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Pentagon Won’t Say Where It’s Sending U.S. Troops — to Avoid Embarrassing Host Nations
The U.S. military has deployed thousands of troops to the Middle East since Hamas’s surprise October 7 attack on Israel but refuses to disclose the military bases or even host nations of the deployments — not for security reasons, but to spare the host nations embarrassment.
One such base, the Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan, welcomed several new F-15 attack jets last month, the same aircraft used to bomb facilities used by Iranian-backed militias in Syria at least twice since October, following attacks on U.S. troops by groups supported by Iran.
“A confluence of factors are driving the U.S. and Iran towards a direct military conflict, including the buildup of forces.”
Despite the hostilities, the Pentagon has declined to acknowledge the base or the military buildup taking place on it for political reasons, even as the growing U.S. presence and increasing activities contribute to rising tensions with Iran.
“A confluence of factors are driving the U.S. and Iran towards a direct military conflict, including the buildup of forces, the retaliatory actions in Syria by U.S. forces, and Iranian proxies’ provocations,” Bruce Riedel, nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told The Intercept. “It is a dangerous situation.”
Government records reviewed by The Intercept, along with open-source data, reveal that Muwaffaq Salti continues to act as a low-key U.S. military base central to growing tensions with Iran.
“The main hub for U.S. air operations in Syria is now Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan, but the American presence is unacknowledged because of host country sensitivities,” said Aaron Stein in a 2021 report by the Foreign Policy Research Institute.
Named after Jordanian Lt. Muwaffaq Salti, a pilot who died fighting the Israeli air force during a conflict involving the West Bank in 1966, it isn’t hard to see why the U.S. government doesn’t want its presence on the air base public. Jordan, a nation home to over 2 million Palestinian refugees, is being rocked by protests opposing Israel’s military operation in Gaza.
“Tit-for-Tat Exchanges”
As the U.S. spirals toward a potential regional war with Iran that could dwarf the casualties in Israel’s war on Gaza, the American government has withheld from the public knowledge of where U.S. troops are in harm’s way.
At the time of this writing, there have been 55 attacks on U.S. service members in Iraq and Syria since October 17, according to the Pentagon, resulting in 59 injuries, including traumatic brain injuries.
Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin in a press conference Monday emphasized how unclear the endgame of the attacks is to the U.S. military.
“It’s been tit-for-tat exchanges and hard to predict, you know, what will happen going forward,” Austin said.
Experts say the U.S. deployments may not only fail to deter Iranian attacks, they might also invite them.
“Enlargement of the U.S. military presence in the Middle East increases the risk of armed conflict with Iran because it means more potential points of hostile contact between U.S. troops and armed elements allied with Iran,” Paul Pillar, a nonresident fellow at the Quincy Institute, told The Intercept. “As has been the case with U.S. military components in Iraq and Syria, such a presence serves less as a deterrent than as a convenient target for anyone in the area who wants to strike at the United States.”
“Undisclosed Location”
“Yeah, undisclosed location in the Middle East,” Pentagon press secretary Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder told a reporter asking about the location of U.S. troops being deployed to the region during an October press briefing.
“But nice try,” Ryder taunted.
The exchange is representative of the Pentagon’s response to questions from the press about the U.S. military buildup. (The Pentagon did not respond to multiple requests for comment from The Intercept.)
“Can we say in some Arab countries or Gulf?” another reporter asked about the deployments.
“Yeah, I can’t go into specific locations,” Ryder replied.
Elias Yousif, a research analyst with the Stimson Center’s Conventional Defense Program, said, “Washington is trying to provide some plausible deniability to host countries at a time when association with the United States is coming to be seen as a political liability.”
Despite the secrecy, photographs released by the Defense Department showing F-15s landing at what it described as an “undisclosed location” were quickly geolocated by open-source researchers and shown to be Muwaffaq Salti Air Base.
“Washington is trying to provide some plausible deniability to host countries at a time when association with the United States is coming to be seen as a political liability.”
Secrecy runs rampant in U.S. efforts linked to the Israeli war against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. Little is known about the quantity and nature of the weapons the U.S. military has provided to Israel, despite the Pentagon’s willingness to disclose an itemized list of military support for Ukraine, as The Intercept previously reported.
Clues about Muwaffaq Salti are scattered throughout federal records, including a reference to the base in the annex of a controversial defense cooperation agreement signed by the U.S. and Jordan in 2021. The agreement, which authorizes how the U.S. military is able to operate within the country, was enacted by royal decree, bypassing Jordan’s parliament.
Even before Israel’s war on Gaza, the U.S. presence in Muwaffaq Salti was expanding. In December 2021, the Pentagon launched a major upgrade to the air base in order to, as Janes Defence Weekly put it, “turn it into a more permanent base.”
The post Pentagon Won’t Say Where It’s Sending U.S. Troops — to Avoid Embarrassing Host Nations appeared first on The Intercept.
More Than 300 DNC Delegates for Bernie Sanders Push Senator to Call for Ceasefire in Gaza
Three-hundred thirty delegates to the Democratic National Convention who backed Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., in his 2016 and 2020 presidential bids sent a letter to the senator urging him to introduce a resolution for a ceasefire in Gaza.
The letter, sent on Wednesday, urges Sanders to introduce a Senate companion bill to a ceasefire resolution introduced last month in the House of Representatives. The Sanders convention delegates also called on him to support an end to the Israeli blockade of Gaza, the occupation of Palestinian land, U.S. military funding for war crimes against Palestinians, and the expansion of Israeli settlements.
“Palestinians require more than just a ‘humanitarian pause.’”
“We’ve progressed beyond the stage of seeking mere condemnations or symbolic gestures,” the delegates wrote. “We concur with your assertion that these ‘unspeakable crimes’ must cease and that ‘the bombs and missiles from both sides’ should be halted. But Palestinians require more than just a ‘humanitarian pause.’”
The House resolution was introduced by by Rep. Cori Bush, D-Mo.; Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich.; André Carson, D-Ind.; Summer Lee, D-Pa.; and Delia Ramirez, D-Ill. The House resolution now has 18 co-sponsors. So far, at least 31 members of Congress, including Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., have come out in favor of a ceasefire — although Durbin and others conditioned their calls on the release of Israeli prisoners in Gaza.
The letter comes three weeks after hundreds of Sanders presidential campaign alumni sent a letter urging the senator to back a ceasefire. Since that letter’s release, Sanders has all but supported a ceasefire: calling for a humanitarian pause; to “stop the bombing”; and saying Congress, the Biden administration, and the world “must take action.”
“We Need Him Now, More Than Ever”
Sanders’s delegates delivered the letter to the Vermont senator one day after more than 115 former staffers for President Joe Biden and former President Barack Obama — including former Biden chief of staff Ron Klain and former Treasury Secretary and Harvard University President Lawrence Summers — applauded Biden for his “staunch support of Israel.” The former top administration officials lauded Biden’s proposed $14.3 billion in military aid for Israel.
It also follows a decision by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D. N.Y., and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., to join Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, R-La., and Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, at Tuesday’s March for Israel in Washington, D.C., where the quartet proclaimed, “We stand with Israel.”
Hours later, Israel invaded Al-Shifa hospital, the Gaza Strip’s largest hospital, where thousands of displaced and injured civilians were trapped, including dozens of premature babies.
Wednesday is the fifth consecutive day that the Gaza Ministry of Health has been unable to update its death toll, owing to a lack of fuel and power that has totaled the health care system, making tallying the dead and communications nearly impossible. The last time the ministry updated the death toll, on Friday, Israel had killed 11,078 people.
“As a Jewish person of conscience watching Israeli genocide in real time, I say, not in my name, not with my tax dollars, shall Israel bomb and deprive a trapped population, half of them children, of water, food, medicine and fuel,” said Marcy Winograd, a 2020 Sanders delegate from California’s 24th congressional district, and a co-founding member of the Los Angeles chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace. “As a Jewish member of Congress, Senator Sanders’ voice would be particularly persuasive in demanding an end to Israel’s violations of international law that shock the world to leave us feeling unmoored from our own humanity.”
The latest letter adds to a growing opposition among Democrats against unconditional U.S. support for Israel. Over a dozen former Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., campaign staffers, 411 current congressional staffers, 400-plus current Biden administration employees, 500-plus former Biden campaign alumni, 133 Obama staffers and appointees, and 260 former presidential campaign staffers for Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., issued statements demanding support for a ceasefire. More have since signed on.
“From coastal cities to rural valleys like mine, millions of young people turned their attention to politics for the first time in 2016 and 2020 because we shared Bernie’s vision for peace and justice,” said Taran Samarth, a student organizer and 2020 Sanders delegate from Pennsylvania. “We need him now, more than ever, to champion those values once more and call for a ceasefire in the face of the Biden administration’s unconditional support for the collective punishment of the Palestinian people.”
The post More Than 300 DNC Delegates for Bernie Sanders Push Senator to Call for Ceasefire in Gaza appeared first on The Intercept.
Google Activists Circulated Internal Petition on Israel Ties. Only the Muslim Got a Call from HR.
A Google employee protesting the tech giant’s business with the Israeli government was questioned by Google’s human resources department over allegations that he endorsed terrorism, The Intercept has learned. The employee said he was the only Muslim and Middle Easterner who circulated the letter and also the only one who was confronted by HR about it.
The employee was objecting to Project Nimbus, Google’s controversial $1.2 billion contract with the Israeli government and its military to provide state-of-the-art cloud computing and machine learning tools.
Since its announcement two years ago, Project Nimbus has drawn widespread criticism both inside and outside Google, spurring employee-led protests and warnings from human rights groups and surveillance experts that it could bolster state repression of Palestinians.
Mohammad Khatami, a Google software engineer, sent an email to two internal listservs on October 18 saying Project Nimbus was implicated in human rights abuses against Palestinians — abuses that fit a 75-year pattern that had brought the conflict to the October 7 Hamas massacre of some 1,200 Israelis, mostly civilians. The letter, distributed internally by anti-Nimbus Google workers through company email lists, went on to say that Google could become “complicit in what history will remember as a genocide.”
“Strangely enough, I was the only one of us who was sent to HR over people saying I was supporting terrorism or justifying terrorism.”
Twelve days later, Google HR told Khatami they were scheduling a meeting with him, during which he says he was questioned about whether the letter was “justifying the terrorism on October 7th.”
