LONDON: Civilian deaths as a result of air strikes on Daesh targets in Iraq have been linked to British forces, according to a Guardian investigation released on Tuesday.
Forces in the US-led coalition fighting against Daesh in Iraq have admitted the killings of hundreds of civilians in Iraq in the period after 2014, but Britain’s government and military have long claimed that a “perfect” war was fought, in which no non-combatants or ordinary Iraqis were killed.
However, the report, which was carried out with the watchdog Airwars, concluded that UK forces were probably responsible for civilian deaths in at least six strikes on the city of Mosul in 2016 and 2017.
In the strikes highlighted, the coalition admits the deaths of 26 civilians, and victims of two of the strikes were identified in the report.
A further strike on Jan. 9, 2017 on Mosul, which coalition officials accepted killed two civilians, has been confirmed as a Royal Air Force mission, but British officials deny that the casualties were civilian but rather legitimate militant targets.
British bombing in Iraq as part of the Operation Inherent Resolve coalition efforts against Daesh started in 2014, and in Syria the year after, with more than 4,000 munitions in the two countries, the report concluded.
UK military figures claim 3,052 Daesh militants were killed in Iraq with no civilian deaths, with 1,017 militants killed in Syria with one civilian death, between 2014 and 2020.
“There is no evidence or indication that civilian casualties were caused by strikes in Syria and Iraq,” a Ministry of Defense spokesperson told the Guardian.
“The UK always minimizes the risk of civilian casualties through our rigorous processes and carefully examines a range of evidence to do this, including comprehensive analysis of the mission data for every strike,” the spokesperson said.
However, critics say that the British position is not convincing.
Former military officials have called the claim of no civilian deaths in Iraq “a stretch” and “nonsense,” especially after the 2016 Chilcot report into the UK’s role in the 2003 invasion of Iraq found that not enough had been done to locate injured or killed non-combatants.
If Britain is forced to accept responsibility for civilian deaths, a law passed in 2021 set a six-year cut-off point for compensation claims for survivors, which leaves those in Iraq and Syria unable to make a claim against the government.
