 Good afternoon. Welcome to New America. My name is Peter Bragg and I run the global studies program here We're here to discuss this great new report by Air Wars US media coverage of civilian harm in the war against the so-called Islamic State It's author Alexa O'Brien is going to speak about the report and then we're going to have an all-star cast of Commentators discussing the report including Chris Woods who runs Air Wars and has written a great book about drones Greg Jaffee to his left to his to your to your left is Covered the US military for for many years wrote a brilliant book called the full star about Petraeus counter-insurgency Iraq and as about Khan who's Writing a book about civilian casualties in these conflicts Won the overseas won a whole series of awards for an amazing cover story That she wrote as a fellow at New America in the New York Times magazine about the real cause of war in Iraq So we'll start with Alexa and then we'll bring the panel in and then we'll bring you in for questions Hi, good afternoon everyone This report would not have been possible without funding from the Riva and David Logan foundation in the US and the J Leon Philanthropy Council in the United in the UK Air Wars set out to quantitatively and qualitatively measure US news coverage of civilian harm in the war against so-called Islamic State in Iraq and Syria how effective was reporting on the subject between 2014 and 2018 in a major conflict that saw Almost 30,000 locally alleged fatalities from US led actions The US led coalition has itself admitted to more than 1,300 deaths The reporting corporates three studies all commissioned by Air Wars two specifically for this report Two were on the frequency and character of US newspaper coverage During key portions of the war Another was on the frequency and character of civilian harm Mentioned at Pentagon press briefing since the commencement of hostilities almost five years ago And in addition almost 100 media professionals were canvassed via confidential survey and in-depth interview So a significant majority of media professionals believe it's the responsibility of US news outlets to Investigate all major cases of civilian harm in the war They also said that civilian harm is a very important issue That it's critical to coverage of war But also oversight of both US government and military strategy policy and operations But what we found was that news reporting on civilian casualties from international and US led sorry US actions was found to be largely absent during key periods of the conflict According to a 2017 unpublished study by postgraduate researchers at American University Five major US newspaper. So the Washington Post the Wall Street Journal the New York Times the LA Times and USA Today Published just five articles between them unreported civilian casualties from strikes in Iraq between October 2 15 and March 2 16 And so none of the 102 articles by the five papers mentioned civilian casualties from US led actions in Nineveh or al-Ambar provinces where coalition forces had conducted a majority of their strikes in Iraq and US newspaper coverage of strikes in Iraq a governor Where the US military had conducted most of its strikes in Syria? For the examined period were also almost non-existent. So just four articles by the five US newspapers mentioned strikes in On the second one. So airwars commissioned a follow-on study specifically for this report examining a more intense period exactly a year later and Two events represented more than half of total references to Civilian harm attributed to US led actions by the five US newspapers The narrow focus raises the question as to whether the five newspapers Were tackling the wider occurrence and significance of civilian harm alleged against US led actions in terms of their frequency and their scale So between October and December of 2016 Russian and al-Assad government forces were heavily engaged In the battle for East Aleppo and this was happening as the US led coalition and Iraqi forces Fought for control of East Mosul So in these first three months the five newspapers were almost six times more likely to mention Alleged harm from Russian and al-Assad government actions. Then they were from the US coalition and There was almost no newspaper coverage of civilian harm from international actions for two of these months in January and February of 217 even though Eastern Mosul was captured captured by so-called Islamic State in late January and Iraqi forces began their major offensive at Western Mosul in late February So field reporters write and create most of the copy or content about civilian harm and poor civilian harm Reporting was often linked to limited presence To a limited presence of field reporters on the ground Except during key engagement. So it was a lot easier for reporters to cover Offensives or invasions or battles than it was for them to cover sort of repetition of just strikes so to speak throughout other portions of the war and it was also linked to Inadequate sourcing And so field reporters are considered best suited by their colleagues and themselves to cover civilian harm Pentagon reporters say for example that they rely on field reporters to cover the issue And so under prior to under prioritized and resourced field reporting contributed to the inability To properly cover the issue Especially from US-led actions in denied areas controlled by so-called Islamic State Industry professionals said that the civilian harm coverage lacks a relevant mandate By managing editors at US media institutions and they felt the subject is generally siloed Fragmented and self-directed by individual journalists So even According to media professionals so in the face of diminished field reporting In this war civilian harm wasn't properly coordinated by managing editors So even when reporting from the field was limited for example because of the logistical security or other challenges The Pentagon press corps rarely verbally inquired about coalition related civilian harm during the conflict When the US military officials overtly flagged the issue the press followed up at most almost half of the time and so In the absence of reliable information about civilian harm from field reporters Media professionals said that they increasingly relied on open source material and analysis is including from specialist non-governmental organizations like Air Wars That monitor civilian harm outside the conflict zone As well as those that investigated on the ground more than they rely on US and Sorry US official government or military sources, and they also said that These organizations and eyewitness accounts had more credibility Then official US government or military sources regarding civilian harm So as a result media professionals expressed support for a reputable and commonly accepted industry-wide Standard for alternative civilian harm counts that can be used to help Credibly report on the issue. They also said that the military's responses to their information requests Were often not complete enough or timely so that they could meet deadlines and that is journalists They had to conduct extensive and costly Investigations or follow-ups to obtain the information that they needed to perform due diligence And finally more than half of US media professionals who were surveyed said that they were not sufficiently prepared to report on civilian harm With regard to specific related disciplines and that they would benefit from such trainings So the recommendations Were the sort of general consensus that we found from the whole Landscape of data and feedback that we received and recommendation one is a clear mandate clear editorial mandate for civilian harm coverage at media outlets consistent comprehensive and Balanced reporting on civilian harm is impossible without a relevant editorial mandate By managing editors at major US media institutions without it reporting is fragmented it consists of isolated events It leads to absent coverage And reporting doesn't provide enough context for what civilian harm indicates about the wars in which the US is engaged Journalists need support from editors to devote the time and resources to covering the issue And relevant editorial mandate would obviously help marshal those resources So the nature of civilian harm reporting is iterative and resource intensive Do in part to the lack of timely responsiveness by the US military as well as the logistical access and security challenges associated with any conflict so journalists really need Need that support and and they also noted what they described as an information void and airpower dominated conflicts like the war against so-called Islamic State so They felt that this operated in tandem with commonly held biases and mindsets including by managing editors And those my mindsets and biases can can concern for example presumed accuracy of US airpower and Associated claims of low civilian harm Despite the munitions being deployed in new ways For example in urban environments with higher population densities and those mindsets can also Concern the credibility of sources, especially sources that are on the ground So if the major media doesn't cover civilian harm the Pentagon sees itself as not sufficiently compelled to investigate cases alleged against the US led Against us lead and you US unilateral actions The second one is persistent and well resourced field reporting and balanced on the ground