The Sunday Story: NPR challenges U.S. denial of civilian harm in raid on ISIS leader
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I'm a shara co, and this is the sunday story. On october twenty seven, twenty nineteen, amErica woke up to the news that the leader of ISIS was dead. Then president donal trump told americans the Operation have been a big success.

Last night, the united states brought the world's number one terrorist leader to justice, a boo, a car, albeit duty is dead. But npr is, Daniel astros has a .

different story about that rate, a story that chAllenges parts of the official U. S. narrative.

For the last four years, he's been looking into the story of two men who were killed and another who was seriously wounded, that 那个 it's a story about the human cost of american military Operations and whether our government is telling us the truth。 Dare you? You're joining us right now. Thank you so much for being here.

Thank you so much for having me here.

So I I want to start with, like, how did you get involved in the story? I mean, I was covering IT at the White house from the White house side. Would you work you on the ground?

Yeah, I was a sunday morning. I was in lebanon, across the border from syria, where I woke up. I was tired from a late night of reporting that I before I looked at my phone and I saw the huge news.

So my producer, I got straight to work, and we were reporting about, you know, why this was so significant? A buck arl beg daddy had, of course, declared in islamic caliph, took over parts of iraq and syria. He recruit fighters him around the world.

But at that time, we were calling our syrian sources that just try to understand, like, how did this Operation actually unfold on the ground? And that very morning, one of our sources told us that two of his own relatives were killed by us. Troops in that Operation highlight most of a cormon and highlight of the magi cormon.

And he said they were noncombatants, which contradicted everything that we had heard from U. S. Officials until that point. This RAID was .

our forces isolated the compound and protected all the non combattants.

So you are hearing something that is very different than what is being said from the bully pool bit of the White house in the defense department. Why was this contradiction to you worth diving into?

Well, I think because there are enormous consequences when you don't acknowledge civilian casualties. And I was speaking about this with a former pentagon official who said, look, if you try to explain to an average person in the united states why they should care that two people are killed in an Operation that kills such a high profile target. The leader of ISIS, he says, what the answer is, what if the deaths of those people then just lead to someone in their family becoming the new leader advices and this becomes a death spiral for everybody.

you know, administrations, whether they are on the right, the left in the sa, they don't like to be questioned when they're taking this Victory lap and saying, kind of quote on quote, that they got the bad guy. They got the terrorists.

You know, I covered every day of the trumpet administration and the first year, the biden administration, and I remember doing the bite and administration, I was on your force one, and I ask the prosecutor and saki about this Operation in syria. Uh, basically, the administration said that all the casualties that happened from this Operation was because this man who replaced back daddy as the leader of aces, blew himself up. And so I just as well is the U. S. Gona offer any evidence for that edits because there maybe people that are skeptical of, and he was very defensive.

critical of the U. S. Military assessment when they went and took out an ISIS terrible leader of ISIS, that they are not providing accurate information and I is is providing accurate information.

I is. But I mean, the U. S. Has not always been straight forward about what happens with civilians. And I mean, that is a fact .

as you there an yeah I remember this exchange. You had this this made big headlines and um I mean, basically the White house was telling you, if you don't believe us, well then that means you believe is is but we do know there are examples where the U. S. Said its airstrikes killed militants when actually we find out later no IT actually killed innocent civilians.

And that's what this story that you are investigating and have investigated all about.

yeah. So when we got that tip, that civilians were killed in the U. S. Operation, going after bad daddy, we wanted to look into IT.

And we gotten touch with ratibor coro SHE is the mother of one of the victims. We spoke to her on video chat. And this was three days after her son was killed. I remember hearing women and children gathered at her home. They were in morning.

And the mother told us, the boy and the car are gone. The boy and the car are gone. So the car, you can actually go to google right now, asia. Do a google image search of bag daddy and hard.

and go to images. Let me see. Well, okay, so I see. Like this is this van that probably was wide or looked wide, and now IT is like is tore up a minute, is blown up to the the windows are out, parts of the back out, its black and charred. This is the man they were in.

this is the van they were in. And this is the picture that was all over the news. A the day that we learned that the leader vices was dead, and no one really understood why I was there.

And so back in washington, uh, there is a press conference and a journalist asked the the U. S. Commander who LED the Operation about this van. There is of a White van that was so the White van that you talk .

about was one of the vehicles that displayed came to water and IT was destroyed.

