The Civilian Casualty Files—A1 of today's
@nytimes
—is the culmination of 5 years of investigation: at airstrike sites in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, a years-long legal battle with the Pentagon, 1,311 military 'assessments' and scores of interviews...
After posting an Instagram story about the war in Gaza yesterday, my account was shadowbanned. Many colleagues and journalists friends have reported the same. It’s an extraordinary threat to the flow of information and credible journalism about an unprecedented war…
Are you an American journalist who's worked in Afghanistan?
Then there's a 100% chance you hired Afghan nationals to help you with your work.
Here's how you might be able to help them right now...
(a thread)
After years of reporting — more than 1,300 hidden Pentagon documents, ground investigation at the sites of 100+ U.S. airstrikes in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, and scores of interviews — we present part 1 of
THE CIVILIAN CASUALTY FILES:
There is more to say, but for now let me tell you how proud I am of our
@columbiajourn
students, whom I've watched report non-stop for days, sleep on floors, support one another & give their all to bearing witness under dire conditions:
@PulitzerPrizes
What a feat of journalism:
@nickturse
unearths an archive of formerly classified U.S. military documents —many from a secret Pentagon task force investigating war crimes— exposing hundreds of civilian deaths kept secret during the U.S. war in Cambodia:
NEW:
Syria's largest dam was on a no-strike list. Military engineers warned that hitting it with an airstrike could cause tens of thousands of civilian deaths.
But a top secret U.S. Special Operations unit struck it anyway.
The story of the Tabqa Dam:
1. They may not be on your TV screens right now, but there’s a generation of Afghan youth in rural areas whose lives over the last 20 years were forever changed by the war playing out directly in front of them—when the American public was not watching as they are now.
The State Dept. announced Afghan nationals who worked for U.S. media orgs are eligible for a specific U.S. Refugee Admissions Program ().
The thing is, they can't apply on their own; they need a referral from the senior-most U.S. employee at the news org.
Exactly six years ago, I met
@basimrazzo
& began systematically investigating how America's 'precision strikes' are killing civilians.
Yesterday, this body of work published in
@nytimes
was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in International Reporting:
🧵...
I've been thinking a great deal about American coverage of the war in Afghanistan over the last 20 years.
It's one reason I'm grateful for this new role at
@columbiajourn
, where I'll be tenure-track faculty & leading a new international reporting center:
So honored to see the Civilian Casualty Files awarded the
@PulitzerPrizes
in International reporting.
This project was born out of the belief that every American deserves to be informed about the wars waged in their names…
My
@columbiajourn
students are out reporting non-stop: working sources they've built over months, navigating the campus unlike any outsider, and adding much-needed context, humanity and depth to coverage.
If you're an editor looking to commission them, get in touch.
Hi, newsrooms: If you are relying on Columbia-affiliated journalists, namely student professionals in various programs at
@columbiajourn
, for exclusive, inside-campus coverage of protests and events, it is common (industry) courtesy and standard to compensate them for their work.
There's a surplus of "How America lost the war in Afghanistan" essays and stories being published right now, but great journalists have been writing the honest history of this war for years. Start here with
@AzmatZahra
's deeply reported "Ghost Schools":
Throughout America's war in Afghanistan, reporters told story after story of the politicians, contractors, commanders & warlords who filled their pockets with billions meant for the Afghan people.
We've heard the numbers, but what were the true costs to Afghans?
🧵...
This is Khanzada. I met him in Nangarhar province in Afghanistan in 2019.
When his family found Khanzada under the rubble, they were hopeful that his grandparents survived too. An hour later, they found the bodies.
#PrecisionStrike
There are already extraordinary challenges to getting information from the ground — the killing of journalists, internet and electricity cuts, and more — but these reports from journalists raise troubling questions about the free press in this war.
So excited about this new investigative reporter role at
@NYTmag
&
@nytimes
.
I've been lucky to have editors like
@jakesilverstein
,
@ByLukeMitchell
& more championing such ambitious investigative journalism. Here's to the work ahead!
