flawed intelligence. Whatever pre-strike surveillance the Coalition conducted at al Mansoura proved insufficient to protect civilians at the site.
Then after a year of denial, the Coalition quietly admitted to killing at least 40 civilians in its monthly civilian casualty review released on June 28th, finally acknowledging what a UN inquiry and human rights groups have long said was among the bloodiest incidents of the four year bombing campaign. The report stated that the incident was “reopened after the receipt of new evidence from Human Rights Watch.” The Coalition then determined that “During a strike on Daesh militant multifunctional center allegedly caused civilian casualties. Forty civilians were unintentionally killed.”
The admitted number of 40 fatalities appeared to be based on the Human Rights Watch findings, though it was unclear what additional steps the Coalition had taken which had led them to reverse repeated denials issued over the previous 16 months. The al Mansoura raid now represents the second largest death toll admitted to by the Coalition, after an attack days earlier in March 2017 in Mosul which killed over 100 civilians.
“The updated assessment of the Mansoura allegation was based largely on a video report from Human Rights Watch,” a senior Coalition official told Airwars. “HRW visited the site and interviewed individuals present during the strike and after. Their accounts included specific details regarding the strike more likely to be known by somebody who had been present. Compelling, detailed, and accurate firsthand accounts tend to weigh heavily in favor of a finding of ‘credible’.
While the Coalition acknowledged its responsibility for the incident, it did not outline how such an incident occurred – and what safeguards were put in place for future actions. “It’s positive that they are acknowledging this now, but it’s an incomplete step,” said HRW’s Nadim Houry. “It is not enough to just say we killed some civilians. No one is saying it was intentional, but that is not the point of conducting the investigation,” said HRW’s Nadim Houry. “Where did things go wrong? What steps have they taken to ensure this doesn’t happen in the future?”
The victims
According to the Combined Joint Task Force’s press desk, Coalition forces conducted “a pattern of life [analysis] prior to the strike but that video footage did not reflect any evidence of civilian activity prior or after the strike.” This raises serious questions regarding the German and US intelligence that both failed to identify the presence of Internally Displaced Persons – some of which had been present in the area for years.
The al Badiya school closed in 2011 and displaced Syrians moved in. Survivors interviewed by the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic all explained that, since 2012, the school housed internally displaced families from Palmyra (Homs), al-Sukhna (Homs), al-Qaryatayn (Homs), al-Khafsa (Aleppo), Maskanah (Aleppo), al-Bab (Aleppo), and Hamah countryside. Some of the residents were recent arrivals while other internally displaced persons had been living in the school for years. More than 200 people were estimated to be living in the school at the time of the airstrike, of which only a few survived. 150 bodies were retrieved from the site though others remained under the rubble as, three days after the airstrike, on 24 March, ISIS prevented rescuers from continuing searches.
Prior to the strike, the families of ISIS fighters fleeing Iraq also moved into the school. Locals reported ISIS fighters around the premises, possibly visiting their families. Despite the presence of these fighters, the school remained full of IDP families. An 11-year-old survivor said that children played in the school’s courtyard, suggesting that civilians could have been noticed in the Coalitions’ pattern of life’ analysis.
An Airwars survey of local reporting in the lead up to the attack – provided shortly afterwards to the Coalition – had also turned up several reports indicating a significant IDP presence in the vicinity of al Mansoura. From November 2016 until February 2017, several local sources reported mass movement of IDPs from Palmyra and Raqqa city to al Mansoura.
In January, Smart News Agency noted that IDPs had moved towards al Mansoura area after ISIS allegedly informed families in nearby countryside West of Raqqa the are would become a “military zone”: “60 families were displaced from the villages of the eastern and western al Salhabiya ( السلحبية ) eastern and western, Kdiran ( كديران ), and Fatih ( فتيح ) towards al Mansoura ( المنصورة ).” In a later report a correspondent for the media outlet, as well as other local sources, reported the movement of about fifty to sixty displaced families to al Mansoura. While only the general area of the village is mentioned, one source specifies that the families were placed in schools and housing centers in villages in the Raqqah countryside.
Mohammad Zein Suhair Rabiji, one of the victims of the Badia school strike
Why the case matters
The al Badiya case is exemplary for the heavy reliance by the Coalition on both pre-strike intelligence from aerial footage and post-strike video analysis of observable harm. This is not an isolated incident, but part of a larger problem.
When Airwars researchers scrutinized Coalition assessments, the modelling showed a strong bias towards certain classes of strikes potentially being assessed as credible. Events taking place out in the open – and are thus more likely to show a civilian entering a target area on strike footage – feature heavily in Coalition-confirmed events.
However, in the context of urban fighting, most civilian harm is by its nature unobservable – with civilians often seeking shelter in side buildings. Even if such events are well-documented, they are far less likely to be confirmed by the US-led Coalition due to an absence of visual confirmation. With strikes on buildings, the footage may show the extent of the damage but not whether it housed ISIS fighters, or sheltering families inside.
As Air Marshal Bagwell has noted, “We cannot see through rubble.” This inability of the Coalition properly to model ‘unobservable’ civilian harm in urban fighting – even though this is likely how most non combatant deaths and injuries occur – is in the view of Airwars likely to be a key reason why the Coalition continues significantly to undercount civilian harm.
Needless to say, this issue of undercounting civilians is especially pressing in densely populated areas such as Raqqa.
The fight to capture Raqqa from ISIS did not officially begin until June 6th 2017. Overall, more than 2,000 non combatants were credibly reported killed by all parties to that battle – with mass graves still being discovered.
Airwars estimates that at least 1,400 civilians perished in Coalition air and artillery strikes before the city’s capture in mid-October. More than 21,000 munitions were fired on Raqqa in just five months – many times more than were released across all of Afghanistan by international forces for all of 2017.
Despite this ferocious assault, the Coalition has admitted to very few deaths in Raqqa – even as its civilian casualty unit churns through and discards allegations. Only 26 fatalities have so far been conceded.
In the same monthly report that saw the al Mansoura strike acknowledged, the Coalition classed more than 120 civilian harm allegations relating to the battle of Raqqa as ‘non-credible.’ In the last two months alone, the Coalition has evaluated almost 200 civilian harm events from the battle and rated them all in this way.
Overall, the Coalition has only admitted to 4% of more than 450 locally reported civilian casualty events for the battle of Raqqa. Airwars instead rates more than 70 per cent of those cases as Fair – that is, with two or more credible local reports, and Coalition strikes confirmed in the near vicinity.
Drone videos sometimes even have difficulties distinguishing a shovel from a rifle, let alone civilians from combatants. The concepts of all-knowing observation and ‘absolute precision’ are unrealistic and crucially, harm long-term goals for military operations. If the UK cannot adequately determine civilian harm, local populations risk losing faith in its capabilities and intentions. Accountability for civilians harmed in conflict is not only a moral obligation, but a military necessity.