Скачать или смотреть Azmat Khan: The Origin of Her Investigation Into Civilian Casualties

On March 18, 2019, a US fighter jet seeking ISIS terrorist targets dropped a bomb on a large crowd of women, men, and children near the town of Baghuz, Syria – and another coalition aircraft then dropped two more bombs on the survivors. Far away, at a US military air operations center in Qatar, one “confused analyst” monitoring drone surveillance typed “Who dropped that?” into the secure messaging system, according to The New York Times. The paper reported that about 70 people, including dozens of civilians, were likely killed in that single, catastrophic blunder.

These were just two of more than 1,300 incidents of alleged civilian casualties examined by a team at the Times in an exposé on the US-led coalition air war against ISIS in the Middle East since 2014. Based on its exhaustive analysis, the Times concluded that “the American air war has been plagued by deeply flawed intelligence, rushed and imprecise targeting, and the deaths of thousands of civilians.”

The Times revealed two mutually-reinforcing errors among many strike planners. The first was confirmation bias, in which everyday objects and activities were often misinterpreted as the kinds of weapons or suspicious movements that preoccupied strike officers. The second was contextual ignorance, where flawed “patterns of life” theories were used to predict civilian movements, and little attention paid to behavior tied to predictable events like Ramadan, midday heat, and civilians ordered to move by ISIS fighters.

Hear reporter Azmat Khan discuss how these biases affected US airstrike targeting in this short video.

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