 Hi, my name is Joanna Naples-Mitchell. I'm a human rights lawyer in New York City. I work at an organization called the Zomia Center, where I run a program that advocates for civilians harmed in US military operations in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan. Zomia is a word for a non-state space, an ungoverned or semi-governed territory like a region with active armed conflict. Our founders are a group of journalists, academics, and researchers who have spent years working in these kinds of spaces. In their work, they observe significant gaps in service delivery, aid, and in knowledge. They founded Zomia to help address this. Today, Zomia has a staff of more than 170 people. We run humanitarian, public health, research and advocacy projects in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan. We are closely affiliated with both ASU and New America. I direct Zomia's Redress program, which we founded in June 2022. We founded this program to address the fact that the US government has multiple funds to help civilians harmed in conflict that are not reaching intended beneficiaries. Tens of thousands of civilians have lost loved ones, limbs, and homes in US and coalition air strikes in recent years. Since 2020, Congress has appropriated $3 million a year for the Pentagon to make condolence payments after killing or injuring civilians in military operations. Condolence payments were common in the military's ground operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. They also may be known as salatia or ex-grasha payments. There are various terms, but they peered off as the military shifted to air operations. They were token amounts of a few hundred to a few thousand dollars, but they were something. Congress passed this new $3 million funding authorization to encourage the Pentagon to start making these payments again. Yet the Pentagon made no payments in 2020 and only won a $5,000 payment to one family in Afghanistan in 2021. Similarly, for the last several years, USAID has received $7.5 million a year through its Marla Ruzika fund to spend on projects to help civilians in Iraq. This fund was recently expanded to $10 million a year to be divided among projects in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, and Yemen. This fund was named after Marla Ruzika, a young woman who founded the Center for Civilians in Conflict and was tragically killed by a car bomb in Iraq. Yet it has been unclear in recent years how civilians in Iraq have been helped by these funds or how outside organizations can even refer cases to USAID for consideration. We founded the Redress Program to address this gap. We've taken on the cases of families in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan who were harmed by US military operations, advocating for acknowledgement and assistance for them and for accountability more broadly. The program started just as the Secretary of Defense announced the military's new civilian harm mitigation and response action plan known as the CHIMRAP in August, 2022, which responds to two decades of civil society documentation and advocacy for greater protection of civilians and accountability for harm. So we've been able to bring the perspectives of the families we're presenting into discussions with the Pentagon on how its processes can better address his family's needs and demands. Before I speak more about the program and what we've done, I wanna take a step back. I've mentioned for building on two decades of civil society advocacy. We work closely with organizations like the Center for Civilians in Conflict and Air Wars. We also owe a great debt to some ASU affiliates, specifically the journalists Asmat Khan and Anand Gopal, both of whom have worked at ASU, co-authored a 2017 New York Times investigation into a US-led coalition airstrike that killed the family of an Iraqi man named Basin Razo. They visited the sites of about 150 airstrikes in Iraq and found that one in five strikes had resulted in a civilian death. This was a rate 31 times the rate acknowledged by the coalition. It turns out coalition airstrikes were far less precise than the military claimed. This investigation catalyzed a series of changes from the Pentagon and Congress, including the $3 million annual fund for condolence payments I mentioned before. Since then, Anand co-founded the Zomia Center, the organization where I work. Asmat went on to do future New York Times reporting that helped catalyze the Pentagon's new civilian harm mitigation plan and won her the Pulitzer Prize. And Basin Razo, the man they profiled, has been an amazing advocate for other families harmed by coalition operations in Iraq. And we've been lucky to partner with him in the redress program at the Zomia Center. Now I've talked about how we got here, why this program exists, what it's intended to do, but where are we now? Over the last year, we've taken on the cases of more than 30 families in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan. In cases, the Pentagon has already deemed credible, meaning they acknowledged they killed her or injured civilians. We've submitted requests for condolence payments. Those requests are all still pending, some since June 2022. We've also collected new evidence of civilian harm from families, journalists and other civil society organizations. And we've submitted that evidence to Central Command, asking them to reinvestigate those strikes. Families have approached us asking to take on their cases for different reasons. Some want acknowledgement for the harm done to them. Some want answers, they wanna know specifically which coalition government dropped the bomb on their home. Others are facing high medical bills after being injured in a strike and the money would do a great deal. So others have lost a breadwinner and even a token payment of a few thousand dollars would help them get back. When we can at Zomia, we try to support these families as they wait patiently for a response from the military. We're working to stand up a program now to provide more medical and other forms of individualized support in the coming months to these families. We're hoping it can be a model that other entities, including the US government might be able to scale up in the future. Even as the US media focuses on Russia's devastating invasion of Ukraine, the US military has continued to come to fire for its targeting of civilians by mistake. Most recently after a strike in Northwest Syria in May, appeared to have mistaken a shepherd tending sheep for a high-level Al-Qaeda operative. The results of that investigation have not yet been released. Within the redress program, we try to situate our efforts within larger conversations around reparations and accountability, including Ukraine. The Pentagon is now considering how to improve its responses to civilian harm, both individual and community-based, and is looking to other countries, for examples. The Pentagon's concern is forward-looking, which means thinking not only about current modes of warfare, but new ones, as we enter a new age of potential, new great power conflict. At ZOMIA, we work to convene other NGOs and survivors, working in these and other contexts, to talk about what redress looks like, what works and what doesn't, what hasn't worked and what has. The unfortunate reality is that the US military will continue harming civilians by mistake, even if the mode of warfare continues to change, and we need to keep holding them accountable. The redress program was founded to help civilians access a $3 million Pentagon fund intended for them. We're still waiting to see how Central Command responds to our requests, but I will say this, we have developed over the last year and changed a relationship of trust with the military. The evidence we've shared and the cases we've raised are being taken seriously. So I am optimistic about what we hear in the coming months, and I'm hopeful that we can continue to work with others to help develop better models that make these processes more accessible to civilians themselves. The military owes them that and so much more. Thank you.