Today five U.S. senators called on Biden to push Israel and Egypt to allow international journalists into Gaza to cover the war, and to provide all journalists there with protections to carry out their essential work:
Hours before the Pentagon made their announcement today, the Ahmadi family gathered together in Kabul to read prayers for their 10 loved ones killed in a U.S. drone strike.
They are exhausted and heartbroken—and still waiting to be evacuated.
#PrecisionStrike
While news orgs with bureaus in Afghanistan are probably very on top of this, other outlets might not be aware of this program.
You should reach out to your current/former outlet & ask if they might submit a referral.
Here are directions for a referral:
BIG:
@nytimes
obtained previously classified surveillance video of the botched drone strike in Kabul:
The military *rarely* releases strike footage from civilian casualty incidents. Until now, we had only the military's own descriptions of the video...
This baby—only a few days old at the time—survived an airstrike in
#Afghanistan
on 3/9/19, thanks to her older sister Waheeda, who grabbed and cradled her infant sister, despite her own injuries. Twelve of their relatives were not so lucky.
#PrecisionStrike
“Journalists in Gaza face particularly high risks as they try to cover the conflict in the face of a ground assault by Israeli troops, devastating Israeli airstrikes, disrupted communications, and extensive power outages.” —
@pressfreedom
Some things to note:
—Afghans who meet SIV eligibility aren't eligible for this
—It helps to dig up evidence of their employment (signed contracts, receipts of payment; wire transfers, badges, etc.)
—Only the senior-most U.S. employee of the media org can submit the referral
Many young people in rural battlefields have never experienced life without war, without U.S. bombings, Taliban attacks, night raids by Afghan forces, kidnappings. Most long for an end to war. It might be hard to understand, but some youth feel they have a shot at a future now.
But as the war became safer for U.S. soldiers and receded from the American spotlight, it continued at record pace: The U.S. dropped more bombs in Afghanistan in 2019 than in any previous year of the war.
After NATO sent out a press release about a mass honor killing by the Taliban,
@jeromestarkey
went to the scene and found out it was actually a botched night where U.S. Special Forces dug bullets out of the bodies of pregnant women to cover it up:
Most of the war in Afghanistan has been fought in rural battlefields, places like Sangin and the Kandahar countryside, where Americans rarely hear the voices of women who have experienced decades of conflict.
Read this deeply reported story about women in Helmand's Sangin Valley
The story of the Syrian engineers who risked their lives to prevent an unprecedented disaster is one you need to read through the end.
We reported this from so many sides, including on the ground, and even obtained records about the strike through a FOIA lawsuit.
Bear with me, I want to share some observations about war, accountability reporting, rights to advanced technology, and what’s happening in Gaza right now.
(a thread)
It's a new process, so if anyone has any useful context/advice to offer about it, please do get in touch.
And if you know people who this might be relevant to, send them this link:
It's an enormous honor to be a part of the team winning this year’s
@PolkAwards
for a series of
@nytimes
investigations into the human toll of American airstrikes. It means a lot to see the stories of civilians recognized after years of difficult reporting
In light of
@Columbia
suspending two student groups today—Jewish Voice for Peace & Students for Justice in Palestine—it’s worth revisiting the history of protest on campus, particularly the 1968 Columbia Uprising:
Sometimes I think about the retired two star general who publicly questioned what right I have to investigate civilian deaths in war without a ‘formal education in military matters’ — an argument he tried to back up by pointing out that my masters was in women’s studies.
The U.S. dropped more bombs in Afghanistan in 2019 than in any previous year of the war ().
The U.S. overwhelmingly relied on air power to support the Afghan govt's tenuous hold on the country, and those bombings took extraordinary tolls on civilians.
“Every major news outlet in the world has serious boots on the ground right now in Israel, where the unspeakable carnage and deep psychological toll from this past weekend’s Hamas attack have been utterly horrific. As is warranted and expected, heavyweights from all the American
Columbia’s formidable Knight First Amendment Institute just issued this statement calling for an urgent “course correction” at the university:
@knightcolumbia
@Columbia
So while I have your attention, it’s my job as a journalist to remind you of them, too.
I met Khanzada in 2019. He and his little brother grew up in family of farmers in a small village in Nangarhar’s Khogyani district.