And this got my attention, because now we've got two different versions of what happened. You've got the pentagon saying, this van came toward troops, displayed hostility, and I was taken out. The family, though, is saying, our boys in this van were not militants. Were they were civilians just driving through this village after work?

So two different stories. How did you go about figuring out which one was true?

Well, I started by trying to find anyone I could, who knew these men in the van? Were they I S. fighters? Were they militants? Were the civilians? So I went on facebook, and I started searching in arabic c for people in that area in syria. And I found some post, and eric and I and I found some people, and I I started friending them on facebook and sending them voice messages.

I mean, a lot of people may not understand this, but as a reporter am a lot of what we do is just reaching out to people would have hope in the prayer.

Yeah no shame. Yeah ah and I would just say hi and introduced myself and I started hearing back.

Well, at all these little idea hub that was amad of dalan coro and moon ja coro. They're all cousins of the victims. And I also heard from two other men named a coro one and uncle, another cousin.

They're all saying the same thing. They said these men had nothing at all to do with ISIS or any armed group. And then I heard from a brother of one of the deceased, his name is ahmad.

Most of a cormon. They do. He said he saw his brother that very morning. He went out to work in the olive harvest.

He was working with his cousin and a friend, but at the end of the day, they were driving the friend back home when they suddenly got caught up in the U. S. Operation.

I do wonder though, or what some people may say hearing this is like what these are, are the relatives and relatives can be biased. So how helpful then where the interviews uh, in terms of getting you closer to what actually happened.

I mean, you make an important point, right? Essentially the question is, could they have all just gotten together and said, let's tell this american journalists that our relatives were civilians and not. But the thing is, I found nearly all of these men on my own.

No one brought them to me. I contacted seven different relatives in total, some were close families, some were distinct cousins. I spoke to each of them separately, individually, as them open ended questions.

And each of them gave me the same information. They all knew basic personal details about the men, like how many sons and daughters they had. They all identify these dead men as having been agricultural workers.

So all of these, of course, are personal accounts. But then I receive something more. One of the relatives gave me very graphic cell phone video from the scene of the air strikes.

This is in the village of brushes, and the person filming this on their cell phone is showing two bodies. On the. And then you see a severed hand.

After the break, danel tracks down, the only survivor from the strike on the van stay with us will be right back.

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We're back talking to Daniel estrin about his reporting on civilian deaths during the U. S. RAID. On the leader of ISIS. So what we know right now is that two men who cousins were killed, but there is another passenger in the van, ARM, that we're hearing about at the one who lost his hand. So what what happened to him?

So his name is barrett ahmed barkat. In his mid thirties we reached out to him and all this reporting, by the way, I am doing very closely with my producer, lama arian SHE was really essential in all of this um and at the time bar cut was recoup rating from his injuries three and a half weeks after the RAID, we finally got to speak to him. We spoke to him on video chat and he was at home.

He was sitting on his couch um his friend was holding up the phone for him because he couldn't hold IT up himself. And I remember just asking him, can you tell me what happened? And he told his story. I was with .

my best friends. They wanted to drop me off at home. We had pumpkin seeds and bought coffee on the road.

We were having fun. We were driving through the village of berisha, and at that moment the helicopter has arrived. Suddenly we were hit. I didn't know what was going on. I was just trying to escape death.

So he says they rushed out of the van, and one of the men fell in his legs filled with strap on nel. And barrett says he took his other friend in his arms. He told me.

I am dying. I told him, no, just say god's name. And I held him in my lab. There were so many shells falling on us. IT was like rain.

I study, how is this .

my fault? I'm just a civilian. I didn't have any weapons with farmers. I make less than a dollar a day now. I'm hand capped and my two friends are in their graves.

I, I mean, I, I, I cannot imagine this that you know, listening and hearing this conversation like, like, what are you thinking at this point?

IT was really excruciating. Asia, I mean, you were sitting. They're listening to this raw narrative of what had just happened to this man a few weeks before. And I remember the time being nervous because you know that i'm talking him on video chat.

I can only see his face and I know that i'm going to have to ask him to show me his missing ARM and his wounds to improve that he was wounded, you know, and i'm in american, and he was the american forces who just allegedly did this to him. So I asked him gently, would you please show us your wounds? And he showed us his right ARM.

