US says mistaken coalition airstrikes in Syria were legal

Air Force Brigadier General Richard Coe, who headed U.S. Central Command’s investigation of the incident, called it “an unintentional, regrettable error, primarily based on human factors in several areas in the targeting process”. Coe said US forces had alerted the Russians – who are conducting their own air campaign over Syria – that USA and coalition aircraft would be striking in the area, but the service member responsible for passing the location of the proposed strikes accidentally gave the Russians inaccurate information.

“Since the forces they were observing during the strike were not wearing uniforms, they had no flags or insignia, we could not attribute a unit or whether specifically they were Syrian regime military”, Coe told reporters on a phone call.

“This was obviously a missed opportunity, to be able to limit the damage of the mistake”, Coe said.

No single person in the United States-led coalition will be sanctioned for the blunder, which a month-long investigation released on Wednesday morning has instead blamed on failures spread across the operation to ensure key decision-makers had all the information.

However, at least one intelligence analyst concluded before the airstrike that the forces being targeted could not have been the Islamic State group, Coe said. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights estimated almost 90 people died.

The September 7 attack prompted outrage from Syria and its main military backer, Russia, which accused Washington of deliberately targeting Syrian forces.

That is the upshot of an investigation into a botched USA -led coalition airstrike in the Syrian city of Deir el Zour on September 17 that may have killed as many as 83 people, many of them members of the Syrian army.

“It was not unreasonable at the time to come to the conclusion that that was an (IS) commandeered asset”, Coe said. The ceasefire was repeatedly violated and collapsed after seven days after Russian and Syrian jets bombed rebel-held areas of Aleppo. Australian, British and Danish aircraft were also involved in the strike.

The mistaken USA airstrikes in September on what were either Syrian military or rebel forces fighting with the Syrians – which the Pentagon said in a report on Tuesday were caused by human error in identifying the target – came just days before Russian Federation is suspected of striking a convoy bringing needed supplies to the war-torn Syrian city of Aleppo.

‘This is unfortunate, ‘ the investigators wrote in an executive summary, referring to the 27-minute delay, ‘but it could have been even more so had the Russians not called’. Accordingly, officials said, they do not report the number or type of aircraft employed in a strike, the number of munitions dropped in each strike, or the number of individual munition impact points against a target. However, President Assad said he did not believe the United States account that the attack “wasn’t an accident”. Russian Federation and Syria at the time put the number of deaths at more than 60, while the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights put it at more than 90.

The investigation found evidence of at least 15 deaths but did not dispute other estimates of up to 83 fatalities. However, they could not go to the site and had to rely on overhead surveillance only, which only confirmed 15.

Recommendations from Coe’s report to reduce the risk of human error in future airstrikes, he said, are already being implemented. No one was reprimanded for the incident.

And the USA and Russian Federation should make a greater use of their safety de-confliction hotline to make sure critical information is more quickly communicated to the personnel who are available.