Lives torn apart by British airstrikes in Mosul give lie to UK’s ‘perfect’ precision war

The transcript of the drone operators’ remarks is brief and blunt, but it captures with grim clarity the moment they realised their deadly mistake.

“Two children” someone called out in the control room, as hundreds of miles away in Mosul, under a warm late autumn sun, the missile they had fired detonated beside a woman and her young family.

Enam Younis, 31 at the time, was thrown to the ground by the blast and has never walked again. Her older daughter, Taiba, six, inquisitive and desperate to start school, was killed instantly. Zahra, just three, was hurled over a fence. She survived but was peppered with shrapnel that tore into her stomach and is still lodged deep in her skull. Doctors have said that if it moves, it could cause devastating brain injury.

There was a third child, Ali, a toddler too young to walk, who was shielded from the drone cameras – and the worst of the blast – by his mother’s arms, but who still lost part of a foot and hand.

Younis was taken out of Mosul for treatment and even six years later, her memories are too painful for her to return to the city she called home. “It is still impossible for me to think about going to Mosul now,” she said weeping. “I didn’t even visit my daughter’s grave. I can’t do it.”

Britain’s planes and drones operated over Mosul throughout the two-year battle to reclaim it from Islamic State (IS), which began in 2016. The Ministry of Defence has detailed how many militants were killed by Paveway bombs and Brimstone and Hellfire missiles it used.

The UK military claim to have fought a “perfect” war in Iraq, one in which British weapons did not harm a single civilian, even as missiles from their allies in the US-led coalition killed and maimed hundreds.

An investigation into this implausible claim, by the Guardian and Airwars, the not-for-profit watchdog that investigates harm to civilians in conflict zones, led reporters to Younis’s current home, in the northern Iraqi city of Erbil, as well as to the site where her daughter had been killed.

Britain says one Hellfire missile killed three militants in Mosul on 29 November 2016. Official data released by the US, the coalition and its allies, and eyewitness interviews on the ground, show that strike also probably killed Taiba and badly injured her family.

The tragedy was so clear, even on the fuzzy aerial video feed, that the team that fired the missile immediately reported the strike to their commanders, prompting an internal investigation, which is detailed in coalition documents released to the New York Times under a freedom of information request.

The coalition concluded the civilian casualty report was “credible”, but would not say which country had launched the missile. The alliance was structured to make investigations – and responsibility – for civilian deaths collective.

Washington has acknowledged that coalition weapons killed 455 civilians in Mosul, although Airwars estimates the real toll to be almost three times higher.

Western drones and aircraft, supporting Iraqi soldiers pressing forward on the ground, were operating in a chaotic battlefield that put civilians at immense risk.

The dense streets of Mosul were filled with ordinary people, some prevented from leaving, others too frightened to cross frontlines to escape the fighting. IS militants had dug in among them for a suicidal last stand. British authorities claim they were able to unleash thousands of kilos of hi-tech weapons on this complex frontline, and destroy a formidable extremist army without harming a single civilian.

Even senior officers have admitted this is not credible. At the highest level, the British government has recognised the importance of investigating civilian casualties.

One of the recommendations of the excoriating Chilcot report on the conduct of the Iraq invasion in 2003 was that “a government has a responsibility to make every reasonable effort to understand the likely and actual effects of its military actions on civilians”.

Yet the government in London has maintained its position that the Mosul campaign was flawless with such commitment, that it has even rejected the findings of its allies. In 2020 the coalition unit set up to assess civilian casualty found that one known RAF strike killed two civilians in the city; Britain insists all victims were fighters.

The MoD declined to confirm or deny whether the specific strikes were conducted by its forces, and said British troops had not killed or harmed civilians in Iraq.

“There is no evidence or indication that civilian casualties were caused by strikes in Syria and Iraq,” a spokesperson said. “The UK always minimises the risk of civilian casualties through our rigorous processes and carefully examines a range of evidence to do this, including comprehensive analysis of the mission data for every strike.”

Finding survivors

The Guardian arrived on the street where Enam Younis was hit, and where her father and brothers still live, after a months-long investigation to trace the hidden victims of this bombing campaign.

Working with Airwars, we filtered through the public statements about the war, from the British military and the coalition, strike records released to Airwars under freedom of information laws, as well as US military transcripts released under freedom of information requests to the Pulitzer award-winning investigator Azmat Khan.

We identified five airstrikes that killed civilians and appeared linked to British forces by the details of their targets, their location and their timing.

One was the attack on the Younis family. That day Britain reported several strikes in Mosul, one using a Hellfire missile that military records state killed three fighters.

