Help us seek justice for civilians killed in war

Over 1,300 previously classified US military documents on civilian casualties have just been released. Please help Airwars use them to secure accountability for civilian deaths in Iraq and Syria

 

What do we need your help with?

 

For eight years, Airwars has tracked every civilian reported killed or injured by the US-led Coalition in the war against ISIS - creating the largest public archive of civilian harm in this conflict. Almost 3,000 incidents have been reported by communities - describing friends, relatives and neighbours killed or injured by alleged Coalition actions. Our 450,000-word event database enables journalists, researchers, affected families, and investigators to hold militaries to account.

 

Now the New York Times has published The Civilian Casualty Files, a trove of previously classified US military assessments of events where civilians were reportedly killed or injured in Iraq and Syria. This remarkable resource, acquired by journalist Azmat Khan, totals more than 5,400 pages of vital information which - until now - has been hidden.

 

The majority of these 1,300 previously secret US military assessments had been triggered by Airwars referrals to the Coalition fighting ISIS. And now we need your help to reconcile this material with our own public database. With your aid, our professional researchers - many from affected communities in Syria and Iraq - will be able to learn far more about the true cost to civilians of this war, and help create a clearer route to accountability and justice for survivors.

 

What will we do with your donations?

 

As we integrate this huge cache of documents with our own findings, we expect to identify hundreds of cases where civilian harm events have wrongly been rejected as ‘non credible.’ By our conservative estimate, at least 4,000 civilians may have been killed in such Coalition incidents. Many of the decisions behind those rejections are likely to be riddled with basic errors, translation problems, or lack of judgment and oversight, based on detailed sampling of a small number of events by the Times.

 

It's a big challenge which we estimate will take our dedicated team about 15 months to complete - including the re-opening of almost half of our own civilian harm assessments dating back to 2014. We’ll also be engaging with the US military and  allies as we proceed, calling on them to re-open assessments based on what the secret documents reveal.

Our organizational funding is already fully committed to other key conflicts of concern, including Somalia, Libya, and ongoing Russian aggression in Syria. So today, with your help, we can challenge nations such as the US to become more accountable for their own actions, while improving opportunities for victims and their families to seek justice.