In an interview, Khatami told The Intercept he was not only disturbed by what he considers an attempt by Google to stifle dissent on Nimbus, but also believes he was left feeling singled out because of his religion and ethnicity. The letter was drafted and internally circulated by a group of anti-Nimbus Google employees, but none of them other than Khatami were called by HR, according to Khatami and Josh Marxen, another anti-Nimbus organizer at Google who helped spread the letter. Though he declined to comment on the outcome of the HR meeting, Khatami said it left him shaken.
“It was very emotionally taxing,” Khatami said. “I was crying by the end of it.”
“I’m the only Muslim or Middle Eastern organizer who sent out that email,” he told The Intercept. “Strangely enough, I was the only one of us who was sent to HR over people saying I was supporting terrorism or justifying terrorism.”
The Intercept reviewed a virtually identical email sent by Marxen, also on October 18. Though there are a few small changes — Marxen’s email refers to “a seige [sic] upon all of Gaza” whereas Khamati’s cites “the complete destitution of Gaza” — both contain verbatim language connecting the October 7 attack to Israel’s past treatment of Palestinians.
Google spokesperson Courtenay Mencini told The Intercept, “We follow up on every concern raised, and in this case, dozens of employees reported this individual’s email – not the sharing of the petition itself – for including language that did not follow our workplace policies.” Mencini declined to say which workplace policies Khatami’s email allegedly violated, whether other organizers had gotten HR calls, or if any other company personnel had been approached by Employee Relations for comments made about the war.
The incident comes just one year after former Google employee Ariel Koren said the company attempted to force her to relocate to Brazil in retaliation for her early anti-Nimbus organizing. Koren later quit in protest and remains active in advocating against the contract. Project Nimbus, despite the dissent, remains in place, in part because of contractual terms put in place by Israel forbidding Google from cutting off service in response to political pressure or boycott campaigns.
Dark Clouds Over Nimbus
Dissent at Google is neither rare nor ineffective. Employee opposition to controversial military contracts has previously pushed the company to drop plans to help with the Pentagon’s drone warfare program and a planned Chinese version of Google Search that would filter out results unwanted by the Chinese government. Nimbus, however, has managed to survive.
In the wake of the October 7 Hamas attacks against Israel and resulting Israeli counteroffensive, now in its second month of airstrikes and a more recent ground invasion, Project Nimbus is again a flashpoint within the company.
With the rank and file disturbed by the company’s role as a defense contractor, Google has attempted to downplay the military nature of the contract.
Mencini, the Google spokesperson, said that anti-Nimbus organizers were “misrepresenting” the contract’s military role.
“This is part of a longstanding campaign by a group of organizations and people who largely don’t work at Google,” Mencini said. “We have been very clear that the Nimbus contract is for workloads running on our commercial platform by Israeli government ministries such as finance, healthcare, transportation, and education. Our work is not directed at highly sensitive or classified military workloads relevant to weapons or intelligence services.”
Nimbus training documents published by The Intercept last year, however, show the company was pitching its use for the Ministry of Defense. Moreover, the Israeli government itself is open about the military applications of Project Nimbus: A 2023 press release by the Israeli Ministry of Finance specifically names the Israel Defense Forces as a beneficiary, while an overview written by the country’s National Digital Agency describes the contract as “a comprehensive and in-depth solution to the provision of public cloud services to the Government, the defense establishment and other public organizations.”
“If we do not speak out now, we are complicit in what history will remember as a genocide.”
Against this backdrop, Khatami, in coordination with others in the worker-led anti-Nimbus campaign, sent his October 18 note to internal Arab and Middle Eastern affinity groups laying out their argument against the project and asking like-minded colleagues to sign an employee petition.
“Through Project Nimbus, Google is complicit in the mass surveillance and other human rights abuses which Palestinians have been subject to daily for the past 75 years, and which is the root cause of the violence initiated on October 7th,” the letter said. “If we do not speak out now, we are complicit in what history will remember as a genocide.”
On October 30, Khatami received an email from Google’s Employee Relations division informing him that he would soon be questioned by company representatives regarding “a concern about your conduct that has been brought to our attention.”
According to Khatami, in the ensuing phone call, Google HR pressed him about the portion of his email that made a historical connection between the October 7 Hamas attack and the 75 years of Israeli rights abuses that preceded it, claiming some of his co-workers believed he was endorsing violence. Khatami recalled being asked, “Can you see how people are thinking you’re justifying the terrorism on October 7th?”
Khatami said he and his fellow anti-Nimbus organizers were in no way endorsing the violence against Israeli civilians — just as they now oppose the deaths of more than 10,000 Palestinians, according to the latest figures from Gaza’s Ministry of Health. Rather, the Google employees wanted to provide sociopolitical context for Project Nimbus, part of a broader employee-led effort of “demilitarizing our company that was never meant to be militarized.” To point out the relevant background leading to the October 7 attack, he said, is not to approve it.
“We wrote that the root cause of the violence is the occupation,” Khatami explained. “Analysis is not justification.”
Double Standard
Khatami also objects to what he said is a double standard within Google about what speech about the war is tolerated, a source of ongoing turmoil at the company. The day after his original email, a Google employee responded angrily to the email chain: “Accusing Israel of genocide and Google of being complicit is a grave accusation!” This employee, who works at the company’s cloud computing division, itself at the core of Project Nimbus, continued:
To break it down for you, project nimbus contributes to Israel’s security. Therefore, any calls to drop it are meant to weaken Israel’s security. If Israel’s security is weak, then the prospect of more terrorist attacks, like the one we saw on October 7, is high. Terrorist attacks will result in casualties that will affect YOUR Israeli colleagues and their family. Attacks will be retaliated by Israel which will result in casualties that will affect your Palestinian colleagues and their family (because they are used as shields by the terrorists)…bottom line, a secured Israel means less lives lost! Therefore if you have the good intention to preserve human lives then you MUST support project Nimbus!
While Khatami disagrees strongly with the overall argument in the response email, he objected in particular to the co-worker’s claim that Israel is killing Palestinians “because they are used as shields by the terrorists” — a justification of violence far more explicit than the one he was accused of, he said. Khatami questioned whether widespread references to the inviolability of Israeli self-defense by Google employees have provoked treatment from HR similar to what he received after his email about Nimbus.
Internal employee communications viewed by The Intercept show tensions within Google over the Israeli–Palestinian conflict aren’t limited to debates over Project Nimbus. A screenshots viewed by The Intercept shows an Israeli Google employee repeatedly asking Middle Eastern colleagues if they support Hamas, while another shows a Google engineer suggesting Palestinians worried about the welfare of their children should simply stop having kids. Another lamented “friends and family [who] are slaughtered by the Gaza-grown group of bloodthirsty animals.”
According to a recent New York Times report, which found “at least one” instance of “overtly antisemitic” content posted through internal Google channels, “one worker had been fired after writing in an internal company message board that Israelis living near Gaza ‘deserved to be impacted.’”
Another screenshot reviewed by The Intercept, taken from an email group for Israeli Google staff, shows employees discussing a post by a colleague criticizing the Israeli occupation and encouraging donations to a Gaza relief fund.
“During this time we all need to stay strong as a nation and united,” one Google employee replied in the email group. “As if we are not going through enough suffering, we will unfortunately see many emails, comments either internally or on social media that are pro Hamas and clearly anti semitic. report immediately!” Another added: “People like that make me sick. But she is a lost cause.” A third chimed in to say they had internally reported the colleague soliciting donations. A separate post soliciting donations for the same Gaza relief fund was downvoted 139 times on an internal message board, according to another screenshot, while a post stating only “Killing civilians is indefensible” received 51 downvotes.
While Khatami says he was unnerved and disheartened by the HR grilling, he’s still committed to organizing against Project Nimbus.
“It definitely emotionally affected me, it definitely made me significantly more fearful or organizing in this space,” he said. “But I think knowing that people are dying right now and slaughtered in a genocide that’s aided and abetted by my company, remembering that makes the fear go away.”
The post Google Activists Circulated Internal Petition on Israel Ties. Only the Muslim Got a Call from HR. appeared first on The Intercept.
Biden forgets that the C in APEC stands for cooperation
There are 21 countries attending APEC and over 1,200 organisations from within those countries. Only one of the 21 countries, which happens to be the host, has a recent history of promoting de-coupling, or de-risking which is diametrically opposed to what APEC stands for; they seem to forget that the C means cooperation. For the Continue reading »
Obama Alumni Call on Former President to “Leverage” Influence for Gaza Ceasefire
More than 130 former Barack Obama campaign staffers and political appointees — including Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., — are urging the ex-president to push for a ceasefire.
In a letter sent on Friday, the 133 alumni asked Obama to “leverage” his influence to push his former vice president and other elected officials toward supporting a ceasefire, brokering the release of Israeli hostages and Palestinian civilians, and setting a path for collective peace.
The House ceasefire resolution — led by Reps. Tlaib; Cori Bush, D-Mo.; André Carson, D-Ind.; Summer Lee, D-Pa.; and Delia Ramirez, D-Ill. — has 18 members supporting it. At least 24 members of Congress, including Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., have come out in favor of a ceasefire.
The list of signatories on the Obama letter is not public, with some of the signers fearing professional retaliation for their stance. But they are hopeful Obama will be receptive; despite his checkered history in the Middle East, he has historically been more open than most other U.S. politicians to the Palestinian cause.
In an essay three weeks ago, Obama reiterated support for Israel to defend itself against Hamas but cautioned for how the country would pursue the goal, noting that already Israel’s bombing had killed and displaced thousands of Palestinians, including children, in Gaza. He stressed “acknowledging that Palestinians have also lived in disputed territories for generations; that many of them were not only displaced when Israel was formed but continue to be forcibly displaced by a settler movement that too often has received tacit or explicit support from the Israeli government; that Palestinian leaders who’ve been willing to make concessions for a two-state solution have too often had little to show for their efforts; and that it is possible for people of good will to champion Palestinian rights and oppose certain Israeli government policies in the West Bank and Gaza without being anti-semitic.”
And, at a staff reunion last week, Obama called to maintain “what on the surface may seem contradictory ideas,” saying, “What Hamas did was horrific, and there was no justification for it. And what is also true is that the occupation, and what’s happening to Palestinians, is unbearable.”
“You have to admit that all of us are complicit to some degree.”
