The Many Casualties of Precision Warfare
Reporting from Hawija, Iraq, our correspondent traces how the United States built a system of coalition warfare sold as precise, in which bombs fall, civilians die, and accountability is diffused across allied states.
Omar Ahmad Abdallah al-Jamili stands outside his home in Hawija with his father, who recalls finding his four-year-old son after the June 2, 2015, strike “with his face on fire, his clothes melted off him.” (Jaclynn Ashly / Jacobin)
Omar Ahmad Abdallah al-Jamili cannot fully open his mouth. His ear is deformed, and his face is a topography of surgical scars — skin grafted and stretched across bone in operations performed in Amsterdam, the capital of the country whose air force set him on fire.
Omar was four years old on the night of June 2, 2015, when Dutch F-16s — acting on US-supplied intelligence under the US-led coalition against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) — bombed an ISIS weapons factory in Hawija, a town in northern Iraq. A secondary explosion, triggered by tens of thousands of kilograms of homemade explosives in the factory’s sheds, sent a wall of fire across surrounding neighborhoods.
The strike killed at least eighty-five civilians and injured hundreds more, destroying or damaging six thousand buildings across a five-kilometer radius, flattening 1,200 businesses overnight.
Sorry, but this article is available to active subscribers only. Please log in or become a subscriber.