sourcing So according to those interviewed in accurate inadequate resourcing for field reporting on civilian harm and existing bureaus and staff were unable to devote The time to develop the source networks that they needed to overcome the security logistical and other challenges of the conflict and that US media relies heavily on freelancers so Including for you know local including local media for foreign news for war coverage, etc So any decline in freelance reporting? Results in a shortage of reliable and vetted information coming out of the battlefield and number three is the coordination of civilian harm coverage by the Pentagon and so there's a consensus that By Pentagon reporters and those who cover the US military back home So there's a consensus that field reporters are best place, but Managing editors should appropriately task and coordinate civilian harm From home especially when on the ground reporting is diminished If the issue is not properly assigned to designated reporting areas Journalists who cover the US military back home might just assume that field reporters are covering it And it sort of falls through institutional cracks and veteran Reporters noted that the lack of coordination between the reporters who cover the Pentagon and the military and those that cover a document civilian harm engenders a lost opportunity to critically and incitefully integrate reporting about US military doctrine strategy and operations as they relate to civilian harm and So record a recommendation for is support for reputable initiatives and standards for alternative civilian harm counts So in addition to official tallies provided by the US government there's support among Media professionals for reputable and commonly accepted industry-wide methodology or standards for alternative civilian harm counts Which can be used to help credibly report on the issue during US conflicts And so the reliable enumeration of civilian harm is critical to reporting on the topic and understanding its significance But media professionals also noted that it might incentivize a greater responsiveness on the part of the US military to their own information Requests if there was an alternative credible count And while those interviewed emphasize that they believe the US military is interested in mitigating the loss of civilian life They also said that its claims about civilian harm are less credible than those of reputable non-governmental organizations in part because The US military does not in their view consistently track the issue And there are some initiatives this was not mentioned and reporters did not bring up these initiatives But there are initiatives for standards around and methodologies around commonly accepted methodologies around civilian harm counts by the UN and a consortium of international non-governmental organizations and Number five is training in disciplines related to civilian harm reporting. So Civilian harm reporting touches on a lot of different components and disciplines and within journalism That can have far-reaching implications for victims, but also for US national policies and interests so three-quarters of survey journalists said that they've never received training on how to cover civilian harm and they expressed a desire to have these trainings offered to them so these can span everything from You know increasing knowledge and expertise about military operations policies and strategy veteran reporters you noted that That these could be in weapons platforms munitions damage assessments intelligence cycles and other relevant disciplines But other trainings that came up in this sort of pocket were How best to engage with the US military on civilian harm issues? How to treat sources in hostile environments? Fluency in open-source investigation and analysis also all these kinds of issues came up and And reporters typically expressed a support for those trainings So that's sort of the general summary of the report Yes, okay So we're going to go next with Greg As Matt, okay. I was Matt. So you're brilliant cover story on the New York Times magazine It's actually called out in this report as media best practice So Can you reflect a little bit on what Alexa said and also tell us the process that you went through when you You did this cover story because I think that the methodology and how you approached it. It's very interesting Thank you for writing this report. I have had so many thoughts on media coverage and civilian harm And I'm very grateful that Air Wars invested the time to interview as many as 100 reporters to put this out I began looking at this issue specifically for the the investigation the uncounted in early 2016 and I remember being on a flight on my way to Iraq and Being handed a copy of the international Herald Tribune and the very first sentence was this You know US airstrikes have killed 25,000 Islamic State fighters in Iraq and Syria It didn't say US officials have said it stated it as a fact It was April 8th, 2016 and I couldn't understand that number Because at the time the US government had only counted. I think eight civilian deaths and To have counted 25,000 ISIS fighters while the number of ISIS fighters remains Constance during that time period around 25 to 30,000 ISIS fighters. I was so incredulous and part of this is a problem of early reporting during the war when Many people who reporters who aren't necessarily on the ground the way they have been in past wars are relying on Government officials because they don't have access to many of these places. We know what happens to reporters who've been actively reporting in ISIS held territory. It is dangerous and It is a very difficult kind of thing to do when ISIS is In power. It's something that I would strongly caution against so it makes sense in some level that Reporters are not necessarily on the ground, but it's also part of a structural problem Which is that you know you tend to see American reporters investigating the costs of war most when American soldiers are dying So when we deploy large numbers of troops and American soldiers are losing their lives We tend to see more critical coverage of the cost of war But when you're conducting air campaigns largely via air and you have very few troops on the ground It's not even just that people aren't upset about the war or aren't questioning its costs Many of them don't even know that that war is happening And so I think that was one of the sort of central problems I saw at the time and I wanted to know well, what would it be like? Would it be possible to try to do a ground investigation? You have deadlines or you're a daily beat reporter and to have the kind of time to invest in an issue Like this to figure out well Can I get to territories that were previously held by ISIS? Immediately after they've been recaptured. Can I do this? Can I get to enough airstrikes to get to a statistically significant number and do you know a Kind of sample that would meet the standards of social science research These things aren't easy to do it takes time and I had the luxury I guess as a freelancer is being independent of having that time But a third impediment and this is one where I think news organizations are responsible There was very little interest in this issue. It was much sexier to talk about the atrocities of ISIS Because what they were doing was barbaric it was unsettling to so many and Watching that splashed across your TV screens was a lot more interesting than weighing what you know What kind of harm the United States might be causing in fighting these very barbaric groups, right? So these were some of the issues that you're facing and I had issues You know even trying to sell the story to begin with I Think I took it to ProPublica first and was told something like you know, we don't support people in war zones That's not our traditional Background, but if you partner with another organization, you know We could partner with another organization who might be able to that that might work And so I went to a series of news organizations before I went to the Times Magazine and it worked out well But what's also interesting to know is that there was more editorial interest after President Trump was elected and Came into office then during the Obama administration when I had started doing that work You saw a shift in the public's interest in these airstrikes and you saw more coverage of them. Um, I Don't want to talk for too long, but there are a few points I do want to bring up as helpful in terms of thinking about what some best practices are And essentially it comes down to tenants of investigative journalism and this is something a daily beat reporter can do It's something somebody with a longer deadline or more time to work on something can do But it's basically being methodical and pushing back against what you're being told and asking for evidence So repeatedly during the course of the uncounted I was denied information, you know told I'm sorry We don't have that or I was told something that was incorrect You know, we've made two payments for civilian death and I knew that not to be true, right? It's how do you get the right answer? And I always found that pushing back repeatedly and providing evidence of what I'd found led to successful results But it required being very specific and very methodical. So I'm going to give you one example You know, there were a number of airstrikes that I you know, I did a