Contrary to Obama’s more measured statements, on Tuesday, a letter signed by more than 115 former Joe Biden and Obama staffers — including former Biden chief of staff Ron Klain and former Treasury Secretary and Harvard University President Lawrence Summers — applauded Biden for his “staunch support of Israel” and the proposed $14.3 billion in military aid for Israel. Tuesday is the fourth consecutive day that the Gaza Ministry of Health has been unable to update its death toll, as lack of fuel and power has made tallying the dead and communications nearly impossible. The last time the ministry was able to update the death toll, on Friday, Israel had killed 11,078 people.
The signatories cited Obama’s own words throughout the letter, including at an event in Jerusalem over a decade ago where he said that “neither expulsion or occupation is the answer.” They asked the former president to encourage U.S. leaders to instead focus on goals including accomplishing a ceasefire, the release of hostages and imprisoned civilians, and the establishment of a path to collective peace and Palestinian self-determination.
Khalilah Harris, former deputy director of the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for African Americans, told The Intercept that she signed on because “there cannot be silence in the pursuit of peace and justice,” adding that Obama, “whose commitment to those efforts is undeniable around the globe,” is a proper voice for the moment.
“I joined and devoted my youth to the Obama/Biden admin because of the courage it inspired in me. The root of all of President Obama’s speeches was courage and justice,” Valentina Pereda, the former deputy director of Hispanic media in the White House, said, describing how some colleagues have remained fearful or hesitant to voice their opinion. “It felt like the spirit of courage had been replaced by one of complacency and fear. I don’t want to live my life that way,” she added.
Citing former State Department official Josh Paul — who, though having helped facilitate weapons transfers for years, resigned out of moral disagreements with the Biden administration’s approach to Israel — the signers describe Israel’s retaliatory war against Hamas as “shortsighted and a detrimental miscalculation.” Paul, as they note, said the Biden administration’s “impulsive reaction built on confirmation bias [and] political convenience” is “decades of the same approach that have shown security for peace leads to neither security, nor to peace.”
“In a world that has dehumanized and securitized people who look like me, President Obama reminded us we belong, and we must demand justice and accountability,” said Rumana Ahmed, former senior adviser to the deputy national security adviser. “What we are witnessing has implications for Palestinians and also for the whole world.”
The Obama alumni letter joins a rising tide of voices opposing the United States’s unconditional support for Israel. Over a dozen former Sen. John Fetterman campaign staffers, 411 current congressional staffers, 400-plus current Biden administration employees, 500-plus former Biden campaign alumni, and 260 former Elizabeth Warren presidential campaign staffers issued statements demanding support for a ceasefire (and more have since signed on).
“We cannot be bystanders to a historic collapse of empathy,” the former Obama staff wrote. “We only live once on this earth. And what we do with that time and space is what we are accountable for. It is our legacy and our duty to generations that follow. And while history does not move in a straight line, we have the choice on where we stand.”
The post Obama Alumni Call on Former President to “Leverage” Influence for Gaza Ceasefire appeared first on The Intercept.
Biden’s Legacy Should Be Forever Haunted by the Names of Gaza’s Dead Children
As Israel intensified its attacks on Gaza last week, including strikes against multiple hospitals, and presided over a forced exodus of hundreds of thousands of civilians from their homes, President Joe Biden was asked about the chances of a Gaza ceasefire. “None,” Biden shot back. “No possibility.”
With a death toll that has now surpassed 11,000 Palestinians, including nearly 5,000 children, the extent of Biden’s public divergence from his “great, great friend” Benjamin Netanyahu’s scorched-earth war of annihilation amounts to meekly worded suggestions of “humanitarian pauses.”
On Friday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken remarked, “far too many Palestinians have been killed; far too many have suffered these past weeks, and we want to do everything possible to prevent harm to them and to maximize the assistance that gets to them.” These disingenuous platitudes melt into a puddle of blood when juxtaposed with the administration’s actions.
The Biden administration has funneled weapons, intelligence support, and unwavering political backing for Israel’s public campaign to erase from the earth Gaza’s existence as a Palestinian territory. As Israeli settlers wage campaigns of terror against the Palestinians in the West Bank, the U.S. remained entrenched in its global isolation, voting last week against a U.N. resolution demanding an end to the illegal settlements. The resolution condemned illegal Israeli settlements, calling them “illegal and an obstacle to peace.” The resolution, which passed 145-7, called for “the immediate and complete cessation of all Israeli settlement activities in all of the Occupied Palestinian Territory.” Only five countries joined the U.S. and Israel in voting “no”: Canada, Hungary, the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, and Nauru.
As the capitals of major world cities have seen massive protests on a scale not registered since the 2003 Iraq invasion, Netanyahu has been on a U.S. media blitz, appearing on Sunday talk shows to cast the stakes of his war “to destroy Hamas” as akin to World War II. “Without it none of us have a future. And it’s not only our war, it’s your war too. It’s the battle of civilization against barbarism,” he said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “And if we don’t win here, this scourge will pass. The Middle East will pass to other places. The Middle East will fall. Europe is next. You will be next.”
Netanyahu has brazenly exploited the grief of Israeli citizens whose lives were torn apart on October 7 when Hamas launched a series of coordinated attacks inside Israel. Those raids resulted in the deaths of 846 civilians, 278 Israeli soldiers, and 44 police officers, according to the latest figures provided by Israel. Some family members of the victims, as well as relatives of the 240 hostages taken by Hamas and other militant groups — among them infants and the elderly — have emerged as some of the most vocal critics of Netanyahu’s government. A small number have spoken out against his attacks on Gaza, though their voices are largely drowned out by pro-war voices in Western media coverage.
“I beg you, I beg also my government, and the pilots and soldiers, who may be called to go into Gaza. Don’t agree. Protect the area around the Gaza Strip, but don’t agree to go in and kill innocent people,” said Noy Katsman, whose older brother Hayim was killed on October 7 at the kibbutz he had lived on for a decade. Maoz Inon’s parents were also killed that day. “Today, Israel is repeating an old mistake it made many times in the last century. We must stop it,” Inon wrote. “Revenge is not going to bring my parents back to life. It is not going to bring back other Israelis and Palestinians killed either. It is going to do the opposite. It is going to cause more casualties. It is going to bring more death.”
Over the past month, Biden has cast doubt on the extent of Palestinian civilian deaths, defended Netanyahu’s violent extremist agendas, and made clear that the U.S. position amounts to this: collectively punishing Palestinians for the actions of Hamas falls under the doctrine of “self-defense.” Biden has stood by Israel as government officials have openly described an agenda of ethnically cleansing Palestinians, proclaiming a “Gaza Nakba,” threatening to do to Beirut what Israel has done to Gaza, labeling hospitals and ambulances “legitimate military targets,” and accusing U.N. workers of being Hamas and journalists of being “accomplices in crimes against humanity.” More than 100 U.N. workers and at least 40 journalists and media workers have been killed in Gaza since October 7. Approximately one in 200 Palestinians have died in Gaza since the start of Israel’s attacks.
National security adviser Jake Sullivan, when asked Sunday on CNN if Israel is abiding by the rules of war, replied, “I’m not going to sit here and play judge or jury on that question. What I’m going to do is state the principle of the United States on this issue, which is straight forward: Israel has a right, indeed a responsibility, to defend itself against a terrorist group.” The U.S. is simultaneously increasing the flow of weapons to Israel — and Biden proposed $14.5 billion in additional military assistance — while its senior national security official cannot state whether Israel is conducting operations in contravention of international law.
Keenly aware of the growing opposition to Israel’s war at home and abroad, and even within his own administration, Biden and his advisers have sought to push a narrative that they are seeking to moderate Israel’s tactics. They make sure the U.S. press know that Biden had urged against a full-scale ground invasion, proposed limited pauses to the bombing, and expressed concerns about the humanitarian crisis for Palestinian civilians. On Monday, after days of relentless Israeli attacks on Gazan hospitals and desperate pleas from international doctors and health and aid organizations, Biden finally addressed the issue, but only after being directly asked. “Hospitals must be protected,” he said in response to a question from the press. “My hope and expectation is that there will be less intrusive action relative to hospitals.”
The White House’s mounting effort to spin itself as being concerned about civilian deaths and doing all it can to urge Israel to avoid massacring civilians on an industrial scale is an effort to obfuscate the U.S. role as Israel’s central ally enabling this slaughter. It is a grotesque parlor game that only works if facts and history don’t matter. And in Biden’s case, that history is extensive.
Students, teachers, and Palestine solidarity allies call for a ceasefire between Hamas and Israel during a student walkout in Manhattan on Nov. 9, 2023.
Photo: Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images
Support for Israel’s Wars
For 50 years, Biden has been consistent in his support for Israel’s wars against the Palestinians. Time and again he has backed and facilitated campaigns of terror waged by a nuclear power against a people who have no state, no army, no air force, no navy, and an almost nonexistent civilian infrastructure. As Gaza burns in a smoldering pyre of death and destruction, 80-year-old Biden may be overseeing the final act in his devotion to Israel’s most extreme agenda. His legacy should be forever haunted by the names of the dead children of Gaza, thousands of whom have died in a matter of weeks under the hellfire of U.S.-manufactured weapons and support.
Biden has been in public office longer than almost any U.S. politician in history. His career in the U.S. Senate began on the eve of the 1973 Arab–Israeli war when he traveled to meet Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir. “I sat across the desk for an hour as she flipped those maps up and down, chain smoking, telling me about the [1967] Six Day War,” Biden said. He called it “one of the most consequential meetings I’ve ever had in my life.” But, as has been in the case with more than a few of Biden’s vignettes about his central role in historical events, in his numerous and varied retelling of that story, he seems to have exaggerated how important that meeting was to Meir and the Israelis.
Over the ensuing decades and up to the current horrors being inflicted on the people of Gaza, Biden has operated as one of the staunchest promoters of Israel’s colonialist agenda, often defending Israel’s disproportionate use of force, collective punishment, and at times outright massacres. “Were there not an Israel, the United States would have to invent an Israel to protect her interests in the region,” Biden said on the Senate floor in 1986. He repeated that same line earlier this year during a July visit by Israeli President Isaac Herzog to Washington. During Biden’s trip to Israel last month, as Israel intensified its attacks on Gaza and the civilian death toll skyrocketed, he told Netanyahu and his war cabinet, “I don’t believe you have to be a Jew to be a Zionist, and I am a Zionist.”
Building support for Israel’s military might and funneling money and political support to Israel has been a central component of Biden’s career-long foreign policy agenda. He is fond of calling himself “Israel’s best Catholic friend.” In 2016, during a visit to Israel, Netanyahu heaped praise on Biden, then vice president. “The people of Israel consider the Biden family part of our family,” he said. “I want to thank you personally for your, for our personal friendship of over 30 years. We’ve known each other a long time. We’ve gone through many trials and tribulations. And we have an enduring bond that represents the enduring bond between our people.”
