Raqqa Bombardment: US-Led Coalition Strikes Killed More Than 1,600 Civilians in Four Months, Amnesty and Airwars Find (June–October 2017)

What Happened

In June 2017 the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), backed by the US-led coalition, launched the final offensive to take Raqqa, the city the Islamic State (ISIS) had made its capital. The operation began on 6 June and was declared complete on 17 October 2017 (Amnesty). Shortly before it began, Defense Secretary James Mattis promised a "war of annihilation" against ISIS.

It was, in Amnesty's words, "an overwhelmingly US military affair". US forces fired all of the coalition's artillery into Raqqa and carried out more than 90% of its air strikes; British and French aircraft carried out about 215 and 50 strikes respectively. The SDF provided ground troops and some targeting coordinates. Sgt. Maj. John Wayne Troxell, senior enlisted adviser to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, said Marines "fired 30,000 artillery rounds on ISIS targets" in five months, more than any Marine or Army battalion since the Vietnam War. Amnesty describes this artillery as unguided; standard shells from the M777 howitzer have an average margin of error of over 100 metres, in a city where civilians were trapped in every neighbourhood (Amnesty, "War of annihilation").

Civilians could not easily escape. ISIS mined the exits and shot people trying to flee, and the bridges had been destroyed. On 2 July 2017 the coalition commander, Lt. Gen. Stephen Townsend, said: "we shoot every boat we find. If you want to get out of Raqqa right now, you've got to build a poncho raft." Amnesty called that "an erroneous assumption that every boat carried IS fighters and weapons".

The UN Commission of Inquiry on Syria reported that "at the height of the operation, the international coalition conducted about 150 airstrikes daily that resulted in the destruction of much of Raqqah city and large numbers of civilian casualties", and that strikes "continued apace on a daily basis ... resulting in ... the death of countless civilians" despite ISIS's use of human shields (A/HRC/37/72, paras 38, 49).

The toll

Amnesty researchers spent two weeks in Raqqa in February 2018, visiting 42 strike sites and interviewing 112 witnesses and survivors. In April 2019, Amnesty and Airwars reported that more than 1,600 civilians were reportedly killed by coalition strikes. They gathered names for more than 1,000 victims and directly verified 641 deaths on the ground. The coalition had acknowledged 159 civilian deaths, roughly 10%, and routinely dismissed other reports as "non-credible" without site visits or witness interviews. More than 11,000 buildings were destroyed (Amnesty, April 2019).

Four families

Amnesty's 2018 report examined four families' cases in detail. On the evening of 28 June 2017 a coalition air strike destroyed the Aswad family building, killing eight people sheltering in its basement, most of them children. Thirty-nine members of the Badran family and 10 neighbours were killed in four separate coalition strikes as they moved from neighbourhood to neighbourhood looking for safety; on 20 August 2017 simultaneous strikes on two neighbouring houses killed 30 of them, mostly women and children, including a one-year-old girl. Nine members of the Hashish family were killed in one air strike. In each case the civilians had been in the buildings for long periods, Amnesty found no information that ISIS fighters were present when they were hit, and the munitions used could be expected to destroy the buildings entirely.

Legal Analysis

Armed conflict. The fighting between the SDF and coalition on one side and ISIS on the other was a non-international armed conflict. The rules of distinction, proportionality, precautions and the ban on indiscriminate attacks apply as customary law. The US is bound by them and by Common Article 3.

What has been shown. Amnesty's field research found that coalition forces "failed to take all feasible precautions to minimise harm to civilians, and, in some instances, appear to have launched strikes which were likely to cause excessive civilian harm or which failed to distinguish between military targets and civilians". It concluded that there is "strong prima facie evidence" that several attacks "violated international humanitarian law and therefore were unlawful". It noted that "disproportionate attacks and indiscriminate attacks that kill or injure civilians constitute war crimes". The use of tens of thousands of unguided artillery shells, with a margin of error of over 100 metres, in dense residential areas full of trapped civilians is the strongest indicator of indiscriminate attack across the campaign.

What has not been shown. A war crime under Article 8(2)(e)(i), or the customary war crime of an indiscriminate or disproportionate attack, requires proof that particular attacks were directed at civilians, or launched with knowledge or recklessness as to excessive civilian harm. Amnesty itself said "it is impossible to determine conclusively how many strikes were unlawful without further information which only the Coalition can provide". The coalition has not released the targets, weapons, timing and intelligence for individual strikes. No UN body has made a war-crime finding about specific Raqqa strikes. That keeps this at a reasonable basis to suspect, not reasonable grounds to believe.

Strongest defence argument. ISIS deliberately embedded itself among civilians, used them as human shields and mined the escape routes, which both the UN Commission and Amnesty document. The coalition says it struck only valid military targets after weighing proportionality. This defence has real force for individual strikes, because the presence of fighters can make a building a lawful target. It does not explain strikes on buildings where Amnesty found no fighters, and it does not answer the choice of unguided artillery in residential areas. Human shielding by one party does not release the other from the duties of distinction and precaution.

Jurisdiction. Syria and the US are not ICC States Parties. The UK and France are, so the British and French share of strikes is within the Court's personal jurisdiction; the US share is not.

Why This Grade

This entry is graded severe with a war-crime classification of potential.

• The harm is massive, field-verified and attributable: at least 641 civilian deaths verified on the ground and more than 1,600 reported, by a campaign the US overwhelmingly conducted.
• Credible legal analysis (Amnesty) finds prima facie IHL violations, which supports a reasonable basis to suspect war crimes. That is the "potential" threshold.
• The top grade needs every element of a specific war crime at reasonable grounds to believe. The knowledge or intent behind individual attacks has not been established, because the coalition has withheld the strike data and no UN body has made a strike-specific finding. It is therefore not graded extreme.
• It is graded severe rather than critical because the core of the entry is concrete, identifiable loss of life rather than a structural attack on legal institutions.

Confidence in this grade: medium. An upgrade would follow if the strike logs were released or a UN body found specific attacks indiscriminate at reasonable grounds.