The U.S. military has claimed responsibility for roughly a dozen and a half civilian casualties in 2021, all of which it says took place in Afghanistan.
The Department of Defense released its annual report on civilian casualties Tuesday, and the report concluded that roughly a dozen civilians were killed in U.S. operations while another five were injured.
As of Feb. 15, 2022, there were four reports of U.S. strikes in Afghanistan that either injured or killed civilians in the year before. The first strike occurred on Jan. 8, 2021, in Herat, Afghanistan, and it killed one civilian and resulted in the Pentagon paying an ex gratia payment to the family of the victim, the report reads. Ten days later, the United States injured two civilians in Kandahar, Afghanistan, in an airstrike.
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The U.S. military mission in Afghanistan concluded at the end of August 2021, wrapping up a war lasting two decades. In that final month, when the U.S.-backed government of Ashraf Ghani collapsed amid a military offensive from the Taliban, the U.S. killed a civilian in a strike, also in Kandahar, on Aug. 11.
The U.S. military targeted a civilian, aid worker Zemari Ahmadi, believing that he was a terrorist who posed an imminent threat to service members who had been evacuating Americans and at-risk Afghans who did not want to live under the rule of the Taliban.
He was among 10 who were killed in the strike, many of whom were his own relatives, including some children.
The Pentagon said in the aftermath of the strike that it would evacuate Ahmadi’s family and compensate them, but only 11 of the 144 people included in the group had made it into the U.S., Brett Max Kaufman, a senior staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union, who is representing the family, told the Washington Examiner late last month, around the one-year anniversary of the strike. More than 30 remained in Afghanistan under threat from the Taliban at that time.
Operation Inherent Resolve, the U.S. military’s operation in Syria and Iraq, received six reports of potential civilian casualties last year, though it was able to determine half of them were not “credible,” while the other three “continue to be under assessment.”
The report did not include details on any strike from 2021 in Syria or Iraq that resulted in civilian casualties, though U.S. Central Command conducted a strike in Syria on Dec. 3 where there were reports of civilian casualties.
It’s unclear if that strike is one of the three that the report said is “under assessment,” though CENTCOM has completed an investigation into the strike, a spokesperson told the Washington Examiner in May. The findings, meanwhile, are undergoing declassification through the Freedom of Information Act process.
The Defense Department also conducted an airstrike on Jan. 1, 2021, in Qunyo Barrow, Somalia, that injured three civilians, while it also recently reopened a previously closed assessment of a joint U.S.-Somali military operation that took place on May 9, 2018.
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In late August, the Pentagon unveiled a memorandum from Secretary Lloyd Austin detailing new changes to the military’s drone program that are intended to prevent civilian casualties. The memo expanded upon one issued from Austin back in late January, directing the creation of the Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Action Plan.
The memo established the creation of a CHMR (civilian harm mitigation and response) Steering Committee with the intent that it would provide executive-level direction, guidance, and oversight of the Defense Department’s CHMR. It also established “a civilian protection center of excellence to expedite and institutionalize the advancement of knowledge, practices, and tools for preventing, mitigating, and responding to civilian harm.”