There is one story from these decades of Biden’s dedication to Israel that seems eerily prescient given the bloodbath playing out in Gaza right now. It took place early in the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. In public, Biden was neither a cheerleader for the invasion nor an opponent. But in a private meeting of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee with Prime Minister Menachem Begin in June 1982, Biden’s support for the brutality of the invasion appeared to outstrip even that of the Israeli government.
As the Israeli prime minister was grilled in the Senate over Israel’s disproportionate use of force, including the targeting of civilians with cluster bomb munitions, Biden, in Begin’s words, “rose and delivered a very impassioned speech” defending the invasion. Upon his return to Israel, Begin told Israeli reporters he was shocked when Biden “said he would go even further than Israel, adding that he’d forcefully fend off anyone who sought to invade his country, even if that meant killing women or children.” Begin said, “I disassociated myself from these remarks,” adding, “I said to him: No, sir; attention must be paid. According to our values, it is forbidden to hurt women and children, even in war. Sometimes there are casualties among the civilian population as well. But it is forbidden to aspire to this. This is a yardstick of human civilization, not to hurt civilians.”
Coming from Begin, the comments were striking, because he had been notorious as a leader of the Irgun, a militant group that carried out some of the worst acts of ethnic cleansing accompanying the creation of the state of Israel, including the 1948 Deir Yassin massacre. The details of his exchange with Biden about Lebanon did not receive attention in the U.S. press. Instead, the New York Times focused on what it termed the “bitterest exchange” between Biden and Begin over the issue of Israeli settlements, which Biden opposed because, he said, it was hurting Israel’s reputation in the U.S. “He hinted — more than hinted — that if we continue with this policy, it is possible that he will propose cutting our financial aid,” Begin alleged.
Over the years, Biden has referenced this confrontation when explaining his opposition to the expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank as a disagreement among very good friends. Biden has long argued that these expansions undermine prospects for a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians, though his rhetoric has often been contradicted by his actions, as was the case with his opposition to last week’s U.N. vote labeling the settlements illegal.
U.S. Vice President Joe Biden speaks at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s annual policy conference in Washington, D.C., on May 5, 2009.
Photo: Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images
“Innocents Got Killed”
In the 1990s, as Biden solidified his reputation as a top foreign policy senator, he often helped shepherd legislation and funding packages to Israel that human rights groups and international aid organizations said would hinder efforts at brokering lasting peace and further entrench the state of apartheid imposed on millions of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.
Biden was an early proponent of moving the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, a move that finally took place in 2018 under the Trump administration. In 1995, Biden helped pass a Senate resolution demanding that the embassy be moved by May of that year. Despite objections that it would harm ongoing Israeli–Palestinian peace talks by deciding a key issue by fiat, Biden said the move would send a positive signal to the region. “To do less would play into the hands of those who would do their hardest to deny Israel the full attributes of statehood,” Biden said.
In 2001, following rare public criticism from the Bush administration directed at Israel’s policy of assassinating suspected Palestinian militants, Biden defended Israel’s right to carry out such killings and even rebuked President George W. Bush for criticizing them. “My view has always been that disagreements between Israel and the United States, those differences should be aired privately, not publicly,” Biden said. He also defended the legality of targeted killings, which at the time were considered highly questionable by legal experts for occurring outside a declared conflict. “I don’t believe this is a policy of assassinations,” Biden said, referring to the targeting of suspected Hamas members. “There is in effect a declared war, a declaration by an organization that has said its goal is to do as much as it can to kill Israeli civilians.”
In July 2006, Israel was bombing both Gaza and southern Lebanon, with Biden cheering it on. The Israelis, Biden said on MSNBC, “have in both cases, both in Gaza and in southern Lebanon, done the right thing.” In the face of international condemnations of Israel’s brutality in its attacks, Biden defended Israel. “I find it fascinating — people talk about, ‘Has Israel gone too far?’ No one talks about whether Israel’s justified in the first place,” he said on “Meet the Press.” Unless critics of Israel recognize that it was a victim of terrorism, he said, “I think it’s awful — I think it’s a secondary question whether Israel’s gone too far.”
Biden said his “only criticism of the Israelis is they’re not that great at public relations.” He compared Israel’s attacks on Gaza and Lebanon to the U.S. invasion and occupation of Afghanistan after the September 11 attacks. “It’s a little bit like the same thing we had when we went into Afghanistan,” Biden said at a press conference in July 2006. “We went into Afghanistan, remember, we took out a wedding party by accident? Remember, we took out — with these very sophisticated missiles we had, we accidentally killed some citizens? Was ever a war more justified than us going into Afghanistan? I can’t think of any war since World War II more justified. Yet innocents got killed in us trying to protect America’s interests.” By August 2006, more than 1,000 people were killed in Israel’s war against Lebanon, and UNICEF estimated that 30 percent of the casualties were children.
During his time as vice president, Biden often played the role of placating his friend Netanyahu who famously loathed President Barack Obama. During those eight years, Obama largely maintained long-standing U.S. posture of showering Israel with weapons and other aid despite repeated political spats with Netanyahu, most prominently over Iran and Israeli settlements. During numerous episodes when Israel unleashed gratuitous violence, drawing international condemnation, Biden served as Israel’s most prominent American defender.
In the early summer of 2010, a group of mostly Turkish activists attempted to deliver a flotilla of humanitarian aid to the besieged Gaza Strip. The attempt was interdicted by the Israeli military, which launched a raid on one ship that resulted in the deaths of nine people, including one American citizen. The raid triggered an international outcry and led to a diplomatic crisis between Israel and Turkey, while drawing further attention to the civilian impact of the ongoing Israeli siege of Gaza.
Biden took the lead in defending the raid to the U.S. public. In an interview with PBS, he described the raid as “legitimate” and argued that the flotilla organizers could have disembarked elsewhere before transferring the aid to Gaza. “So what’s the big deal here? What’s the big deal of insisting it go straight to Gaza?” Biden asked about the humanitarian mission. “Well, it’s legitimate for Israel to say, ‘I don’t know what’s on that ship. These guys are dropping eight — 3,000 rockets on my people.’” No weapons were ever found on the ship, only humanitarian supplies. Amid the fury that the raid generated and the muted response from Obama, Biden’s remarks were welcomed by AIPAC spokesperson Josh Block, who said at the time, “We appreciate the many strong statements of support for Israel from members of Congress and the vice president today.”
After the 2014 Gaza war — a seven-week Israeli ground invasion that killed more than 2,000 Palestinians (two-thirds of them civilians) and caused widespread displacement and destruction of civilian infrastructure — Biden boasted of how the Obama administration had “steadfastly stood before the world and defended Israel’s right to defend itself,” declaring, “We have an obligation to match the steel and the spine of the people of Israel with an ironclad, nonnegotiable commitment to Israel’s physical security.”
In May 2021, a few months into Biden’s presidency, Israel intensified its ethnic-cleansing campaign against Palestinians in East Jerusalem, forcibly evicting people from their homes to hand them over to Israeli settlers. The incendiary situation was then exacerbated during a Ramadan siege by Israeli forces at one of the holiest sites in Islam, Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem. In response, Hamas began launching rockets into Israel. Netanyahu retaliated by ordering a massive 11-day bombing campaign against Gaza, striking residential buildings, media outlets, hospitals, and a refugee camp.
As the civilian death toll among Palestinians began to rise, Ned Price, the State Department spokesperson, characterized the operation as Israel exercising its right to self-defense. When he was then asked whether the principle of self-defense also applied to Palestinians, he struggled to answer before saying, “Broadly speaking, we believe in the concept of self-defense. We believe it applies to any state.” When Matt Lee of The Associated Press pointed out that Palestinians do not have a state, Price said, “I’m not in a position to debate the legalities from up here.”
More than 250 Palestinians died during Israel’s siege, including dozens of children. More than 70,000 Palestinians were displaced. Throughout the bombing, the U.S. staunchly defended Israel’s disproportionate attacks, with Biden declaring on May 16, “there has not been a significant overreaction” from Israel before pivoting to condemn Hamas’s firing of rockets into civilian areas of Israel.
Displaced Palestinians at Nassr hospital try to feed their children during food shortages on Nov. 8, 2023.
Photo: Abed Zagout/Anadolu via Getty Images
Evidence of Genocidal Intent
Following Hamas’s horrifying attacks on October 7, Biden and his administration have defended Israel’s mass bombardment of Gaza, and U.S. weapons shipments have been accelerated. Biden called his proposal for additional military support an “unprecedented commitment to Israel’s security that will sharpen Israel’s qualitative military edge,” saying, “We’re going to make sure other hostile actors in the region know that Israel is stronger than ever.”
This crisis has undoubtedly solidified Biden’s legacy as one of the premiere American defenders of Israel’s crimes, including disproportionate attacks against an overwhelmingly defenseless civilian population, in the history of U.S. politics.
In an alternate reality — one where the rule of law is applied equally to all states — Israeli leaders would likely face war crimes charges for the razing of Gaza. Leading genocide scholars and international law experts have cited the statements of Israeli officials about the aims of their operations in Gaza as potential evidence of “genocidal intent.” A coalition of international lawyers representing Palestinian rights groups has already petitioned the International Criminal Court to open a criminal inquiry and issue arrest warrants for Netanyahu and other officials.
Such attempts at accountability should not focus solely on Israeli leaders, according to some U.S. constitutional law organizations. The U.S. is Israel’s premiere bankroller and arms dealer, not to mention its political defender. There are several U.S. laws and treaties that prohibit support for, and failure to prevent, genocidal activities. Among these is the Genocide Convention Implementation Act, signed into law in 1988. Its sponsor? A senator named Joe Biden.
On Monday, the Center for Constitutional Rights filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of Palestinians in Gaza seeking to block the Biden administration from providing further military aid to Israel. The suit names Biden, Blinken, and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. “They have continued to provide both military and political support for Israel’s unfolding genocidal campaign while imposing no red lines,” said Katherine Gallagher, one of the lawyers who filed the case. “The United States has a clear and binding obligation to prevent, not further, genocide. They have failed in meeting their legal and moral duty to use their considerable power to end this horror. They must do so.”
