The top U.S. ground commander in Iraq was at the end of his briefing — and at the end of his rope.
Lt. Gen. Stephen Townsend, commander of Combined Joint Task Force Operation Inherent Resolve, had just fielded questions from the Pentagon press corps for 45 minutes Tuesday, and he felt it was time to inject a little moral clarity into the conversation.
Townsend, in an audio briefing piped in from Baghdad, has just conceded that there was “a fair chance” that a U.S. airstrike played a role in the deaths of more than 100 Iraqi civilians when a building, or buildings, collapsed on a narrow Mosul street in the midst of some of the most demanding house-to-house, door-to-door urban combat since World War II.
But he thought the reporters, with their single-minded focus on why the American-led air campaign, touted as the most accurate in the history of warfare, had taken the lives of innocent civilians including women, children and babies, was missing the bigger picture: They weren’t targeting civilians, the Islamic State is.
And so the three-star general let out his frustration over the tone of the questioning. “[It’s] a little disappointing to me that all the questions were about our airstrikes, and our process, and our decisions,” Townsend said, beginning his lecture to Pentagon reporters.
“If these innocents were killed by the coalition, it was an unintentional accident of war, and ISIS is slaughtering Iraqis and Syrians on a daily basis,” Townsend said. “ISIS is cutting off heads. ISIS is shooting people, throwing people from buildings, burning them alive in cages and they are making the video record to prove it. This has gotta stop. This evil has gotta be stamped out. And in my mind any responsibility for any civilian deaths, the moral responsibility for civilian deaths in Iraq and Syria belongs to ISIS.”
“I’ll close with that,” he said.
Townsend had spent his entire briefing trying to paint a picture for the media about the complexites of urban combat in west Mosul, which he described as an “urban canyon, very dense, claustrophobically-close terrain, with streets so narrow that tanks can’t accompany the troops in the attack.”
It was this kind of situation, Townsend implied, that Iraqi troops faced March 17, taking fire from heavy weapons in a building and facing a massive truck bomb that could take out their position on a Mosul street in one horrific instant.
“Imagine a VBIED [vehicle-borne improvised explosive device] barreling down on a forward-deployed unit,” Townsend said. “This armored VBIED is hurtling at them and you may have as few as 20 to 30 seconds to make a decision, or less.” And he added for emphasis, “Our [U.S.] advisers might not be too far behind them.
“This is why this is not a war crime to accidentally kill civilians,” Townsend said. “It’s unfortunate, but it’s not a crime because these soldiers have to make these decisions in seconds sometimes, in circumstances you cannot imagine unless you experienced them.”
Townsend said his gut tells him that the U.S. strike probably played a role in the deaths, but he places the blame on ISIS, who he says have cruelly used civilians as human shields.
“The Iraqi counterterrorism service reported they found two houses rigged to blow and filled with hostages: 45 in one house 25 in another,” Townsend said. “They managed to defuse the explosives and release the hostages without harm.”
In this latest case, Townsend said there are three theories of what caused the tragedy: a direct hit on the building, a blast from hitting the truck bomb nearby, or explosives rigged by ISIS, or perhaps a combination of the three.
But in any event, Townsend said the blame is clear:
“Our enemy, ISIS, are evil and murderous butchers, engaged in purposeful and mass slaughter,” Townsend said. “There are countless mass graves surrounding Mosul. ISIS put those bodies in there, not the coalition.”