sample of a hundred a Hundred and three airstrikes and three territories that had previously been held by ISIS I went to many more in other areas, but this was a cluster-based sample I worked with the sociologists to make sure that this met the standards of social science to make sure that this was a Cluster-based sample. He's also a fellow at New America. His name is Anand Gopal and We designed what a sample like that would look like and I went on the ground to go do it And what I found was, you know, I would go to these places. I would investigate the site I would do tons of interviews. I would look at before and after satellite imagery I would, you know, dig through as safely as I could, rubble for any fragments of civilian or ISIS presence I would collect weapons fragments. I would You know, then take all of this research and give it to the government, right? I would ask them, did you conduct an airstrike at this GPS location on this date approximate date and time? And I was often being told no, we didn't we have nothing in that area We didn't conduct the nearest airstrike we conducted with 600 meters away on a different date But at the same time I'd been also saving and archiving all of the videos that the US government had uploaded itself And I was able to find many instances in which they had told me no that couldn't have been us You know, the nearest airstrike we conducted the 600 meters away I was able to find a video showing the airstrike that they had uploaded to their own, you know, sites showing an airstrike in the exact place I'd mentioned and instead of just being like hey, I found this video. You're lying. I would write hey I found this video. It looks like it's the same place in question. Is the date wrong on the video? Is it maybe a totally different area knowing fully well? It was the same area. I'd wait for them to respond confirm the video. I'd follow up So, you know, why did your record say that the nearest airstrike was 600 meters away? Are you looking at a different log to search for this? Are you and I'd give them all of these different options and I would just follow up back and forth back and forth And I thread my answers each time and eventually from that kind of reporting. I was able to learn that They weren't logging all of their airstrikes Which is a major problem when it comes to investigating harm if they're not logging all of the Jeep You know, they conduct six strikes and 20 minutes and they only can they only include the GPS coordinate of one of them and their number one reason for denying an airstrike civilian casualty is that they have no record of an airstrike in that geographic location Then you have a fundamental problem in that process and I've had this kind of that's just one example but I had this come up over and over again and it came down to being methodical getting specific and always pushing back so I was denied embeds and Repeatedly and I still have been and it really came down to pushing back not saying no But having the time, you know as they delayed or did whatever it was I had the time to be able to say no, you know, that's fine. Okay, you can't do it this month How about next month or the month after that? So these are things that not every journalist can have it's expensive work a lot of editors are not necessarily interested but I think that if you go out on your own let's say you're a freelancer and You gather some of this material and you're able to put it together in a way that shows something maybe systematic That would be very compelling whereas going to an editor and saying hi, I'd like to pitch the story They're not that necessarily that interested at the get-go but if you're able to show something to do some early reporting whether that's through a grant from the Pulitzer Center or the reporting group or other sorts of Institutions that help fund journalists doing this kind of work if you're able to show something like that You're more likely to be able to get it picked up and so I would recommend especially for any reporters in this room To prioritize that and if you can't go on the ground do what you can online because tracking those videos for example With something that that's actually very easy to do You know I was looking at when they deleted videos and I used a tool called visual ping It would just alert me every time they edited page or removed a video and it became very easy for me to figure out The day that they started pulling down all the videos was the day that I inquired about some of them So there are all of these tools you don't always have to be on the ground, but we do need reporters to take up That interest to begin with because the other factors as they exist right now You know when you don't have for example a widespread anti-war movement, right? When you tend to see those when American soldiers are dying when you don't have you know officials like president Karzai who at the time You know when he was a president in Afghanistan He had really pushed back on civilian deaths. You don't have officials like that these days So then it falls to reporters to push for it and you see the US government respond accordingly Chris Thanks so much for It's very much appreciated and for a Lexus fantastic Report it was it was important for Air Wars to have this report written by a journalist. We wanted this to be Journalists talking to journalists. We didn't want this to feel like a report that beat up on The media industry Air Wars over the past five years has worked with I think almost every major news organization in the US either Assisting with investigations assembly as a source or resource And as I hope we highlight in the report that really have been exceptional A Coverage of the issue over over the past five years including of course by asthma and by Greg Who thank you both for being here today? And Air Wars itself was set up originally by journalists to fill that gap We had this situation earlier on in the war where the coalition was claiming really zero civilian harm for a very long time They'd got caught up in their own narrative of precision strikes And they didn't really know what precision strikes did in this kind of high-intensity warfare So they just you know went with the makers claims really Even a couple of years ago they was they would still claim well We can't be killing a lot of civilians in places like Mosul and record because we use precision weapon That narrative has gone you don't hear military officials making those claims anymore and the coalition itself Has got a lot better at admitting civilian harm. They do their monthly press releases their their admissions as Alexa said They've admitted to killing 1300 civilians now which is significantly below where the true figure lies But still we probably haven't seen the US admit that number of deaths in any war during the war previously And I think there was a lag really between What was reporting out on the battlefield at scale and this was and the ease of war at scale lasted longer than World War one The urban fighting we've seen we haven't seen that intensity since World War two a Minimum of 30,000 deaths locally alleged by communities affected Certainly in the zone of somewhere between 8 and 12,000 is our own minimum estimate of civilians harmed But do we have any sense of that sitting at home reading the New York Times watching CNN NBC or or engaging with digital media and I think our concern was We risk coming away from this war without really understanding the consequences to affected communities and the implications that had for this complex and future complex so the report Can you measure that and yes, we hope we found ways of actually measuring coverage I think that some of the reassuring things in Alexa study are for Reporters themselves. They do see coverage of civilian harm as central to the broader coverage of war You know, we are a special interest group, but that was we get that we're here for civilians on the battlefield coverage of war is much broader than that Reporters do feel that every major incident should be covered not just to talk through to power But also because of what that tells us about the other issues involved that was reassuring and perhaps the Expectation among reporters is that they had been doing a good job But when we looked at it, it really did turn out to be episodic and and there were entire periods of the war When there was just no coverage and I think we were surprised to find that During January and February 2017 when you get the very heavy push To finish off the battle of East Mosul Obama in his last weeks in office in fact had changed the rules of engagement And as you've described the effect on the ground as being like from day to night in terms of the switch Very high levels of civilian harm In those two months more than a thousand deaths were locally alleged by Iraqis and Syrians from coalition actions And there was no media coverage in the US in major US news organizations non Now they had been there in the earlier stages of the battle of Easter Mosul So perhaps that was burn out of teams perhaps it was resourcing that everyone Was waiting with anticipation of what would happen when Trump came in because Trump comes in right at the end of that battle But I I just find it astonishing that such an intense part of the war Just if you there are no news clips there it Interns of civilian harm something something obviously wasn't working as intended roll forward two