It is unfathomable, given the current world order, that any meaningful legal accountability will be served on U.S. or Israeli leaders. But on a moral level, it is important to remember these legal efforts to confront the slaughter and the complicity of Biden and other Western leaders. The U.S.-enabled horrors of the past five weeks should remain a bloody, permanent stain on the fabric of Biden’s political career and legacy. Among the U.S. political elite, it will simply be noted as Biden doing his job.
The post Biden’s Legacy Should Be Forever Haunted by the Names of Gaza’s Dead Children appeared first on The Intercept.
Palestinians Sue Biden for Failing to Prevent Genocide in Gaza
A group of Palestinian human rights organizations, residents of Gaza, and U.S. citizens with family members impacted by Israel’s ongoing assault jointly sued President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin on Monday for failing to “prevent an unfolding genocide.”
The 89-page lawsuit, filed by the Center for Constitutional Rights in a California federal district court, traces 75 years of history and analyzes acts committed and rhetoric espoused by the Israeli government that exhibit a disregard for international law. It is accompanied by a declaration from a genocide expert who describes Israel’s actions as signs of genocide and argues that the Biden administration has breached its duty under international law to prevent it.
“Under international law, the United States has a duty to take all measures available to it to prevent a genocide. Yet, Defendants have repeatedly refused to use their obvious and considerable influence to set conditions or place limits on Israel’s massive bombing and total siege of Gaza,” the lawsuit reads.
“Despite escalating evidence of Israeli policies directed at inflicting mass harm to the Palestinian population in Gaza,” the Biden administration has opposed “a life-saving cease-fire and lifting of the siege, even vetoing United Nations measures calling for a ceasefire,” the lawsuit continues. “Instead, their actions to fund, arm, and endorse Israel’s mass and devastating bombing campaign and total siege of the Palestinians in Gaza constitutes a failure to prevent an unfolding genocide and complicity in its development.”
The Biden administration’s opposition to a ceasefire comes despite mass protests across the U.S. (and the world) urging the government to act to save Palestinian lives, and the suit follows dire warnings from human rights and United Nations experts that Israel is committing war crimes in Gaza and that its actions may amount to a genocide. The Center for Constitutional Rights, or CCR, a U.S.-based nonprofit, itself warned Biden, Blinken, and Austin last month that they could be held responsible for failing to prevent — and indeed supporting — Israel’s crimes in Gaza.
“To be culpable, the provider need not share the recipients’ genocidal intent.”
In their lawsuit, the plaintiffs ask the court to enjoin the U.S. officials from providing further military, financial, or diplomatic support to Israel. In a press release, CCR said that some courts have identified “the providing of weapons and other materials to the perpetrators of genocide as a form of complicity. To be culpable, the provider need not share the recipients’ genocidal intent.”
The Pentagon declined to comment, and the White House and State Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Israel has severely escalated its campaign against Gaza in recent days, spurring hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to leave their homes in northern Gaza for the southern part of the strip. The bombing campaign has targeted locations that American officials have described as sacred, including hospitals and corridors that Israel had designated as “safe.” Gaza officials have deemed some hospitals out of service because of the intensity of the bombing, to the point of removing babies from incubators.
Meanwhile, after weeks of American officials prodding Israel to follow international law, Israel’s own officials are clear about their intentions. “We are now actually rolling out the Gaza Nakba,” Avi Dichter, Israel’s Minister of Agriculture and former Shin Bet security agency head, said on Saturday.
The plaintiffs in the lawsuit include the Palestinian human rights organizations Defense for Children International – Palestine and Al-Haq; Gaza residents Omar Al-Najjar, Ahmed Abu Artema, and Mohammed Ahmed Abu Rokbeh; and U.S. citizens Mohammad Monadel Herzallah, Laila Elhaddad, Waeil Elbhassi, Bassim Elkarra, and “A.N.,” who all have family members who have been killed and displaced by Israel’s war.
“To be honest, it’s difficult to revisit all the scenes of the past weeks. They open a door to hell when I recall them,” said Al-Najjar, a 24-year-old intern physician who works at Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Yunis, Gaza, in a statement. “I’ve lost five relatives, treated too many children who are the sole survivors of their families, received the bodies of my fellow medical students and their families, and seen the hospital turn into a shelter for tens of thousands of people as we all run out of fuel, electricity, food, and water. The U.S. has to stop this genocide. Everyone in the world has to stop this.”
The plaintiffs trace their case back to the 1948 Nakba (Israel’s displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians) and up to the present day to demonstrate Israel’s persistent violations of human rights and international law. The lawsuit notes that in September, for example — just weeks before Hamas’s attack on Israel — Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu held up a map before the U.N. General Assembly titled “The New Middle East” that totally erased the existence of Palestine.
The lawsuit also presents a meticulous timeline from October 7 up to November 8, detailing the scale of violence Israel has inflicted upon Gaza, including its siege and bombing campaign that has now displaced nearly 2 million Palestinians and killed over 11,000. It details Israel’s targets during the military campaign, including repeat bombings of refugee camps and hospitals, and statements by Israeli officials that demonstrate a disregard for international law.
“The emphasis is on damage and not on accuracy,” Israel Defense Forces spokesperson Daniel Hagari said on October 10, discussing the “hundreds of tons of bombs” Israel had already dropped by then.
“Human animals must be treated as such. There will be no electricity and no water [in Gaza], there will only be destruction,” said Israeli Maj. Gen. Ghassan Alian. “You wanted hell, you will get hell.”
Since those remarks, the Israeli military has waged a campaign that has left millions of Palestinians displaced, thirsty, hungry, sick, and without fuel; launched indiscriminate airstrikes; and used white phosphorus, a chemical weapon that causes burns, in densely populated areas, in direct contravention of international law.
Biden, Blinken, and Austin, meanwhile, have repeatedly affirmed support for Israel. In one instance, after it was widely reported that Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant called Palestinians in Gaza “human animals,” Austin assured his counterpart that the U.S. was ready to deploy additional military aid to Israel.
Biden, backed by nearly every congressional Republican and most Democrats, is preparing to send $14 billion in military aid to Israel. (Biden’s request to Congress for the funding includes an unprecedented loophole that would allow the White House to approve $3.5 billion in future weapons sales without notifying Congress, In These Times reported.) The lawsuit notes that Israel has been the largest cumulative recipient of U.S. foreign aid since World War II. As of January 2023, America had sent $260 billion (adjusted for inflation) in military and economic aid to Israel since 1946, and as of March, Israel had $4.4 billion worth of American-provided munitions.
In the diplomatic arena, the U.S. has repeatedly used its veto power in the United Nations to block resolutions critical of Israel’s human rights and international law violations. Amid the current war, the U.S. has opposed multiple resolutions calling for a ceasefire.
“We have lost so many people, but there are still many more who are living, and we owe it to them to do everything possible to stop this genocide,” said Herzallah, one of the plaintiffs with family in Gaza. “I have done everything in my power: I have participated in protests, sit-ins, wrote letters to my representatives, civil disobedience. Now I am asking the courts to end this ongoing genocide.”
The post Palestinians Sue Biden for Failing to Prevent Genocide in Gaza appeared first on The Intercept.
I Joined Gaza’s Trail of Tears and Displacement
Palestinians flee Gaza City and other parts of northern Gaza to the southern areas amid Israel’s ongoing bombardment of the region, on Nov. 11, 2023.
Photo: Mohammed Talatene/picture-alliance/dpa/AP
It was Thursday night when we started to negotiate. Do we need to evacuate to the south or not? The F-16s did not leave the sky, the bombing did not stop, the live ammunition was very close. The sky was foggy, gas bombs and white phosphorus filled the sky. It was hard for us to even breathe.
Our job is to document the war, to let the world know what is happening. How could we leave? For hours, we asked the question. I had a headache from overthinking.
“What if they kill us? What if they arrest us?” one guy asked.
“I am not leaving, I prefer dying here,” another said.
“We should leave, we have kids and families.”
“We did everything we can. We reported everything.”
Despite the sound of the bombs, I urged myself to sleep. I wondered if this might be my last night in the office, my last night in the city.
Our job is to document the war, to let the world know what is happening. How could we leave?
We had evacuated from the office three times in 30 days. We evacuated from the office to Roots Hotel, but journalists there were targeted, so we evacuated to Al Shifa Hospital. After the threats the hospital received, we chose to risk it and go back to our three-room office in the Al Rimal area, near Al Saraya.
I used to live on a mat on the floor in the office. I had a private bathroom.
The 11th floor office had the best view of Gaza. It was home when we were displaced. It was our tiny home.
I slept as my colleagues were still debating.
It was 6:30 when my colleague Ali woke me up. “Get ready, we are leaving,” he said hurriedly.
“Go where? Nowhere,” I told him. “Let’s find another place to go. I do not want to leave.”
“Hind, yalla, no time to negotiate, we do not have a lot of time,” he stressed while he was packing his cameras in his backpack.
I stood up from the mat. Everyone was packing, searching for their stuff. I realized that I do have ADHD, as I’ve always suspected, because I had no idea where to start.
It was less of a problem because I barely have clothes anyway — a couple of dirty sweaters, my laptop, and my camera. I have been displaced since October 9.
I grabbed my bag and hurried with Ali to pick up his injured mom and my cousin. Ali drove so fast. We parked away from the Al Shifa entrance. The entrance to a hospital has become a danger zone, with several having been bombed recently.
We started walking so fast trying to enter the hospital. It was crowded, people were rushing out.
We started pushing people. It took us more than 10 minutes to reach the building from the entrance, a distance that normally takes just a minute or less to cross.
I went to find my cousin, Sara. She works as a surgeon and has been in Al Shifa hospital since day one. Ali went to get his injured mom and sister.
I started knocking on the door. “Sara, open the door. It’s me, Hind.”
I kept knocking for three minutes until another doctor opened the door. Sara was sleeping.
I woke her. “Hurry up, we are leaving,” I told her.
She gave no reaction. She began packing her clothes.
Ali took his mother in a wheelchair. I took my cousin with a couple of doctors.
My cousin Dr. Sara waiting during the exodus on Nov. 10, 2023, in Gaza.
Photo: Hind Khoudary
The corridors were becoming empty, everyone in a rush. Even patients were evacuating.
By now, we were far too many to fit in the car, so we began to walk. We walked with thousands of other civilians. I even saw a hospital bed being pushed along the way.
Children, people in wheelchairs, the elderly, babies — everyone was carrying their backpacks, pillows, and mats.
We waited at the intersection for 40 minutes until Ali met us. Together, we walked.
I studied the looks on people’s faces. Terrified, they were holding white flags.
