Making the US admit it bombed civilians

Hey there!

The newsroom where I work, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ), was founded in 2010. (Yes, that does make us a teenage organisation, though with hopefully fewer mood swings.) 

It means that when I’m looking for stories to tell you about, I sometimes find one in our own archive. This time it’s a biggie – a project that ran for a decade, right from TBIJ’s very first year. 

It all began in Pakistan, where the US was waging a covert war on al-Qaida and uncrewed drones were the weapon of choice. The key word there is covert – the US didn’t claim responsibility. Bombs were falling, people were killed or injured, and no one could say exactly why. So TBIJ decided to try and track the strikes. 

It required painstaking work, pinpointing reported attacks and cross-referencing them against local media accounts, press releases, on-the-ground interviews and NGO reports. Each strike needed at least three sources of verification. All of the information was out there, but no one had brought it together in one place.  

It was a huge project – and as it went on, it kept growing. After all, the US didn’t stop at Pakistan. So why would we?

Yemen, Somalia and Afghanistan became separate lines of inquiry, and eventually full databases of their own. We tracked strikes from as far back as 2004 until 2020, when the work was passed to Airwars, a not-for-profit that monitors civilian casualties from bombings.  

One of my old colleagues, Jess Purkiss, led the project for several years. She told me: “It was OSINT [open-source intelligence] before I really knew the word OSINT. 

“There was no record of harm that existed. People knew this was happening but no one was keeping track. So the idea was to create a body of evidence … Recording and verifying cases of harm was really valuable in a space where that wasn’t happening.”

The data sets she helped assemble were revelatory. For the first time, detailed estimates were put together of strikes and the number of people hurt or killed. 

Dozens of organisations put the information to use. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union drew on the databases to conduct investigations and file legal cases. Academics and researchers built on our work; it was cited thousands of times. And it reached officials at the highest levels, including congresspeople and UN special rapporteurs. 

After a while, the US government came under mounting pressure to acknowledge what its air force was doing and to monitor the harm itself. 

As the project progressed, Afghanistan became the main focus, with the team tracking not just drone strikes but air strikes by both the US and Afghan air forces. “The air war there was much, much more intense, as were the civilian harm figures,” Jess told me. With two air forces operating in the same region, survivors of strikes had no idea where to turn for answers. Both air forces would either go quiet or issue a denial. There was, Jess said, “absolutely no accountability”. 

In 2016, six years after the project began, the US finally published its own casualty figures. Government insiders said it was a direct response to TBIJ piling on the pressure. But they didn’t do a great job of it – the first year’s figures looked like a woeful underestimate, and the next year they clammed up. It would take a further year for the US to publish data again, this time with more transparency.

By this time, Jess and the team were developing Shadow Wars, a series of investigations into specific strikes that grew out of the drone tracking. One story examined a single strike in late 2018 that had killed 12 members of the same family, 11 of them children. Masih Ur-Rahman Mubarez lost his wife, his seven children and their four young cousins. Neither the Afghan nor US air force would admit to conducting the strike. 

“There was a pattern we saw over and over again. We’d go to the US military. They would say, ‘We have no record of the strike.’ And we very often didn’t have the evidence to go back and argue with that. In this case, we got lucky,” Jess said. “We got a weapons fragment that we could trace back to the US military that made it difficult to to deny. Eventually, after three denials, we got a reversal.”

The US had initially denied a strike had taken place in the area on that day; after being confronted with the findings it later said it was possible the area had been targeted but there were no civilian casualties; then, after being shown yet more evidence, it ultimately conceded that the strike had been carried out and it was possible there had civilian casualties.

“It took so much to get that admission of culpability,” Jess said. “So much evidence and so much work, that in every case where there wasn't that evidence, families were stuck between a rock and a hard place. They would never be able to get the answers that we are able to get in this one case.”

“That investigation affected me both personally and professionally. Personally, I became really good friends with Masih. He was at my house in Kabul, we shared tea, and also did some filming in the house as well. He’s a very humble person. I'm still in contact with him, we chat sometimes. 

In terms of the US accountability, he got that. However, he still hasn’t had any accountability from the Taliban. I don’t think he’s going to get it. 

On the professional side, the investigation – as well as the other investigations in the Drone Wars project – helped shape my career. I was a young journalist and I didn’t understand a lot of the nuances – I was just going about my job, doing what I was supposed to do. But it taught me a lot. And, you know, when you come out of Afghanistan, you’re able to zoom out and see the bigger picture. I think in Afghanistan I didn’t see it.

I learnt how to shape my articles, how to shape the outcome of the work that I have been doing in a way where I am asking deeper and more meaningful questions and getting beneath the surface. Normally what a news agency does is just on the surface. So it really helped me in finding ways to build trust with people. It’s very hard for people to tell you what they went through and their experience and share their emotions. 

I was with the Bureau up until 2019. I started the Alive in Afghanistan project with a friend on 15 August 2021, the day of Afghanistan’s collapse. We felt, my friend and I, that there was no news coming out of Afghanistan because all of the news agencies were in a rush and panic on what to do and whether to get out or not.

At first we were just on Twitter, but after a month of doing that we came out with our first article. It was about the people who died in the Kabul airport bombing on 26 August, during the evacuation. There was an investigation and there had been names provided for the US soldiers who had been killed. But there were no names to the Afghans who’d been killed, and they also had families, they had legacies, they had loved ones.

Since then we’ve been focused on human-centred stories and people who’ve been outside the media’s focus. That in Afghanistan means that we are focusing more on rural places, which make up 70% of the country, rather than focusing on cities. We wanted to do something that hasn't been done, which has its own difficulties and challenges, of course.

We train journalists in their local communities – some of them are the only breadwinners in their homes. The women that work with us are sometimes the only breadwinners as well as the only female journalists in their province, sometimes the region.

When we started, we were only publishing in English, but then we started using local languages, Pashto and Dari, on Facebook, and our following grew exponentially. 

We wanted Afghans from different corners of Afghanistan to read about themselves, to read about who they were – because we, as Afghans, don’t have a lot of knowledge when it comes to other ethnic groups or other people that live elsewhere. 

There are a lot of different ethnic identities who have no knowledge of each other, and we were able to provide that without saying out loud that ‘this is the ethnicity that you’re reading about’. Rather it was more nuanced. Not all our stories are focused on ethnicities, but that’s Afghanistan’s make up, so there’s always going to be something there. 

I’m really happy about the impact we had in Afghanistan, but I didn’t expect the impact we had.”

You can read more about Alive in Afghanistan and support the project here

We still get emails today about the data gathered during the Drone Wars project, and people across the world are putting it to use to this day. It’s amazing how revelatory gathering information in one place can be, when no one else is doing it. Fifteen years on, there are other organisations that fill the gap – Airwars, for one. But spotting a blank space, a gap in the data, is still one of the most valuable things journalists can do.

See you next week,