An investigation by U.S. Air Forces Central Command has concluded U.S., British, Australian and Danish aircraft mistakenly bombed forces aligned with the Syrian government Sept. 17 after they were misidentified as Islamic State fighters.
“We made an unintentional, regrettable error,” said Brig. Gen. Richard “Tex” Coe, the lead investigating officer in a conference call with reporters Tuesday.
As many as 83 troops were killed and more that 100 wounded in the strike, according to human right groups. But the U.S. investigation was able to confirm only 15 deaths, because it had no access on the ground.
Coe blamed the mistake on “human factors,” including “confirmation bias,” but said his probe found the decision to authorize the strike was made “in good faith,” and he found no evidence of “deliberate disregard of targeting procedures” or that there was any intent to target Syrian government troops.
“I found that the decision to identify the targets as Daesh [Islamic State] military objectives was made in good faith, based on information reasonably available at the time to all coalition decision makers,” Coe said.
A critical mistake came when a vehicle was identified as belonging to ISIS, and that planted the misimpression that the forces were Islamic State, and that’s where confirmation bias kicked in, leading to the erroneous interpretation of further observations that only reinforced the misidentification.
“Factors like confirmation bias, improper labeling and invalid assumptions resulted in a preconceived or imprecisely arrived at identification of forces on the ground coloring in the planners’ minds what they were seeing and failing to notice or voice contradictory information to others in the planning or the approval chain,” Coe said.
The investigation judged it was more likely than not that the fighters killed were aligned with the Syrian regime, if not Syrian government troops, but Coe said it was difficult to determine the precise affiliation of the troops because they had no flags, insignia or uniforms that identified the ground forces.
The September attack on Dayr az Zawr involved U.S. A-10s, as well as mix of F-16s, F/A-18s and drones from the U.K., Australia and Denmark.