A truck that normally carried cows was packed with people. Another truck that used to transport gas canisters took people to the south.
People crying, angry, sad, eyes filled with fear.
My emotions were blocked. All I could think was that I do not want to leave, that it was wrong to leave, that I must not leave.
Everything was destroyed. Even the streets were damaged and destroyed. My eyes were trying to document everything, I tried my best to capture everything in my eyes. I wanted to cry my tears out, but I held them inside me.
It’s not time to cry, I will cry later, I told myself.
We started walking from the “Doula Square” — the launching point.
We found donkey carts. They called out that they would take us as far as the Israeli tanks.
We reserved two carts. The owner was in a hurry; he charged us 20 NIS — around $5 — for a 10-minute donkey ride. Some could not afford it, so they walked on foot.
I saw people carrying cats, carrying their birds in their cage, holding their bags, taking as much as they could.
We reached the area scraped flat by bulldozers. I saw one bulldozer, two tanks, and a dozen soldiers.
This was the first time many people in Gaza — especially kids — would see a tank or an Israeli soldier.
The owner of the donkey carts told us that this was as far as he could take us. All the people started holding out their green IDs, raised their hands and their white flags. Everyone was terrified. This was the first time many people in Gaza — especially kids — would see a tank or an Israeli soldier.
I saw Israeli soldiers in 2016 when I left the Gaza Strip through Erez, the fortified border in the north. I was not scared.
We were still walking. I was holding two bags, one on each shoulder. Ali’s injured sister was leaning on me all the way. She got shrapnel in her leg when the Israelis targeted the Al Shifa hospital entrance.
As I was walking with the crowd, I was looking toward the ground. I saw baby blankets, baby slippers. I saw clothes, toys, bags. I’m sure people were too scared to go back and pick up the stuff they dropped.
We walked over dead, decomposing bodies.
We were thousands of us pushing each other on this one-way road. We wanted this to end. To our left was a tank and soldiers holding their rifles, watching us through binoculars on a sand hill. To our right were four soldiers standing in front a bombed-out building, posing and taking selfies on the rubble.
Our group was stopped more than four times (for no reason) — and let go for no reason.
As we approached the soldiers, I saw a naked man standing in front of the sand hill alongside three other men with their heads down.
Another man with a yellow five-gallon water jug and a blond child were called over by the soldiers. They asked the small boy to step closer without his father. The boy was terrified. Those of us walking past worried the boy would be taken.
The soldier told him there was nothing wrong, he just liked blond kids.
We kept walking. As we walked, pushing each other, we saw bombed cars and dead bodies inside the cars.
Flies filled the cars, feasting on the blood and the bodies inside.
A newborn in front of me was crying. The mom was trying to make food for her as we were walking. She started nursing her without stopping the walk. Another mom was pulling her kids in their baby seats with a rope.
A man pushed an injured woman in her wheelchair. It kept getting stuck in the sand.
We kept walking, stopping, then walking, the soldiers a constant threat.
It felt like years of walking, though it was only hours. It was packed, and we constantly looked between the crowds for each other. On the other side were people who were already in the south and came to pick us up. People in the south were searching for us, for people coming from the city. Everyone was tired. Everyone was thirsty.
I had lost my cousin in the crowd of thousands, but found her at the end. She was crying, her leg had given out. She was in intense pain. We helped her keep moving until we could find a car.
I can’t describe the sadness. We escaped from being killed or injured, but I did not want to leave — and did not want to leave the city.
As we walked closer to where the cars were stationed, people started distributing water to us. They told us we were welcome and that their homes were open to us.
We were so tired. I could not feel my shoulders or my legs.
Everyone was happy we evacuated; everyone was hugging us. We had safely made it.
But I did not feel the same. A piece of my heart was left in the city, and I may never be able to go back to get it. It is impossible for me to imagine I abandoned my father’s house, left it alone. He built that home with his own hands, and when he died in 2012, it stayed with the family. Our house in my family is something so precious to us. We do not know if our house is still standing or not, but we know that we are not in it.
Fifteen minutes after we arrived, the people walking behind us were bombed.
The post I Joined Gaza’s Trail of Tears and Displacement appeared first on The Intercept.
Pivoting away from China’s manufacturing power threatens global supply chains
While the US and its allies prioritise reducing supply chain risks, reshuffling away from China, repercussions from decoupling or de-risking might pose greater concerns than the risks themselves. Such actions could bifurcate the global economy, leading to fragmented supply chains and divergent technology standards. This could hinder global economic recovery, dampen investment flows, and impede Continue reading »
Secret Pentagon Investigation Found No One at Fault in Drone Strike That Killed Woman and 4-Year-Old
This story was supported by the Pulitzer Center.
Mogadishu, SOMALIA — Mariam Shilow Muse was born in the springtime. When relatives dropped by, the bright-eyed 4-year-old bolted through the yard and beyond the fence to greet them. When her father came home, she smothered him with hugs.
In late March 2018, Mariam’s mother, 22-year-old Luul Dahir Mohamed, planned to visit her brother to see his children for the first time, and Mariam insisted on coming along to meet her young cousins. Luul’s brother had planned to pick them up, but Luul couldn’t reach him by phone, so on the morning of April 1, she and Mariam caught a ride with some men in a maroon Toyota Hilux pickup.
That same afternoon, as Luul’s brother Qasim Dahir Mohamed was on his way to pick up his sister and niece, he passed the maroon Toyota pickup. He noticed mattresses and pillows in the bed and, at the last second, caught sight of Luul, with Mariam on her lap, in the passenger seat. He waved and honked, but the truck kept going.
Qasim’s phone wasn’t working, so he decided to drive on to El Buur, where Luul and Mariam had just spent the night, to see other relatives before returning home to welcome his sister and niece. Seconds after he reached the house, Qasim heard the first explosion, followed by another and, after a pause, one more blast.
Key Takeaways
- The Intercept is publishing, for the first time, a Pentagon investigation of civilian deaths from a drone strike in Africa.
- The probe acknowledged that a woman and child were killed in a 2018 attack in Somalia but found that standard operating procedures were followed.
- After months of “target development,” a secret U.S. task force rushed to annihilate perceived enemies in a war Congress didn’t declare, mistaking a woman and child for an adult male. They never even knew how many people they killed.
- The strike was conducted under loosened rules of engagement approved by the Trump White House, and no one was ever held accountable for the civilian deaths.
- The Pentagon expressed doubt that the victims’ identities would ever be known. But in Mogadishu this spring, seven members of their family told The Intercept that, despite multiple pleas, they have never received compensation or an apology from the U.S.
This is a story about missed connections, flawed intelligence, and fatal blindness, about Americans misreading what they saw and obliterating civilians they didn’t intend to kill but didn’t care enough to save. In rural Somalia, cellphones often fail because the militant group al-Shabab forces the local carrier to suspend service to thwart informants and government eavesdropping. But after the explosions, the telecom immediately restored service. Qasim began calling Luul, but her phone rang endlessly.
The news spread fast: A drone strike had hit a pickup carrying mattresses. Qasim and one of his brothers started driving toward the site of the attack. They were the only ones on the road and his brother demanded they stop, Qasim told me when we met recently in Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu. It was too dangerous, the brother said. What if they were targeted by another strike? “I told him that I didn’t care,” Qasim recalled.
Qasim wasn’t the only person to spot the Toyota pickup that day. In a military joint operations center that the U.S. government refuses to identify, members of a Special Operations task force that officials won’t name watched live footage that they declined to release of everyone who entered the Hilux. They recorded and scrutinized it, chronicling when each “ADM” — or adult male — got in or out, where they walked and what they did. The Americans logged these minute details with a pretense of precision, but they never understood what they were seeing.
For all their technology and supposed expertise, the Americans were confused, and some were inexperienced, according to a Pentagon investigation obtained by The Intercept via the Freedom of Information Act. The inquiry is the first such document to be made public about a U.S. drone strike in Africa. It reveals that after months of “target development,” the Americans suddenly found themselves in a mad rush to kill people who posed no threat to the United States in a war that Congress never declared. They argued among themselves about even the most basic details, like how many passengers were in the vehicle. And in the end, they got it wrong. The Americans couldn’t tell a man from a woman, which might have affected their decision to conduct the strike. They also missed the 4-year-old child whose presence should have caused them to stand down.
The Intercept obtained this AR 15-6 investigation of the drone strike that killed of Luul Dahir Mohamed and Mariam Shilow Muse, along with supporting documents, via the Freedom of Information Act. It is the first report of its kind to be released about a U.S. drone strike in Africa.
In the joint operations center, the Americans quickly realized their initial strike had failed to kill all the passengers and decided to eliminate what the investigation file refers to as a sole “survivor running away from vehicle post the first engagement.” But the “survivor” was actually two people: Luul and Mariam. Seconds later, another missile screamed down from the sky.
“It seemed like they did everything wrong,” said an American drone pilot who worked in Somalia and examined the investigation file at The Intercept’s request.
When Qasim found the Toyota, the roof was torn open, the bed was smashed, and the mattresses and pillows were aflame. Four men were dead inside and another young man lay lifeless in the dirt nearby. There was no sign of Luul or Mariam.
About 200 feet away, Qasim found what remained of Luul. Her left leg was mangled, and the top of her head was missing. She died clutching Mariam, whose body was peppered with tiny shards of shrapnel.
Qasim tore off a swath of his sarong and began gathering up small pieces of his sister. Stunned and grieving, he spent hours searching for fragments of her body along the dirt road, working by the glare of his car’s headlights as the sky darkened. Finally, he bundled Luul’s and Mariam’s remains and brought them home. Luul’s body was so mutilated that it was impossible to properly wash, as is required in Islam. Instead, he wrapped her with care in a shroud and buried Luul and Mariam together in a village cemetery. The next day, locals living near the strike site called Qasim. They had found the top of Luul’s skull, complete with hair and a delicate gold teardrop dangling from one ear.
That same day — April 2 — U.S. Africa Command, or AFRICOM, announced it had killed “five terrorists” and destroyed one vehicle and that “no civilians were killed in this airstrike.” The Somali press immediately said otherwise. By the following month, the task force had appointed an investigating officer to sort it all out. He quickly determined that his unit had killed an “adult female and child” but expressed doubt that their identities would ever be known.
