US military killed nearly 500 civilians in 2017: Pentagon

The Pentagon says US military operations killed nearly 500 civilians during the first year of the Donald Trump administration, but rights groups have denounced the figures as “non-credible.” 

In an annual report provided to the US Congress on Friday, the Pentagon said ground and air operations in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and Yemen killed 499 civilians and injured approximately 169 civilians during 2017.

The report, however, said the Pentagon has yet to assess 450 civilian-casualty reports in Iraq and Syria, due to limited resources, indicating the final tally could be higher.

Regarding civilian deaths in Afghanistan, the Pentagon said it had found credible assessments, but it didn’t detail how many had been killed.

This is while, the United Nations said the US military killed or injured more than 200 civilians in 2017 only in Afghanistan.

The US military, however, claimed that the UN figure was inflated and its own assessments that included “surveillance information” contradicted the data.

In Yemen, the UN figures show more than 15,000 civilians have been killed or wounded since March 26, 2015.The Pentagon said it hadn’t received any “credible reports of civilian casualties” as a result of US military operations in Libya last year.

The study, did not even list any civilian casualties in Somalia, where news media and local officials as well as nongovernmental organizations have reported scores of civilian deaths on US or US –backed military operations.

In August 2017, a raid by foreign forces and Somali forces on a farm in southern Somalia killed ten civilians, including three children; news media cited a deputy governor as saying.

Back then, the US military confirmed that it had supported an operation in the area, and said it would look into the allegations of civilian deaths. The recent report, however, does not mention the incident.

The US-led military coalition fighting the Daesh terrorist group in Iraq and Syria released its own report on Thursday, saying that "at least 892 civilians have been unintentionally killed" between August 2014 and the end of April 2018.

Outside groups have said that the number of civilians killed in the battle is even much higher than the coalition's figures.

In the meantime, monitoring group Airwars reported this year that the US and its allies may have killed as many as 6,000 civilians in strikes in Iraq and Syria alone in 2017.
 

Reacting to the Pentagon report, human rights groups called it good first step but criticized the lack of details. They said that the Pentagon may be grossly under-counting the number of civilians killed in airstrikes and other military activities due to a “faulty system” for investigating and counting possible deaths.

A director at Amnesty International USA said that the pentagon “has deemed that the vast majority of claims of civilian casualties are not credible without ever investigating them.”

“Its numbers therefore likely severely under-count the actual civilian death toll,” said Daphne Eviatar.

Director of the American Civil Liberties Union's National Security Project Hina Shamsi said the study “provides only a total number of unidentified people killed in all those countries, without any additional detail.”

“The administration’s low death claims cannot be meaningfully tested and therefore cannot be trusted,” she added.

Delivery of the Pentagon report was mandated by a 2016 executive order signed by then-President Barack Obama. Under the order, the report was to be made public "annually on May 1, consistent with the need to protect sources and methods." The Trump administration, however missed the deadline.

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