A friend asked me what it looks like when the U.S. military apologizes for killing civilians in an airstrike.
In recent years, almost no one gets a face-to-face meeting, but here's what it looks like when they do...
A conversation between
@basimrazzo
& the U.S. military:
Most of the war in Afghanistan has been fought in the rural countryside, where nearly three quarters of the population lives. In these areas, I’ve met newborns who will never have a memory of their mother or father. Boys who saw their grandparents’ bodies pulled from rubble.
Since a series of
@nytimes
investigations last year into U.S. airstrikes and civilian casualties, there have been a number of developments that are worth watching.
I'll lay out some of them below.
A 5-year New York Times investigation into hidden Pentagon records shows that a pattern of failures in U.S. airstrikes in the Middle East has killed thousands of civilians, many of them children. None of these records show findings of wrongdoing.
Read the 9,600+ word investigation, but see the documents for yourself.
Explore the more than 1,300 Pentagon "civilian casualty assessments," published here:
A girl who hid her infant sister in a cupboard amid a night raid and bombing. Many Americans would struggle to relate to them. They don’t speak English. Most have never had a smartphone. They don’t DM me. And you’d be hard-pressed to find a video of them going viral online.
Biden: "We went to Afghanistan almost 20 years ago, with clear goals. Get those who attacked us on September 11 2001. ...We never gave up the hunt for Osama bin Laden & we got him."
What he didn't say:
The U.S. turned down multiple opportunities to avert this war altogether:
Today, two major journalistic institutions issued statements about the threat to a free press in the Israel-Hamas war:
The New York Times:
Columbia Journalism School:
@columbiajourn
I often talk abt how U.S. cable news sporadically swoops in for Afghanistan coverage, so I want to give a shoutout to a small team of Afghan reporters at the Times who for years worked to track war casualties—even if few were reading
@fahimabed
@FatmaFaizi
NEW: A U.S. Central Command investigation into the botched August 2021 drone strike in Kabul reveals how biases and assumptions led to the deadly blunder, and that military analysts saw possible civilian casualties within minutes of the strike:
#FOIA
A 2019 airstrike in Baghouz, Syria, killed dozens of civilians. An Air Force officer reported it as a possible violation of the law of armed conflict — a war crime.
This is the story of how it was buried:
@David_Philipps
“The journalists come here and take their reports,” Emal Ahmadi said. "No organizations, no one has come for helping us, or for condolence. Just only reporters come and take pictures and take film and go."
I went on
@ReliableSources
with
@brianstelter
today to talk about U.S. media coverage of the war in Afghanistan, which has been its lowest in recent years, despite record pace.
There are many negative consequences, but one I want to emphasize the most is this...
(a thread)
There’s a “very, very real concern” that journalism could become a “black hole” in Afghanistan, says Reporters Without Borders’ Anna Nelson.
The fear is that “journalism will not just dissipate but disappear completely,” she says.
After a series of New York Times investigations into civilian casualties from US airstrikes, the Secretary of Defense directed the military to begin making changes, and set a timeline to complete a civilian casualty policy
w/
@EricSchmittNYT
@charlie_savage
@hondrosfilm
@HamptonsFilm
10. Samar described how she thinks of the day her parents were killed every day, and how it dramatically shaped the course of her life.
One night, Khanzada’s cousin set out to irrigate the fields. Not long after he left the house, they heard the planes. The mobile connection cut out and the bombing started. Khanzada’s cousin ran towards home, guided by a flashlight. The firing shifted towards him.
A bomb hit the house, and Khanzada sank into it. When his family discovered him alive under the rubble, they were hopeful that his grandparents survived too. An hour later, they found the bodies.
Btw, there’s been pushback against the third country waiting period in the P-2 process: .
If you’re with an org that’s trying to change that requirement, can you get in touch? I’d love to learn more about what you’re doing.
“The coverage was making everybody but the Taliban a good guy, when the reality was there were a lot of bad guys. People were being made heroes who had done horrible things. And I thought, ‘How much of history as we know it is like this?’”