From left to right: Shilow Muse Ali, the father of 4-year-old Mariam Shilow Muse and husband of 22-year-old Luul Dahir Mohamed, both of whom were killed in a U.S. drone strike in 2018; Luul’s father and Mariam’s grandfather, Dahir Mohamed Abdi; and Luul’s brothers and Mariam’s uncles Qasim Dahir Mohamed, Ahmed Dahir Mohamed, Hussein Dahir Mohamed, and Abdi Dahir Mohamed, in Mogadishu, Somalia, on May 10, 2023.
Photo: Omar Abdisalan for The Intercept
“We Can Do Whatever We Want”
The exclusive documents and interviews with more than 45 current and former U.S. and Somali military personnel and government officials, victims’ relatives, and experts offer an unprecedented window into the U.S. drone war in Somalia, an investigator’s efforts to excuse the killing of a woman and child, and a “reporting error” that kept those deaths secret for more than a year from Congress, the press, and the American people. The Intercept’s investigation reveals that the strike was conducted under loosened rules of engagement sought by the Pentagon and approved by the Trump White House, and that no one was ever held accountable for the civilian deaths.
“Ultimately, this is just one of many tragedies caused by the U.S. military’s systemic failure to adequately distinguish civilians from combatants, to own up to its deadly mistakes, to learn from them, and to provide assistance to survivors,” Daphne Eviatar, director of the Security With Human Rights program at Amnesty International USA, told The Intercept. “The failure to adequately distinguish civilians from combatants isn’t just tragic. It’s also a violation of international law and completely undermines U.S. counterterrorism strategy.”
More than five years after the strike, Mariam and Luul’s family has not been contacted by any U.S. official or received a condolence payment. Over two days this spring, I met with eight of their relatives in Mogadishu. They spoke about Mariam’s wide smile, Luul’s nurturing role as a sister and mother of two, and the terror that haunts Luul’s surviving son. Their anguish and outrage were palpable, particularly when I showed them the findings of the formerly secret U.S. investigation.
If the Somali military had killed Americans in similar circumstances, Abdi Dahir Mohammed, another of Luul’s brothers, told The Intercept, “the United States would have reacted and the Somali government would have reacted. The pain that Americans would feel is the pain that we feel. They know innocent people were killed, but they’ve never told us a reason or apologized. No one has been held accountable. We’ve been hurt — and humiliated.”
The attack was the product of faulty intelligence as well as rushed and imprecise targeting carried out by a Special Operations strike cell whose members considered themselves inexperienced, according to the documents. The secret investigation led to an admission that civilians were killed and a strong suggestion of confirmation bias: a psychological phenomenon that leads people to cherry-pick information that confirms their preexisting beliefs. Despite this, the investigation exonerated the team involved.
“The strike complied with the applicable rules of engagement,” wrote the investigator. “[N]othing in the strike procedures caused this inaccurate [redacted] call.” Luul’s husband and Mariam’s father, Shilow Muse Ali, seemed staggered as he tried to process those words. “The attack was horrible and their response was horrible. I lost a wife and a child,” he told The Intercept. “But I cannot understand the explanation in the investigation. How can you admit that you killed two civilians and also say the rules were followed?”
“How can you admit that you killed two civilians and also say the rules were followed?”
AFRICOM declined to answer The Intercept’s questions about the attack or civilian casualties in general. When the command finally admitted the killings in 2019, AFRICOM’s then-commander, Gen. Thomas Waldhauser, said it was “critically important that people understand we adhere to exacting standards and when we fall short, we acknowledge shortcomings and take appropriate action.”
Some who took part in America’s drone war in Somalia dispute that. “When I went to Africa, it seemed like no one was paying attention,” the drone pilot and strike cell analyst, who served in Somalia the year Luul and Mariam were killed, told The Intercept. He spoke on the condition of anonymity due to government secrecy surrounding U.S. drone operations. “It was like ‘We can do whatever we want.’ It was a different mindset from the Special Forces I worked with in Afghanistan. There was almost no quality control on the vetting of the strikes. A lot of safeguards got left out.”
Those safeguards began to evaporate once Donald Trump took office in 2017, and their absence was soon felt across Africa and the Middle East. Under international law, governments cannot kill people they deem to be enemies outside of recognized battlefields if they do not pose an imminent danger or can be stopped another way. But just days after Trump entered the White House, the Pentagon reportedly asked for parts of Somalia to be declared an “area of active hostilities,” allowing the military to employ looser, war-zone targeting despite the lack of a congressional declaration of war. “It allows us to prosecute targets in a more rapid fashion,” Waldhauser said that March, emphasizing the need for a “little more flexibility, a little bit more timeliness in terms of [the] decision-making process.”
In response, Trump, now the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination, secretly issued rules for counterterrorism “direct action” operations, including drone strikes in places like Somalia, according to a redacted copy of the document. By the end of March 2017, the number of U.S. airstrikes in Somalia skyrocketed.
“The burden of proof as to who could be targeted and for what reason changed dramatically,” Donald Bolduc, who led Special Operations Command Africa at the time, told The Intercept. During the Obama administration, strikes required high-level approval, the strike cell analyst said. “Giving strike authority down to a ground commander was a massive difference,” he explained. “It had a big effect.”
Attacks in Somalia tripled after Trump relaxed targeting principles, while U.S. military and independent estimates of civilian casualties across U.S. war zones, including Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen, spiked. The U.S. conducted 208 declared attacks in Somalia during Trump’s single term in the White House, a 460 percent increase over the eight years of the Obama presidency. (The Biden administration has conducted 31 declared strikes there, including 13 so far in 2023.)
A review of Trump-era rules by the Biden administration found that, in some countries, “operating principles,” including a “near certainty” that civilians would “not be injured or killed in the course of operations,” were reportedly enforced only for women and children, while a lower standard applied to civilian adult men. All military-age males were considered legitimate targets if they were observed with suspected al-Shabab members in the group’s territory, Bolduc said.
There was another possible contributing factor to civilian casualties. During 2017 and 2018, commanders within Task Force 111, the Joint Special Operations Command or JSOC-led unit responsible for drone attacks in Somalia, Libya, and Yemen, competed to produce high body counts, raising red flags in the intelligence community, according to a U.S. intelligence source who asked not to be identified due to the sensitivity of the topic.
Further down the chain of command, new awards — special “remote” devices on medals to recognize the work of drone operators in combat zones — encouraged attacks, according to the strike cell analyst. “That made some people want to do more strikes,” the analyst said. “They want to brag about being in combat.”
Left/Top: People stand next to destroyed walls at the scene of an al-Shabab car bombing attack in Mogadishu, Somalia, on Dec. 22, 2018. Right/Bottom: Somali soldiers at Sanguuni military base, where an American special operations soldier was killed by a mortar attack on June 13, 2018.
Photos: AFP via Getty Images
“The United States Failed Us”
Less than a month before Luul and Mariam were killed, Waldhauser praised AFRICOM’s efforts to avoid civilian casualties before the House Armed Services Committee. He specifically referenced procedures meant to ensure “levels of certainty” to prevent harm to noncombatants. Days later, he emphasized that it was “very important … that we know exactly who we are attacking on the ground.”
Yet the Pentagon investigation found that the Americans had no idea who they were targeting. “During the post-strike review,” according to the investigator, “it was assessed that one of the ADM that loaded into the vehicle … was an Adult Female and child.”
Three Somali government sources — including Nur Gutale, a Somali official on the front lines of the conflict against al-Shabab in El Buur, where the drone strike took place — said there were seven people in the pickup truck that day, not the four or five the Americans argued about before the strike or the six their most seasoned analyst counted after numerous post-strike reviews of drone footage.
The men in the truck included members of al-Shabab: Alas Jango’an, the driver and the local head of Jaysh Al-Hisbah, al-Shabab’s police force; a tax collector with the militant group; and a poet associated with the group, who was identified in local press reports as Yusuf Dhegay. Others said a community elder in the car, identified as Ali Hared, also had relations with the militants, but they were unsure if he and the poet were “real” members or simply — like most civilians living in Shabab-controlled areas — compelled to deal with an armed group that functioned as the local government.
But the young man whose body Qasim found sprawled beside the pickup after the strike, 20-year-old Yusuf Dahir Ali, was a civilian, Gutale and others said. “He was a student in Mogadishu. It was school break, and he was just traveling home,” Gutale told The Intercept. “He was innocent.”
The Pentagon redacted all images of Luul and Mariam in the documents they released. The former U.S. strike cell analyst said those still frames from the drone footage — known as “snaps” — “would seal the deal on how blatantly obvious it was. If you got a snap of the woman and child running from the vehicle, you would be able to go: ‘How don’t you see that as a female and child?’” the analyst told The Intercept. “Typically, males in Somalia wear a dress-type thing. But women still look very different. If it’s during the day, you can tell.”
Nur Gutale agreed, insisting that even if the Americans confused a woman for a man when she entered the vehicle, there was no way to mistake her as she ran down the road with her child. Qasim noted that Luul was wearing a flowing green jilbab: a garment more voluminous than a hijab, covering the entire body and leaving only the face, hands, and feet exposed. “Because al-Shabab is there in the area, she had to wear it,” Luul’s brother Mohamed Dahir Mohamed explained of the terror group’s strict dress code. He likened Luul’s garb to a huge umbrella.
“Her death isn’t only what makes me angry. It’s that they say that they mistakenly killed her. That hurts me deeply. It was no mistake,” said Qasim, a formidable man with a hard stare, close-cropped hair, and a bright orange, henna-dyed goatee. “She wasn’t killed in the car where they couldn’t see her. She was hit out in the open. There is no way they could mistake her for a man. It’s a lie and it makes me sick.”
“This wasn’t top leadership. These were low-ranking guys. I don’t understand their priorities.”
Gutale said he “had a good relationship with AFRICOM” and provided intelligence on high-ranking Shabab officials, but he found American targeting choices puzzling — especially the strike that killed Luul and Mariam.
“This wasn’t top leadership. These were low-ranking guys. I don’t understand their priorities,” he told The Intercept. “There was no reason to kill a woman and child in a big strike. They know that they did this. The U.S. is at fault.”
“It’s heartbreaking,” he added in exasperation. “The United States failed us.”
Qasim Dahir Mohamed, who found his sister Luul’s body after the U.S. drone strike, poses for a photo in Mogadishu, Somalia, on May. 10, 2023.
Photo: Omar Faruk for The Intercept
Even under the Trump administration’s loosened rules of engagement, Sarah Harrison, who worked as a lawyer in the Pentagon’s Office of General Counsel at the time of the attack, questioned the follow-up strike that killed Luul and Mariam. “U.S. forces were required by policy to take ‘extraordinary measures to ensure with near certainty’ that there would be no civilians injured or killed,” Harrison told The Intercept. She wondered why the U.S. hadn’t made another “near certainty assessment” before the second strike was carried out.