An MoD statement from the day, summarising British attacks, said a “group of terrorists engaged in a firefight with Iraqi forces were struck with a Hellfire”. These match the description from the US civilian casualty report obtained by the New York Times.

It describes the targets as “three adult males” with one “possible rifle” and “possible RPG”. Other targets listed by the British military and coalition in strikes on Mosul that day involved heavier military hardware or buildings, including mortar systems, car bombs, vehicles and weapons caches.

It was relatively simple for the Guardian to find Younis. We went to geo-coordinates for the strike that had been released by the US military to Airwars in 2020 as part of a “commitment to transparency”.

Although some coordinates have been off by hundreds of metres, this one turned out to be accurate to a few dozen metres. At the site, we asked people living along nearby roads if they knew about an airstrike that hit a woman and her children at the end of November 2016.

Six years had passed, but it took little more than an hour to find her family, with the help of a young student whose father had been beheaded by IS, a reminder of the many cruel ways the battle for the city ripped apart families.

He took us first to a nearby street where a single woman was killed by a strike in late November; IS fighters had taken over the house, and she was walking past when it was hit. The details of that attack do not appear to match any civilian casualty incidents on coalition databases, suggesting the death went uninvestigated, and unreported.

Next we went to the home of Younis’s father, from where she had stepped into the path of the missile. On that autumn day in 2016, IS fighters had just moved into the area, turning it into a new frontline. Phones were not working and Younis, who was visiting her parents, worried her husband may come looking for her and the children.

As a former police officer he could have faced detention or worse if stopped, so she decided it was safer for him if they went home, just a few minutes away. She asked her father and other relatives to watch them walk down the street.

The timing and details of the attack they described matched the civilian casualty report – which the family had never seen – so closely that there was no question it was the same incident. The dry, concise language of military record was brought to painful, tragic life.

Why it matters

In the years since, no one from the coalition, or the British military, has contacted or met the family, and residents said they were not aware of any investigating teams coming to the area to find out what happened.

The official investigation in 2016 found that although the civilian casualty report was “credible” they would not look into what happened in any more depth because “at this time … as no additional information could be discovered by further investigation”.

It recommended that the drone pilots who carried out the strike get extra training on rules of engagement, and rules for identifying targets.

At the time, Mosul was a battlefield, and it would have been impossible to send a team there to find out what happened. Younis was in hospital, where she would stay for weeks, with IS fighters urging her husband to leave her to die.

Since then, though, IS has been all but routed in Iraq, reduced to a handful of insurgent cells. Swathes of Mosul still lie in ruins – the destruction was so terrible there is even a city centre statue commemorating workers who clear the rubble – but it is largely safe for westerners to visit.

The impact of the campaign in Syria may still be difficult and dangerous to chart, but in Iraq it would not be difficult or even particularly expensive for the coalition to investigate bombings there that went wrong.

There are obvious moral reasons for Britain and its allies to accept responsibility for the civilians they killed and injured. But there is also a strong strategic argument to investigate these tragedies.

In every war, cycles of violence are fed by the pain and fury of those who have lost loved ones, and take up arms seeking revenge or protection. In the past 20 years civilian deaths have again and again proved one of the most powerful recruiting sergeants against western armies, from Iraq to Afghanistan.

Without investigating how and why innocent people were killed by British weapons, Britain is unlikely to do a better job of protecting others in the next war it is drawn into.

The deceptive pitch of modern “precision warfare” is that enemy fighters can be picked off by sophisticated bombs, with no “collateral damage”’ to people around them.

In high-profile operations, which follow extensive surveillance, it can work. The assassination of al-Qaida leader Ayman al Zawahiri on a balcony in Kabul last year left most of the house untouched; no one else was harmed. But in the heat of an intense battle, with last-minute decisions about targets seen only through a drone video screen, mistakes are almost inevitable. Other allies, including the US, Australia and the Netherlands, have admitted to tragic errors that cost dozens of lives, and in some cases paid compensation.

Either the UK government is not making a reasonable effort to understand how its campaign against IS affected the civilians of Iraq and Syria. Or it has – but is not willing to share that information with British citizens in whose name the war was waged, or the families directly affected.

Knowing what we did

A second mass killing investigated by the Guardian shows how imprecise “precision warfare”’ can be. The coalition accepted as “credible” a report that it killed 14 civilians on 1 March 2017, describing them as casualties of an attack on an IS “vehicle bomb factory”.

It appeared to be a British strike; the government’s claim that an RAF attack had taken out two buildings used as a truck factory in Mosul matched the coalition’s report that two vehicle bomb factories were targeted in the city.

But when the Guardian went to Mosul to try to find survivors, the official story unravelled. The coordinates the coalition provided for the missile could never have been a vehicle bomb factory in 2017, or somewhere 14 civilians died, because they were at the centre of a large, scrubby wasteland. A historical shrine had stood on the site until 2014 when IS took over the city, decreed it was blasphemous, and levelled the building.

