The U.S. military is reviewing more than 700 videos of bombs it dropped on the Iraqi city of Mosul after hundreds of civilians died in U.S.-led airstrikes in the campaign to retake the city from the Islamic State.
Local reports say that as many as 200 civilians, including women and children, were killed in a March 17 airstrike that struck buildings where they were hiding during bloody street-to-street battles.
If the deaths are found to be a result of the airstrike, it would be one of the deadliest coalition attacks on civilians in recent history.
“We are not jumping to any conclusions,” Col. John Thomas, a spokesman for U.S. Central Command, said at the Pentagon on Monday, speaking from Central Command headquarters in Florida. “We are looking at getting ground truth. It’s our highest priority.”
We are keenly aware that every battlefield where an enemy hides between women and children is also a humanitarian (shield).
Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis
The hundreds of videos span a 10-day period. Central Command said the assessment would be the top priority for investigators for two to three weeks. If there is sufficient evidence, a formal investigation will be launched.
[READ MORE: Pentagon denies airstrike hit mosque in Syria]
“We know that we were dropping bombs in the immediate vicinity, if not on specific buildings that have made it into the (reports),” Thomas said. “Our weapons are quite precise . . . so we have to look at what we actually struck.”
Iraqi Vice President Osama Nujaifi has called for an immediate investigation into the impact of the Mosul airstrikes, which he called a “humanitarian disaster.” The United Nations said last week that it was “profoundly concerned” about the reported civilian deaths in Mosul.
“We are stunned by this terrible loss of life,” Lise Grande, the U.N.’s humanitarian coordinator for Iraq, said in a statement Friday. “International humanitarian law is clear. Parties to the conflict – all parties – are obliged to do everything possible to protect civilians.”
Mosul, the Islamic State’s stronghold in northern Iraq, is the country’s second largest city and has been under the terrorist group’s control since 2014.
Word of the investigation came as the Pentagon announced that it was dispatching more U.S. troops from the 82nd Airborne Division to Mosul to assist Iraqi forces as the battle intensifies.
Pentagon officials declined to say how many additional troops were being deployed, saying only that an “unspecified number” were being sent from the division’s 2nd Brigade Combat Team, based at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. They will join 1,700 troops from the same brigade combat team who were deployed in November for nine months to support the anti-Islamic State campaign.
200,000Civilians displaced by the fighting in Mosul since October
Fighting in Mosul has intensified as the battle has moved into more densely populated areas in the city’s west, where Islamic State militants are using homes as cover. More than 200,000 civilians have fled the city since the offensive began in October, according to the Switzerland-based International Organization for Migration. Thousands more are trapped in the fighting.
Thomas said the military was examining “intriguing information of secondary explosions,” a possible indication that a large number of civilian casualties were due to causes other than a U.S. airstrike itself: possible Islamic State booby traps, perhaps the explosion of an Islamic State truck bomb after it was hit by a U.S.-launched munition or possibly buildings collapsing because of the blasts.
The Iraqi military denied Sunday that U.S. airstrikes had caused the massive civilian casualties, saying in a statement that military experts dispatched to the scene had found no signs of an air attack. Instead, they found that the walls of the houses where families had been hiding were booby-trapped. The Iraqi military said a detonator had been found nearby.
The Iraqis said 61 bodies had been pulled from the rubble and that 25 women and children had been rescued alive.