The investigator found that “some members did not have any FMV experience.”
The Pentagon investigator concluded that “time was the biggest factor” in misidentifying Luul. For reasons that are explained nowhere in the unredacted portion of the documents, the strike cell found itself “under perceived pressure” to launch the attack “as quickly as possible.” Experience levels also loom large in the investigation file. The most senior team member on duty had eight years of experience analyzing full motion video, or FMV, as live feeds from drones are known — a significant track record, according to experts. But the youngest member had spent just six months with the task force and the same amount of time analyzing such feeds. Elsewhere, the investigator asserts that “some members did not have any FMV experience.” One team member noted that “due to a contracting issue, they have lost a lot of experienced personnel.”
“For those without much experience as well as contractors working with a task force, the pressure to say ‘yes’ to get to the commander’s perceived desired outcome is pretty great,” said Todd Huntley, a former Staff Judge Advocate who served as a legal adviser on Joint Special Operations task forces conducting drone strikes in Afghanistan and elsewhere and now directs the national security law program at Georgetown University Law Center. “The combination of confirmation bias and the pressure to move quickly and achieve results is already tough to overcome. When you have less experienced people, that pressure is even greater.”
The investigator determined that no one tracked how much time strike cell members spent in a particular geographic area of responsibility, known in military jargon as an AOR. “This could lead to a very inexperienced crew working in an AOR due to a lack of a Checks and Balance system,” he wrote.
Another of Luul’s brothers, 38-year-old Abubakar Dahir Mohamed, had a succinct response: “If you admit that you assign someone with no experience then you have to take responsibility for what they do.”
The Pentagon investigator urged procedural changes that would affect every subsequent mission: “I recommend that each senior analyst has a brief with their team prior to going on shift to ensure the entire team has the correct mindset and highlights that accuracy is more important than speed.” There is no indication that that recommendation or any others were implemented.
Qaali Dahir Mohamed shows a picture of her nephew Mohamed Shilow Muse, far right, on her cellphone in Mogadishu, Somalia, on May. 10, 2023.
Photo: Omar Faruk for The Intercept
Erased From Existence
Living in al-Shabab territory in the 2010s, Luul inhabited a world almost devoid of smartphones and social media. Her family has no photographs to remember her by.
The U.S. government, meanwhile, has countless images of Luul. Its cameras captured video of her and Mariam entering the pickup truck, and analysts had eyes on her through her last moments. Luul’s visage now exists only in classified files and in the memories of those who knew her — and in the face of her younger sister, to whom she bore an uncanny, almost identical, resemblance.
“If you want to see Luul, it’s me,” Qaali Dahir Mohamed, Luul’s sad-eyed, soft-spoken, 18-year-old sister, told me when we spoke in a deserted rooftop lounge in Mogadishu. As the only two girls in their household, they shared a tight bond that extended past childhood when, in keeping with local custom, Qaali moved into Luul and Shilow’s home after they married. “When I was young, she used to carry me, protect me, tell me traditional stories to prepare me for life,” said Qaali, who hunched her tall, lithe form as she talked about her sister. “After she had her children, she had me look after them and continued to teach me about how to be responsible, how to be a good mother.” Qaali spoke with her hands, her fingers slowly twisting in the air as she talked about Luul. “She loved her children so much. She couldn’t bear to see them cry,” Qaali said before she sank down in her chair and started wiping away tears.
The entire family has been traumatized by the airstrike. Luul’s brothers say their elderly father never recovered from his daughter’s traumatic death and has been in failing health ever since. When Qasim’s son saw a “normal airplane” flying over their farm, he began running around, trying to hide, convinced it might kill him. The family told Luul’s son, Mohamed Shilow Muse, the truth about his mother’s death: “The Americans killed her with their airplane.” When he sees or hears a drone, they said, “he rushes under a tree to hide.”
A 2012 study of civilians in Pakistan found that the constant presence of drones, the fear that a strike might occur at any time, and people’s inability to protect themselves “terrorize[d] men, women, and children, giving rise to anxiety and psychological trauma among civilian communities.”
Mohamed, now 6 years old and living with his grandmother, constantly asks why Luul left him. He’s terrified of being alone. “If I or my mother leave him,” said Qaali, “he cries all day. He won’t stop. He feels abandoned.” Unable to continue, Qaali grasped her blue-veiled head with both hands, laid it on the glass table, and sobbed.
A June 12, 2018 email from a member of the Joint Task Force that conducted a drone strike that killed 22-year-old Luul Dahir Mohamed and her 4-year-old daughter Mariam Shilow Muse to the investigator who found that the rules of engagement and standard operating procedures were followed.
Photo: Screenshot by The Intercept
“The Height of Disrespect”
On April 5, 2019, Qasim was listening to the radio at a tea shop when he heard a BBC news report about the U.S. military acknowledging that it had killed a woman and child in a drone strike the previous April, the first admission of a civilian casualty by AFRICOM.
The announcement came more than a year after the attack, a delay AFRICOM blamed on a “reporting error,” claiming that its headquarters was only notified of the investigation months after it concluded. Four days later, in response to questions about compensating the family, then-spokesperson John Manley told The Intercept that AFRICOM was “working with our embassy in Somalia on a way forward.”
On April 12, 2019, Luul’s brother Abubakar wrote a letter to the Somali Ministry of Justice asking for help in obtaining compensation from the United States. Four days later, he wrote to AFRICOM via the “Contact Us” function on the command’s website, noting the family’s appreciation for acknowledging the deaths and asking the military to “take appropriate action toward the case as restitution for the lost lives.” After AFRICOM added a new online portal to file civilian casualty claims, Abubakar did so using this method as well. Abubakar, who lives part-time in Mogadishu and speaks and writes English, shared copies of his letters and screenshots of his submissions with The Intercept. Five years after the strike, the family has yet to be contacted, much less compensated, by AFRICOM.
“It is unacceptable that AFRICOM would resign itself to such total ignorance,” Amnesty’s Eviatar told The Intercept, noting the Pentagon’s repeated failures to contact survivors or offer condolence payments. “It is the height of disrespect for the local populations where the U.S. operates for the military to completely ignore the direct victims of lethal strikes, even when the U.S. knows they were civilians and the strikes were in error.”
Drone Wars
After almost 17 years of drone strikes and commando raids in Somalia, the U.S. has carried out 282 declared attacks as well as an undisclosed number of CIA strikes. AFRICOM claims to have killed just five civilians in that period, including Luul and Mariam — although the command has never referred to them by name. But since nothing about the April 2018 attack was out of the ordinary, according to members of the task force, there is good reason to believe that the real number is far higher. Airwars, the U.K.-based airstrike monitoring organization, says the actual count of civilians killed by U.S. strikes in Somalia may be more than 3,000 percent higher than the official tally.
Over the last two decades, investigative reporters and human rights groups have increasingly documented America’s killing of civilians, underreporting of noncombatant casualties, failures of accountability, and outright impunity in Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Yemen and elsewhere. A 2021 investigation by New York Times reporter Azmat Khan revealed that the U.S. air war in Iraq and Syria was marked by flawed intelligence and inaccurate targeting, resulting in the deaths of thousands of innocent people. Out of 1,311 military reports analyzed by Khan, only one cited a “possible violation” of the rules of engagement; none included a finding of wrongdoing or disciplinary action; and fewer than a dozen condolence payments were made.
Last year, in the wake of these damning findings, the Pentagon pledged reforms. The 36-page Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Action Plan provides a blueprint for improving how the Pentagon addresses noncombatant deaths but lacks mechanisms for addressing past civilian harm.
The Defense Department has publicly confirmed five civilian harm incidents in Somalia and maintains a $3 million annual budget to compensate survivors, but there is no evidence that any Somali victims or their families have ever received amends. The Pentagon has also been clear that it isn’t interested in looking back. “At this point we don’t have an intent to re-litigate cases,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told Rep. Sara Jacobs, D-Calif., when she asked last year whether the Pentagon was planning to revisit past civilian harm allegations.
There’s no re-litigation necessary, however, in the case of Luul Dahir Mohamed and Mariam Shilow Muse. More than four years ago, AFRICOM admitted killing them. “Credibility, transparency, and accountability are fundamental to military operations,” Waldhauser said in a press release taking responsibility for the strike. To date, however, AFRICOM won’t even discuss reparations with a journalist, much less provide compensation to relatives of the dead.
Experts say that the deaths of Luul and Mariam offer AFRICOM the chance to finally live up to Waldhauser’s rhetoric. “This case is a real opportunity for AFRICOM, since they’ve acknowledged that this is a credible report of civilian harm,” said Joanna Naples-Mitchell, a human rights attorney and director of the nonprofit Zomia Center’s Redress Program, which helps survivors of U.S. airstrikes submit requests for compensation. “Given that there’s an English-speaking member of the family in Mogadishu, it would not be hard for the Pentagon to offer amends.”
Shilow Muse Ali, Luul’s husband, poses for a photo in Mogadishu, Somalia, on May. 10, 2023.
Photo: Omar Faruk for The Intercept
“They Don’t Know Who They Killed”
For most of the day I spent with Shilow Muse Ali in an outdoor restaurant in Mogadishu, he sat slack-jawed and blank-eyed, with a dazed look on his face. Sometimes he seemed confused, sometimes confounded. He answered my questions, but it was difficult to elicit much detail about the wife and child he’d lost. When I decided to end the interview and asked if there was anything else he wanted to say, his eyes narrowed and his demeanor changed.
“I was bewildered at the beginning when my daughter and wife were killed. I expected an apology and compensation considering the Americans’ mistake. But we received nothing,” he said in a voice with an increasingly hard edge. “They admitted there were civilian casualties, but this investigation shows that they don’t even know who they killed.”
For the first time all afternoon, Shilow looked me square in the eye and fury seemed to surge through him. “We aren’t the people they are targeting. We are not supposed to be treated like we’re enemies. Does the U.S. military even see a difference between enemies and civilians?” he asked, his voice rising and his hands slicing through the air. “They said they were following the car from the beginning. How could someone following the car, watching everything, not see a woman with a child?”
I had no answer.
“We want the truth from the American government. But we already know it,” he told me. “This attack shows that there’s no distinction, none at all. The Americans see enemies and civilians as the same.”
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