months and you see a Completely different pattern with the assault on West Mosul US newsrooms devoted quite significant resource to that battle You get a lot of coverage a lot of pushback against the coalition narrative The worst month of the entire war March 2017 Al Jadida a neighborhood in in Mosul came under terrible assault 5,000 munitions dropped from the air alone by the coalition in that one month Terrible terrible civilian harm The US medium really did its job really got in on the ground did the reporting the coalition Reacted they scale back their bombing by 30 percent civilian arm fell by 30 percent that next month as well So there was a direct link between the two we felt And that was reporting working well So you know just just just a few months apart you get these wild swings between no coverage and good coverage Between our assumptions of what covering civilian harm and war Should and could be and what it actually was I think also the value of Alexa studies we didn't sort of stop there if we just measured the reporting If it had just been an accounting exercise, that's not really helping anyone The in-depth interviews that we did with reporters, you know, why is this happening? What are your expectations? Where should the resourcing go? What do you need to do this better? I think all of that comes out really strongly in the report And I I hope gives a template for the better future coverage because I I would hope we're all in agreement that The coverage of civilian harm should should remain a critical part of broader coverage And if we accept that there were failings this time around on such a major war, you know, what are the Fairly straightforward changes that couldn't should be made for the future and as you know, it's a simple list of five recommendations Which we're hoping to get in the door with editors in the weeks ahead And convince some of the value and the final thing I say is, you know, the home reporters did a great job But I also feel that this report really sings The praises and value of field reporting it is worth investing in not just for covering civilian harm If you're going to cover a conflict that your own forces are involved in you have to have people They have to be there. They have to talk to communities Air Wars monitors civilian harm remotely. So we monitor what local communities say that is only a partial Picture and only ever can be a partial picture and whether when Asma and Anand went into Cairo For your for your uncounted study, I think you've had just in that one hand three times more Incidents of civilian harm than had ever been reported out were known about by ours by the US military by anyone You need to go in to talk to people and reporters Are the best place to do that and it's when you talk to people On the ground that you get those really comprehensive understandings of the effects of conflict on community and and Home reporting has a very important role to play but field reporting. I think yeah, it's not something we get to scale back on Great You know, I've covered this primarily as a Washington reporter So I bring that perspective which I think comes with a certain amount of myopia I will say reading as much story in the New York Times magazine I was floored just by the two people could do that because I've been talking to the US military forever You know, I'd spent 15 years covering the US military and and had been following this issue through the wars And from their perspective is always too hard. It was too costly would require too many people And two people working on, you know, the budget that would buy paper clips for the Pentagon were able to You know knock it out. So it That the there was lots of value to that story in terms of telling the human stories But more just showing what was possible if you really care or you really put the effort into it You know, I had done a story on on Civil and casualty and the other reason I was so impressed by it is I had done a story on civilian casualties before and I realized Like how much serendipity Was required just for me to do that story with a colleague in Iraq We did a story on I was interested in civilian casualties because the Obama administration had started digging into it With regard to drones in particular and looking at drone Strikes and Civcast strikes, but they weren't doing it for Iraq and Syria. So I started flipping through some old DoD reports from Iraq and Syria and in one of the reports They had quoted which that was a period when they were releasing full redacted reports, you know 40 or 50 pages which they no longer do but in one of those 40 or 50 page reports They had quoted an email from a woman who had emailed the coalition and said I had paid some people to drive my vehicle from Mosul to Baghdad and You guys blew it up and you killed all the people in the vehicle And her email address was redacted and so I called the military and asked, you know, did you reach out to this woman? Do you know who she is? I'm trying to learn about this civilian casualty incident And they said no, we don't know who she is. We never emailed her back but we looked at drone footage and Gun camera footage from the planes that did the strike and we decided four people were killed And I mentioned it to our Baghdad correspondent. I shared the email with her And just by happenstance she had been in Erbil a couple weeks earlier With our one of our local reporters and had met the woman outside the consulate in Erbil She was there trying to get reimbursed for her car and couldn't get a meeting So she was wandering around outside the gate and they just talked to her And by coincidence he had written down her phone number and so we called her up and asked her who was in the car and Then she gave us the names of the people who Were in the car and their families and we called them up and instead of I think instead of four people being killed I think it was 10 or 12 including a couple of children And it just for me that incident was interesting just in the sense that You know how easy it would have been for the US military just to email this woman back And then she would have emailed them right back because she was desperate to talk to somebody It was this strange mess alone message in a bottle that she had thrown out and it it made me think In some ways, I do think the US military scissors tremendous amount of credit for on the front end Trying to come up with rules and engagement that minimize civilian casualties like I've never met I Can't think of a US military person that I've met. I'm sure they exist But in very small numbers that wants to kill civilians But that said I don't think they want to learn from their mistakes And the only way to get better is to really interrogate your mistakes And I think that they're really reluctant to do that One because I think they think it's used as enemy propaganda To I think they want to sort of believe that they're good guys and they're on the fight side of right and three There's this sort of default notion that well, it's war bad things happen in war and we can't control it Also the last thing just in terms of why coverage waxes and wanes I think all the the factors that Chris and Alexis Cited in there very in that very good study are exactly right I think in Washington we respond a lot to what the US military prioritizes probably too much So we cared a lot about civilian casualties as Asma knows noticed when Karzai was complaining about it but also when the the strategy in Iraq and Afghanistan was a counter-insurgency strategy when you had McChrystal and Petraeus Who priors prioritized counter-insurgency which put the focus on protecting the people from the enemy well then The military cares a lot about civilian casualties And so we in the Pentagon press corps care a lot about civilian casualties And we want to hold them to the standards that they set once we transition away from counter-insurgency to what we're in now Particularly, I think this is true in Afghanistan But it was also true in Iraq and Syria this notion that we can punish the enemy We can hit them hard enough that will force them to essentially sue for peace it becomes either a nutrition or Exclusively pain-based strategy in which your enemy focused and not civilian focused well Then the military is not really interested in civilian casualties in the same way anymore And I think because it's not central to US strategy to win the war then we don't care as much anymore And I'm not sure that that's right or good. It just happens. I think in this case to be true a Lot of proof of thought here. I had a number of clarification questions so Alexa mentioned that the US is admitted to 1300 deaths not casualties right deaths What and you mentioned I think 8,000 to 12,000 Chris does adding is that in civilian deaths that's in Iraq and Syria, right? And is that entirely is that estimate including all casualties caused by all Operations by SDF and the Iraqi. No, no, so that's just US and international allies, okay? And then you mentioned something about a change of the rules of engagement. I didn't quite get when that happened what it meant and who instituted it Or there were there were two Orders that changed, you know, what the rules were when it came to airstrikes and who could call them in one of them happened in December of 2016 Under the Obama administration the second one was issued the day of inauguration that President Trump came into office And they