There was a bloody strike nearby on 1 March 2017, however, that residents said was the deadliest that year in the al-Nabi Sheet neighbourhood. It destroyed three homes 250 metres from the coalition’s official target, killing an extended family sheltering there, all close relatives of Badour Nazim Abdulrahman, who was 27 and living with her husband, Musab Ghanim. The Guardian found her through a Facebook page for Mosul residents bereaved by the war.

The dead were her father, Nazim Abdulrahman, her mother, Khalida, sister Mayada, brother Haitham, sister-in-law Noor, and two nephews, seven-year-old Idris and eight-year-old Aziz.

She had begged them to leave “many times”, and they stayed with her for a month. But, she said, “My father didn’t like it, he went back because he wanted to be in his own home.”

She took us to the ruins of the homes that had been levelled, down a narrow residential alley barely wide enough for a car to negotiate. It would have been impossible to park a car there, let alone engineer vehicle bombs on the site.

Details of the civilian casualty report, taken from a drone or warplane video feed, describe a very specific sequence of events that did not happen on this street. It claims the strike on the bomb factory caused a shock wave so large that it detonated a car bomb stationed further down the street, and the force of that explosion caused a house to collapse, trapping civilians.

In al-Nabi Sheet Street, a neighbour who had been across the street at the time said IS fighters had taken up positions on the roof of a neighbouring house, and were using it to attack. Not long after, a missile narrowly missed their vantage point but destroyed the three neighbouring buildings.

The questions thrown up by the attempt to find out what happened on one day in March, in west Mosul, are serious, fundamental ones about how Britain and its allies fight their wars.

For all their hi-tech targeting, did the coalition know where its bombs were landing? Are the videos not linked to location and timing data, and if so why did officials not cross-check them? Was a real bomb factory somewhere else? Or if the location data was correct, was the video feed so poor, the understanding of Mosul so bad, and the intelligence so weak that this home was really mistaken for a car bomb factory?

There are also questions about how targets are assessed. The civilian casualty report says officers watched the target for nine minutes and, seeing no civilians, launched the missile. Even in peacetime, you could watch many – perhaps most – civilian homes for nine minutes without seeing anyone coming or going. And in the middle of an intense battle, with bullets and bombs flying, most residents tended to huddle at home, going out as little as possible.

There is no respect or affection for the IS fighters the coalition were chasing. After the strike, Badour’s brother Haitham was still alive, trapped under the rubble. Neighbours could hear him begging for water and help, but the fighters refused to let them bring in heavy lifting material to reach him.

After two days he fell silent. By the time Badour was able to collect the remains of her family, when fighting died down several months later, there was nothing left in their home but bones. “My family is mixed with this soil,” she said, walking around the ruined site.

The remains of her father and mother, her brother and two beloved nephews, her sister and brother-in-law could be buried together in a single grave.

Left alone

Badour comes to the cemetery to visit the grave of her family often, because for her, life stopped the day the coalition bomb killed them. She and her husband have not been able to have children of their own, and they cannot afford fertility treatment.

“I used to go visit my family every Thursday,” she said, weeping by their collective grave. “I go to see them still, but in the graveyard. I am lost. I can’t sleep for days at a time, thinking of them.”

She dreams of medical care that could help her start a new family to fill her days and carry the legacy and memories of all those she has lost.

In Erbil, Enam Younis, who had no idea the coalition had investigated the airstrike, said a payout could help their family adjust to new lives in the wake of the airstrike.

“Will it bring back my two legs? No. Nor will it bring back my daughter. Nor will it make Ali OK. In school the kids can’t concentrate. Zahra has shrapnel still in her head but they can’t remove it because they fear she may end up paralysed.”

“There is nothing they can do to fully compensate me but … I need money to send my children to a better school. I need to own a home, so no one can come and throw us out.” She would also like a more comfortable wheelchair. “I spend my life in this chair.”

Yet in Iraq and Syria, it is impossible for those who lost their relatives to British strikes to seek compensation. Payouts for civilian deaths are the responsibility of individual countries, not the coalition. But because the coalition will not say which countries carried out individual strikes, even survivors of strikes deemed “credible”, have nowhere to go to make a claim.

Beyond broader questions of moral responsibility and future strategy, the coalition position on civilian casualties during the campaign against IS has left those whose lives were torn apart by British bombs utterly alone.

“Life and death are the same to me now,” said Badour, after the loss of her beloved parents, siblings and nephews. “My message to the British people is that they should know what the British government is doing.”

Salim Habib contributed reporting