@Kathygannon
Part 2 of The Civilian Casualty Files—out now in
@NYTmag
—is so special to me because of the people of Mosul. I hope you walk away from it with an idea of what they have gone through, what they wanted you to know.
The Human Toll of America's Air Wars:
Why is it so easy for Americans to ignore the wars happening in their names today?
In this interview, I talked about my book project—
#PrecisionStrike
—and why a collective, democratic debate about U.S. bombing needs to happen:
1. An indispensable tool for investigative journalists suddenly stopped working last month. Whether you've ever used it or not, its loss affects you, but there's also a bigger problem at play. A thread...
I'm very proud the
@nytimes
published "The Civilian Casualty Files" in Arabic, so that more people in Iraq and Syria — who experienced these wars firsthand —can read it too:
فخورة جدا بأن النيويورك تايمز قد نشرت "ملفات الضحايا المدنيين" باللغة العربية، حتى يتمكن المزيد من الناس في العراق وسوريا — الذين مروا بهذه الحروب الأمريكية — من قرائتها أيضا.
@basimrazzo
@Momen_muhanned
@AliBaroodi
If there's only piece of reporting you read about Afghanistan this week, I think it should be this:
WHEN THE RAIDS CAME - by
@andrewquilty
:
He spent 2.5 years reporting it, only to have it come out the day after Kabul fell & get lost in the cycle. But...
This baby—only a few days old at the time—survived an airstrike in
#Afghanistan
on 3/9/19, thanks to her older sister Waheeda, who grabbed and cradled her infant sister, despite her own injuries. Twelve of their relatives were not so lucky.
#PrecisionStrike
1. It came up unchecked in last night’s debate, so I want to clear up a dangerous misconception that pervades conversations about U.S. war: the faulty assumption that U.S. war = the presence of American troops on the ground, & ending war just means bringing ground troops home...
Because most Americans are only now waking up to the war, they're informing themselves about the debate over withdrawal based mostly on sudden coverage from Kabul over the last few weeks—not the the years of context that's essential to having an informed debate about this war.
.
@CENTCOM
: "It is unclear what may have happened, and we are investigating further. We would be deeply saddened by any potential loss of innocent life."
@hondrosfilm
@HamptonsFilm
4. One scene was among the most arresting of any film I've watched in years. It featured Samar, the girl in the photo, who's now 18.
In short, The Times did what military officials admit they have not: analyzed the assessments in aggregate to discern patterns of failed intelligence, decision-making and execution & visited 100+ casualty sites, interviewed scores of surviving residents and U.S. officials.
While placing blame on the Afghan security forces for not fighting to keep the country, Biden neglects to mention America's overwhelming reliance on airpower — airstrikes and bombings were the way that the U.S. managed its tenuous hold on the country...
This was the human impact of a single $100,000 contract for a school, but I saw it over & over:
Now multiply it by the millions and billions stolen from the country and consider how many Afghans viewed this war and their own government.
Witnesses & Afghan investigators told Starkey American soldiers had dug bullets from the bodies of at least one of the dead pregnant women. All signs indicated that in one night 16 children lost their mothers because of a botched U.S. raid that was subsequently covered up.
In addition to the 9,600 word story, The Times has made more than 1,300 of the documents available online for you to explore for yourself
I can't put into words how important this is. It took years of legal wrangling (ht
@rcfp
) & incredible effort by many
This is a mass burial of civilians after a U.S. strike in Nangarhar province in 2019.
I'm going to stop here for now because I could go on and on sharing stories and photos of the dead, but know this...
Thrilled to kick off the semester at
@columbiajourn
with my Conflict & OSINT Reporting course, but am especially excited to have the wonderful
@heytherehaley
joining as an adjunct professor!
Here’s to the great journalism ahead 🎉
The answers Scahill received were devastating & important:
They are also a testament to the dire need for investigative ground reporting from war zones, and the years of persistence required to hold the powerful to account.
"...as Kissinger dated starlets, won coveted awards & rubbed shoulders with billionaires at black-tie White House dinners, Hamptons galas & other invitation-only soirées, survivors of the U.S. war in Cambodia were left to grapple with loss, trauma & unanswered questions."