basically expanded the authority of who was allowed to approve an airstrike happening and the intent as it was explained to me was that There were commanders who wanted to be closer to the site of a particular or they wanted to allow people who were closer to the site of conflict To be able to authorize those instead of just calling back to a cell And you did see a spike in casualties But here's where you know, I might take a different understanding or approach than some people while You can trace a shift an increase in the numbers of civilian deaths that correspond with that time frame I can't necessarily establish causality and say that one is directly the result of the yeah Let me explain why it's it's essentially that around that time is when you saw the battle for Mosul Just go into bigger gear and that was always the intent is that it would happen within those three years that battle would happen at that time what I've always found a little bit disturbing is the The ease with which people associate the shift in administrations with the increase in civilian casualties, so there was a lot of interest once Trump was elected I'm sorry once Trump came into office in the civilian casualty problem After he came into office, and I didn't see that during the Obama administration But at the same time I was seeing mass casualty incidents when we talk about the very famous March 17th 2017 incident in Mosul Jadidah. I can trace one in Hawija that happened in the summer of 2015 That killed at least 70 people It was a coalition airstrike. I've been to the site where this happened in Hawija. It happened under the Obama administration Really, there was just a little bit of like wire coverage of it, but nothing like what we saw later That's one small example, but what I've seen is like the causation for why these civilian casualties are happening It's not as simple as someone in office or even necessarily in executive order It often comes down to very specific things and you have to dig deeply to understand why But we saw increased civilian death in the battles for Mosul and Raqqa and a major reason for that Barely ever talked about in coverage and it's this it is that there was a decision made Not to allow an exit corridor for ISIS fighters Now that had been the case with Ramadi with Fallujah With all of these other major cities that had been retaken from ISIS is that they had allowed an exit quarters In exit quarters that fighters could leave and the battle would continue elsewhere with both Mosul and Raqqa Decision was made whether it was by and there's some disagreement here whether it was US officials or Iraqi officials Or others who made this decision, but not to allow for an exit quarter So all of a sudden you have all of these ISIS fighters trapped in West Mosul and the same thing happened just a few months later in Raqqa and What that resulted in was people being trapped in one spot and A quest to sort of retake that city and a huge increase in civilian deaths That was one of them a second thing that I found and it really just came from digging specifically into into incidents So if you read the uncounted you know that You know of the airstrikes that we investigated in the sample of 103 that we found a rate of civilian death That was 31 times higher than what had been admitted By the US government, but if you looked at why the assumption is often that most of these civilian deaths happened during liberation or You know quest to retake territory or the results of something You know we casually this term we throw around of collateral damage that there was a legitimate target someone happened to be walking by or whatever it might be it was hit and Unfortunately, this person nearby was killed what I found was that in half the cases of civilian death that we found It was the result of what's likely poor or outdated intelligence We couldn't find a discernible ISIS target nearby and it was the intelligence that was wrong Rather than necessarily it being a good hit, you know a precision strike. They hit the right thing They got it right and it just happened to be somebody nearby and it it just requires digging more deeply into these individual incidents Getting forensic about those details and that's sort of what allows you to see what the real root causes actually are I want to go back to these rules of engagement because kind of I think there's a confusion around this that I think we should we need to clarify What you described isn't necessarily We give the authorities to a lower level commander the rules of engagement don't necessarily change You're just saying you can take the shot without asking You know Saint-Colm or the White House to take the shock So is there are we is there kind of a conflation of? Because the rules of engagement presumably under Obama and Trump and under any US military Commander-in-Chief was presumably we're going to try and avoid subpoenaing civilian casualties and the certain standards that we're going to take a shot Where we wouldn't take a shot, so I just want to make sure that we understand what you're saying Engagement is an actual document. Yeah, was that document changed? No, but we now put aside that official term Yeah rules of how you carry out an airstrike and how you engage were those changed Yes, they were and it actually it was a little bit frustrating at the time. It became this point of argument I remember my my co-author on and the sociologist who helped design the cluster sample We were talking about this and I was like well They say it's actually technically not a change in the rules of engagement He's like but it is a change in rules and we were sort of going back and forth about this And I think getting lost in the details of that is really just a very convenient way to just sidestep what's happening Which is that this is something that is creating a shift and it is apparently having an effect of some kind on the ground and Whether or not it's a technical change in the official rules of engagement or not Shouldn't it be studied and why are we getting caught up in this conversation about how you would classify it specifically? I guess I'm still still not completely clear because Giving a local commander more authority to take a strike So one of the reasons that Authorities placed higher up the chain is there's more hoops to clear and one of the problems from a military perspective For the battle of East Mosul is that there were that there were very high proportions of Iraqi dead and injured Mostly Iraqi special forces fought the battle for East Mosul and they they registered around 50% attrition That's very high And there were real concerns by the Iraqis that they wouldn't have the troops to capture all of Mosul if that level carried on So the request for a change in the rules of engagement was being driven significantly by the Iraqis themselves that that involved a Transfer of risk from Iraqi forces onto the civilian population because the lower down the chain you go The the greater the risk of the local population because the faster you can call that in and the less oversight and scrutiny That's that's what's assumed Associated Press put the minimum number of dead in Mosul at 9,000 civilians You talk to the coalition about the battle of Mosul they've admitted to about 400 deaths Commanders have told me privately They know they killed more than a thousand. They just don't know where or when it was such a chaotic fight They know it was a very bad fight for for civilians But I think there was a conscious recognition that they're there They couldn't continue to clear house to house as they've been doing in the suburb and Architecture of Eastern Mosul and they went for a higher intensity Approach that that they knew would transfer more risk on to the civilian populations That was a military decision and one that the US would have been a party to But also the other issue is Western Mosul the density of population was so much greater And the civilians were trapped they really had nowhere to go So that I'm absolutely in agreement with as he wasn't a Trump thing in terms of that spike in civilian It would have happened with a Clinton presidency. We'd have we'd have seen a very similar spike in trends Rackers are more interesting one because we don't know how Clinton administration might have played out that battle And the Americans for example very heavily used artillery on rack We're using a 10s to carry out urban strikes Which have never been done before by the US military and the study I was recently did with Amnesty Shane You know at a bare minimum sixteen hundred civilians as many as three thousand killed by the US in that very small city actually so It's it's it's nuanced I think that because I mean so by raising this issue like a Hillary being president And Mosul it happened I mean there's so you have this like huge attrition rate for the Iraqi And they've been killed at like at very high numbers and it's very densely populated particularly Western Mosul with the outcome of being different On these rules of engagement and you know whether or not they were the result of this because of one specific thing There are two different kinds of airstrikes There's what are known as deliberate airstrikes and what are known as dynamic airstrikes deliberate or ones that are planned out Over a significant period of time. They're usually something that is considered You know, there's intelligence that you know is coming from