"Over the past 20 years, the U.S. military has struggled with escalation of force and many civilians were killed when they were falsely viewed as a threat," Larry Lewis of the Center for Naval Analyses told
NPR. "This incident appears to be one of many such cases."
The raid's sole survivor, a 39-year-old laborer named Barakat Ahmad Barakat, told
NPR that the two men who were killed were his friends and that they were heading home after working at a local olive press. Barakat—who insisted he did not know that al-Baghdadi was hiding out in the area—said the U.S. airstrike took the men by surprise. They fled the van but came under renewed aerial attack.
"Suddenly I felt something hit us," he said. His friends, 27-year-old Khaled Mustafa Qurmo and 30-year-old Khaled Abdel Majid Qurmo, were killed. Barakat's right hand was blown off; his arm was later amputated. His left hand was also badly injured.
The U.S. military initially claimed that the army helicopters came under fire from the van. However, a formerly classified U.S. Central Command
document previously published by NPR shows that the Pentagon acknowledged the claim was untrue.
The newly exposed document states that the military also "assessed secondary explosions emitted from the vehicle, indicating weapons and explosive devices were on board the panel van."
This was untrue, as was a
similar claim made by the Pentagon following an August 2021 drone strike that killed 43-year-old Afghan aid worker Zamarai Ahmadi and nine of his relatives, including seven children, in Kabul during the chaotic days of U.S. withdrawal from a 20-year invasion.
The Pentagon often
attempts to conceal or minimize civilian casualties caused by U.S. bombs and bullets, which have killed and maimed hundreds of thousands of civilians in more than half a dozen nations since the ongoing so-called War on Terror began after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States.
NPR's latest report on the al-Baghdadi raid comes as the Pentagon implements its Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Action Plan (CHMR-AP), a series of policy steps aimed at preventing and responding to the death and injury of noncombatants.