great source. It's vetted It goes through far more hoops and then this second category these dynamic airstrikes are often perceived to be urgent and this is because maybe they're partner forces on the ground or There is some kind of an imminent threat that's perceived and so it can be seconds It can be minutes. It can be just a few hours for those to take place a Significant majority of these airstrikes during and any kind of liberation phase many of them are dynamic airstrikes So you do actually don't we tend to associate this with the rules of engagement. I wound up during the course of my reporting I got the numbers on the ratio of deliberate to dynamic and we were looking at eighty five percent I have these stats. I think it was through June of 2017 is when I had them As much as eighty five percent were dynamic airstrikes and those do not require the same levels of authority They don't even that executive the orders that we're talking about this shift in engagement It's actually far easier to to to carry out one of these dynamic strikes and to go through fewer hoops So we tend to like there's a lot of focus on those shifts and in the rules and who could call them in again I do not think it was as important as the fact that dynamic airstrikes don't have to go through that many hoops in the first You mentioned that you haven't been able to get an embed In Afghanistan and I don't think there were any in beds in Iraq or Syria during this, right? There was National Geographic and 16 minutes. Okay, but it's the National Geographic thing was kind of an authorized Oh, everything was super. I mean, but I mean like the embed system seems to have disappeared And then that was you know an imperfect way to actually see what was going on in the front lines You know not You know, there are some all with without there's some usual caveats, but let's not get into that But let's try let's look at the question of Without having embeds. I mean, what does that do to war reporting in general? So there were if the problem is that most of the frontline fighting was happening via Iraqi Troops right in Iraq at least and so there were a lot of American journalists embedding with those Iraqi units but in terms of with Americans you would just see visits to bases and Maybe more informal stuff, but there weren't that many Americans that close to this, you know There were some special operations Forces that did, you know, sometimes they would do capture those sorts of battles I think that's the reason why you didn't see as many part of the reason why mostly Special operations kind of war and therefore that is not gonna let you in But at the same time you didn't see a lot of reporters going to these major air bases like Qatar the air base that I went to Tell us about that air base and Greg you've you've been to that place as well. So what yeah, what happens there? Oh in terms of cutter it's so it's the major coordination Center for the operations in both the Iraq Syria theater and the Afghanistan theater so you walk in it's this cavernous room and you do get this sense even though I think a false sense that you're sort of all-seeing and all-knowing in a place like that They're these giant screens with live feeds of drone footage from the battlefield All sorts of just hundreds of analysts kind of hunched over computers in a darkened room I'm looking at stuff. So you it does I think some of the military sense that they're not causing civilian harm Is this incredible sense of technology in the sense that they've got this unblinking eyeball in the sky? The intelligence tail centers in Virginia actually one of the big Intel Bunkers where the you know thousand analysts doing the drone strikes that that all seeing is fascinating I mean we push back with a coalition on this most of the civilians He died in places like Muslim record died in unseen spaces when buildings collapsed on them Coalition didn't know they were there before the strike and they weren't able to see the bodies after the strike And I think modern militaries not just the u.s. Have got themselves into a bind here They they've become very dependent on the observable from above They don't have people on the ground asking local populations. They just look at the video And if there's nothing on the video they tell themselves everything is fine Greg's example They convinced themselves there were just four people in that vehicle and that they were ISIS and they were in fact 11 11 civilians So the there's a sort of the seductiveness of the technology Has has led the u.s. Military and and its allies then this this really problematic road where they they were convincing themselves They weren't harming civilians. I think we have seen a shift with the Americans Recently on a willingness to confront the the numbers at least try and bridge the gap between Chris expand a bit on that because I think it might be surprising to the audience the extent to which central command kind of deals with you at all Yeah, I mean our engagement is So the coalition took over from sencom in in late 2016 So we work mostly with the coalition and we're in touch with their civilian casualty assessment team on a weekly basis There's a significant exchange of data between them and us now And there's a kind of conversational space between us and them where we Neither party seems well neither party It really knows What has actually taken place? So there's a there's a dialogue about events The coalition has changed the way it engages on these events at least in its engagement with air wars So two years ago the single biggest source of Confirm the civilian arm events and the coalition was from self-reporting. That was pilots and analysts coming forward There was an inherent bias within the system towards what they themselves are seeing The biggest single source of confirmed events today is from external sources, whether that's reporters nga's or Or air wars. That's a that's a welcome shift. Actually, they're listening more to what outside organizations and experts are telling them And reporters have been very successful in securing admissions of civilian Well, I just want to pick up on that because my understanding is Jim Mattis read as Matt announced peace and sort of said, you know, basically what's happening Is that I mean, do we do we know what the outcomes were from your piece? Because it seemed to have got a lot of attention inside the Pentagon Right, so I met with the senate arm services committee a few times during the reporting and then again after the uncounted came out So they'd known what I was working on And it caused them to ask a lot of questions to the do d and they ultimately included in the The national defense spending bill last year A section as a result of that reporting As a result of the uncounted that established a civilian Officer who's in charge of civilian casualty policy It was supposed to the do d was supposed to create a portal for submitting So that people could submit allegations of harm that doesn't exist yet But you know, you know one of the things that we had found is that there was no means for an ordinary person to report civilian harm to begin with There were a few provisions within there including, you know, for example, I had mentioned earlier that That I'd been able to find out that they weren't logging all of their airstrikes So one of the things this official was tasked with doing was making sure that all airstrikes were logged That was one of the things in this in this section, but not all of that has been implemented There isn't official in charge, but a lot of the exact provisions, you know, the payment processes that were mandated Those haven't Come into play. There's one thing I want to touch on quickly again Not to harp on this not to harp on this like deliberate versus dynamic airstrike thing, but I really just want to emphasize this When we talk about, you know, the video footage and what we're seeing and being all knowing Deliberate airstrikes have a lot of that video footage, right? There's a lot of intelligence collected In the lead up to that dynamic airstrikes don't even necessarily have video footage of those even occurring sometimes They won't necessarily They there won't be a lot in the lead up to it There'll be very little FMV as it's called full motion video to review with dynamic airstrikes again and again I can't hammer this home enough when we talk about the standards for airstrikes and what's being done We're often referring to the standards for a deliberate airstrike Not the standards for a dynamic one and a large part of what I did at that Major airbase what's known as the chaos and cutter was go through the steps for every Everything that needs to every hurdle that has to be passed for both dynamic and deliberate airstrikes And the ones for a dynamic do not meet the standards that we casually refer to when we talk about what's happening and why One quick final question, which is just before we open it up is Are there why are the Saudis? killing so many civilians So many years into the war in Yemen Well, there's a few reasons One that we found, you know, you'll hear a lot of people talk about how they're not trained and the laws of armed conflict They're not trained and Whatever this might be that might be part of it But for the longest time the united states also carried out airstrikes with very little regard, you know Whether we're talking about dresden, tokyo, etc. So how did we get from? Mass casual how did the united states for example get from these mass casualty incidents and very little regard for in wars past To deliberate counting it was the results of largely it was the result of the vietnam war And this massive anti-war movement and it was one of the major demands was that the united state United states take these better protections And so they were integrated as a result of these demands. They were integrated into u.s policies Saudi has never had to do that right there has never been A major anti-war movement that they have grappled with that has forced them to change their policies And even just their thinking and how you go about war and then there's very little pressure from the u.s Government as well. So I've talked to officials, um, you know in the senate And and congress who are just Upset they think that they're in enough they're close enough with the Saudis to Lend them an era an aura of legitimacy But not in enough to actually Affect the way that they're carrying out these strikes with regard to civilian death You've seen some changes when it's come to hospitals and things that are very Very obvious examples of violations of the laws of war and you've seen some adjustments You've seen, you know officials who've gone to Saudi to help train officials there But at the end of the day those major adjustments the kind of Overall this change in thinking about what's acceptable in terms of civilian death That has come in the united states from two things only ever in the past one has been widespread anti-war movements which happened when american soldiers were losing their lives And two when there was a foreign official someone like Karzai pushing back when we look at some of the best time periods when You know america had the lowest rates of civilian casualties in afghanistan We tend to say oh patreus mccrystal. They're the reason why They adopted that policy because actually karzai pushed them to or certain foreign leaders push them to at the time They were facing so much pushback that they had to so those are the two things and until saudi has to grapple with either of them We won't see that and the third reason i think in fairness to them too They did because they thought they were it was causing them to lose the war Because of that pushback they were getting because of the killing civilians, right? We're trying to win the support of the people here, right? So it would wrap it up. Yeah, absolutely. A fourth factor is groups like our wars and civic and others I mean the civic groups these groups didn't exist before the iraq war, right? I mean, I can't think of Yeah, civic was founded in Yeah, and mahal got killed in 2005 But so I mean the point is that that civil society's had an important role to play in this Well, they were responsible for payments specifically civic was but when it comes to that major shift in thinking about Civilian deaths that was the result of the isn't payments a proxy for taking responsibility They already were taking responsibility. It was a change. It was actually the first payments happened during the korean war Oh, interesting. Just one quick thing on the sands. It's quite right that we we attempt to hold the sands to account here for the appalling disaster of yemen, but the europeans Are a bloody mess on this as well the british the french the dutch the danes The belgians absolutely unaccountable for civilian harm and and and the us comes in for a lot of criticism At least dod is engaging and admitting civilian harm putting policies and practices in place The french haven't admitted to a single death in five years of war The british won death the dutch have admitted to three events. They won't tell us where when or who they killed The belgians who knows And so, you know, it's yes, the saddies are a problem. The europeans are terrible on this as well That's fascinating. If you have a question raise your hand and identify yourself and wait for the mic. Thank you This lady in front to start with Mike's coming. Yeah Thanks very much. Jenny McAvoy from interaction. Um, thanks very much for this report and and for this panel discussion A couple of questions An issue that increasingly comes up in our discussions With the department of defense is surprisingly enough Who is targetable? And I wonder whether that has come up in the course of your reporting. Um asmat or jeff And you know, what observations you have on whether in fact that's a moving Moving target is the wrong is the wrong term whether that is shifting as well And you know perhaps relating to some of the attitudes and beliefs That were mentioned earlier the the other question is What role you observed in relation to local or regional media outlets in their coverage Of the anti isis operations and you know, I think there is a value in looking at us media outlets in particular But I suspect that there's a positive dynamic with the local and regional outlets as well And I'd love to hear your observations on that Your last question actually reminded me of comments from in-depths that didn't necessarily make it into the report I I do remember speaking to local reporters and Them reflecting that when they had we asked them when stories were rejected about civilian harm and why stated reasons Oftentimes their stories about civilian harm Were rejected because they were considered to be local stories So so on that question You saw a lot more robust coverage from syria because of the syrian revolution It created, you know, a lot of networks of you know citizen journalists and others who were then Documenting what was happening. So there was a much richer body of coverage. There were a lot more people documenting there's you know, the syrian violation there's all of these different groups that Basically were documenting this in syria that were local media groups And that was a result of the revolution in iraq you saw less of that You saw some posts on social media and I was able to so for the airstrikes I was looking at I would all obviously then do a deep dive online to see was this ever Reported anywhere did this show up in local media? Did this show up in social media posts? and I found that it only showed up on social media when The person who or the head of household in whatever this airstrike was was somebody who was kind of influential You know, it wasn't just if it was an ordinary household or a family It would be less likely to be reported But if it was an ex soldier, you know or somebody who had been in government at some point or a police officer at Some point it was far more likely to get reported But with respect to your first question about who's targetable and whether or not that's changing um Again, I want to go back to the distinctions between deliberate and dynamic airstrikes and with dynamic airstrikes many more people Are targetable by virtue of the fact that you're assessing less when you're looking at what you're doing, right? Your partner forces are under threat. You've been told it's coming from there There's a lot less time to evaluate the who who that is and a lot less to go through in the first place But one distinction I measured or saw with respect to the anti isis air war that seemed different from previous conflicts Was there's this sort of um obsession with and you can see this if you look at the uncounted I published You know through foyer. I was able to get The investigative document in the assessment the credibility assessment for a particular civilian casualty incident And they go through what they determined to be the reasons as they're evaluating in this deliberate airstrike You know whether or not this house is the nicest headquarters and whether it's a good target They they go through these things and they have what's known as like a slant where they're they're saying here's the number of women women men and children right and they were like there were no women or children observed and they That was you know a factor for why they They knew that this it was part of the reason why they approved this airstrike was that they didn't see women or children And that became a metric but what they didn't account for and what I kept digging into as I was looking at the anti isis air war was The fact that women and children often didn't leave the house during um During isis takeovers now in Afghanistan and elsewhere you would see women in burqas They would be very visible in certain ways And so one of the things I kept asking at the kayok and katar was How have you adapted to isis is very specific tactics and techniques and gender And the fact that a lot of women are not leaving their homes How are you measuring for that and I never got a good answer and that was one thing that I felt Was being ignored in this coverage was specific to gender And girls and the sort of metric that unless we see women or unless we see children what it's very explicitly children Um, you know that was often a cutoff point. It's come up in a lot more of the documents I've gotten in the time since Um, but there's been very little discussion of that and no understanding of whether it changed whether You know the ttps the techniques and procedures they look for when deciding who's target able adapted with that I wanted to say on and you guys a chris and asma might know better than Correct me if i'm wrong on who's target able to there's a certain amount that's classified and below the water line that we can't see So in some strikes as I remember it, they'll set the civilian casualties that They won't take the strike unless there are no civilians in place and others because the target is more valuable They'll raise it up to five or ten or twenty acceptable civilian casualties It's very rarely zero for the united states. Yeah, they dropped they said very early on in the war against ISIS We're not going with zero There's we reference in the report actually barbara star did a report for cnn on a Coalition strike on a bank in mosul And the target was money. There were no high value targets It was it was cash dollars that were being used to fight the war and Barbara managed to get hold of the the non-combatant value for that strike which they put at 50 Which is just shocking actually they were prepared to tolerate 50 dead and injured civilians to destroy that bank and for that number to be so high for effectively an inanimate object Told us something that we We were we were deeply concerned by and and though that information is obviously held back a lot of the time But I suspect the permissive environment was far worse than we realize For many of these strikes and many of these campaigns Hi, jeff abramson with the form on the arms trade and arms control association. I also want to echo my thanks I do a lot of work trying to convince Discussion about the arms trade whether these weapons will be misused So i'm intrigued by one of the question one of the trends you talked about in terms of alternative methods of Knowing the truth or what actually happened. So this following now more into the NGO side and let's say the government side So my question is where do you think that is? And you talked about reporters wanted a standardized method for understanding the casualties and conflict Where you think that has gotten to at this point and what sort of more needs to happen And then separately I I do find that Reporters are at least willing to pick up human rights watch reports or industry reports much more than the u.s. Government or other governments are Sometimes I do see the un or un Reporters are willing to talk about these alternate sources. So i'm wondering where you feel that In outside of the u.s. Maybe there are places that are more willing to pick up Different types of sources than the official government ones to chris With regards to where Journalists were at in this particular study and in the in-depth they expressed support for this Some of them brought it up on their own Sometimes I asked them directly as a follow-on from other interviews. How do you feel about? a media consortium or You know many reporters would sit make comments such as Anything from I really wish there was a another count other than the u.s. Military because You know there dot dot dot dot Other people said you know when I would ask them directly they would say well, I don't know if that'd be a good idea if media If the consortium is a media consortium it might need to be an NGO So there would it was a range of views of of how that might look and but there was ultimately overarching You know from the interviews General support for it and with regards to where That particular those initiatives are at i'm going to pass it over to chris I think in terms of where we are with standards on casualty counting we mentioned two approaches in the report One is by a global network of casualty recorders. There's more than 50 organizations in in six continents Who kind of pull their expertise to produce the first global standards on casualty recording? Uh oh hch are the un agency has also just begun its own process. So in march. He'd agreed the first standards there from from the un So that that there's a sort of meta standards as it were I think it always comes back to listen to communities It would be perverse to let's say there were there was a terrorist atrocity or In the united states and we ignored an affected community But that's exactly what we do with the wars that we fight. We ignore the communities who've come under fire We've been urging the us and its allies to go back into mozal and raca And understand how many civilians they killed nbr have done the job Associated press have done the job as matter of the name they've done the job but the coalition haven't and The deaths who knows we know it's in the in the high thousands But unless you go back follow up talk to those affected communities and as as matt mentioned Local reporting coming back to jenny's question It is a guide, but it's but it's fallible Half of all of the confirmed civilian harm events the us has admitted to in iraq were never locally reported by iraqis themselves because of the poor quality of Local reporting the very fragmented nature of iraqi society, which we are very significantly responsible for So if those us analysts and pilots hadn't come forward, we would never know about those events And that's why going in on the ground talking to communities engaging with communities is the only answer ultimately And with we're not seeing that commitment from militaries You know colon powers words, you know you break it you fix it, you know you break it you you find out how you broke it And we didn't do that. And therefore we won't I'm pipe r-hendrix from civics. So thank you for the mention as a quick background since 2003 We've expanded into research technical assistance and community engagement Um, I'd specifically like to hear a bit more and christ you started to touch on this But how can non-profits like ours and civil society in general be more supportive in in your efforts in media and having more coverage More accurate coverage of civilian casualties I'll say one Good thing about air wars in terms of helping with that is that they're really really transparent and for news organizations That's really important that you know, I feel like when we deal with air wars. We know exactly what their standards are Which they publicly state we know how they compile them They're very clear about sort of the margins of error what they know and what they don't know And so it's just that sort of extreme transparency I think helps a lot With reporters making a pitch to editors that these are reliable numbers or these are numbers we can use The work of organizations like like civics, which I think you know when we we briefly touched on the founder of civics Marla Rizika who who died in Iraq But who spearheaded this organization and made the military By going door to door counting people made the military start making payments towards people To to civilian families that it had harmed I would actually I would tackle this less from the approach of you know Information and journalism and can you how can you help support my journalism so much as You know organizations like that can fill a space that I can't I'm a journalist. I'm not an advocate I can't go help people get payments. That's not my job Right now there is no one for me to go to right when I've collected all of these survivors I have you know now confirmed that these are civilian casualty incidents There's nobody I can tell these people. Oh, by the way, here's an organization That will help you get a payment because the Vic doesn't do that anymore. It doesn't help people get payments There isn't an or advocacy organization I can refer them to or even mention or even talk about and so there's this whole space when it comes to advocacy that obviously I as a journalist can't touch But I'm not necessarily seeing others picking it up either and I still don't understand why not Has the coalition paid out anything for the uh isis wars? They've paid The last time this was like a week and a half ago after a very long back and forth They are saying to me that they have made three payment Three payments in the anti-isis air war And we went back and forth or were these offers or were they accepted payments and I there's some ambiguity on that But they say they've made three and I know which two of them are one of them was to The story that you did the woman, but that was not for civilian death That was for the per vehicle and the other was to basa morazo and then there is a third Actually, the third one was recently. I think reported by human rights watch. So those are the three But the basa morazo one was not accepted Is it sort of baked into a predominantly air war that you're gonna have less of these payments and less The responsibility taken then if you have a ground war where you have a lot of people on the ground Yeah, that's part of it. They say look there's nobody there to administer it How would we even do this? But if you look at Afghanistan A lot of times they would administer these payments through partner forces And this would be actually very easy to do It's it was a lot harder for me to get into these places than it would be for Partner forces or even u.s. Military officials like I had to don't even get I don't want to talk about How long and annoying it was to negotiate access to these areas and like how many times I would have to try and like How many times I was somebody's wife, but I never want to do that again, but It's a lot easier for them to do this payments. That's an excuse that's used and maybe for an overall structure That's a good excuse It's it's valid But when it comes to actually being able to make a lot of these they can do this with ease I want to thank Alexa for doing this report and for our panelists commenting on it chris for supporting it Please give everybody a round of applause