Um IT was engaged. IT was missing his hand, and most of the four ARM IT was amputated after the attack. And then he showed us his left ARM and he said he couldn't move most of his fingers on his .

left hand that his tendencies were slushed. I mean, I that is just it's so shocking, but getting that visual evidence IT IT shows you this person was really seriously injured in in and you got the visual confirmation of that right? Yeah, did you ever ask bearcat if he knew about that daddy and and if he knew that his camping was right there on the road that they were traveling?

Yeah, I asked him and he said, no, I had absolutely no clue and that's exactly what the U. S. Military has said to um locals on the ground had no idea that big daddy was was hiding in that secret compound .

of his then you you'd spoke in to the relatives of the two men who died in the attack was IT the fact that you now have a living witness did did that make all the difference? Because I I imagine that if you that if far three of them had died, IT would be a very different story and IT IT would be, I would imagine, much harder to report.

Yeah, IT made a huge difference. He survived. This was our only on the ground eyewitness account of what they saw and what happened.

And if you would have died, we would have only had the U. S. Military account.

What did you do next?

Well, I felt like we had enough information to approach the pentagon. So I emailed them and I said, we have these claims of civilian casualties in the RAID against the leader vices. And they said this was the first that they had heard of possible civilian casualties in the U.

S. Operation. A U. S. Defense official wrote that initial reports for that the van had fired on U.

S. helicopters. But he said the panel gon would conductor review. They d look at surveilLance footage and they would determine whether an investigation was needed.

I kept emAiling the pentagon every couple weeks, every months or two. Three months later, I finally got some news. The U.

S. Military has opened a formal investigation into claims that IT killed civilians during its RAID last year. On ice is leader apple Baker aleg daddy.

And this was a really big development. The pentagon actually decided, yes, it's gonna conduct a formal review. It's going to see, did civilians really get killed and injured in this strike. So I called barca to tell the news. I thought the issue .

had been forgotten. I did not expect that. I wondered, is that possible the american people would forget this issue? Now I feel there is someone caring about my life. There is humanity in the american people.

What was IT like for you to hear that, especially after that first conversation was so intense.

you know, I said, I think I felt mixed because I was really hard to hear him express that optimism and that excitement. You know, he he's sitting there and he's telling me he can only use his left pinky finger um he says his wife has to wash his face. His wife has to hand feed him.

He can't support his Young kids. He's out of work because of his injuries and and then he asks, what are the chances that the U. S. Could help provide for his children?

Is there any hope for any help for me? If there is no hope, please tell me, i'd like things to be clear.

I remember feeling and I didn't want to give barca t false hope because the truth is, you know, congress does allocate millions of dollars to pay civilians harmed in U. S. Operations.

But the pentagon is made very, very few of those payments in recent years. So you know, all catelan was, be patient. Let's see what the pentagon says.

So, so what happened with the pentagon investigation? What did they find?

Well, four months went by and the pentagon completed its report, and they told me that their conclusion was that the men in that van were enemy combatants. So I wrote the pentagon and I asked, under the freedom of information act, can you give us a copy of your review and any documentation and emails, uh, where you discuss this incident? Um we waited and waited, didn't get any documents. So npr suit, we should depend gon for fAiling to comply in a timely fashion. And three years after the rate we have finally got the pending guns documents.

What do these documents say? So there are a lot .

of things that stood out to us. One of them was a declassified pentagon email that admitted that actually the van had not fired on U. S.

Troops as they claimed initially. But the the central thing that we looked at was the actual report that walks through the events as the military saw them that night. So the report says us troops arrived in syria by helicopter as they arrived near the daddy secret compound.

They are fired upon and the troops fired back. And then, and you follow along in the report, there are eri's surveilLance photos of this. After that firefight, our van comes on to the scene.

Okay, so this feels like the moment of truth. The van pulls up. And then what happens? Yeah.

this is where where things get interesting. So the van turns right at an intersection, and IT starts driving up a village road in the direction of the bad daddy compound. And then what the pentagon report says happened next is that A U.

S. Aircraft fired warning shots in front of the van, about fifty feet in front of the van. But the report says that the van kept going, and so the aircraft targeted the van directly.

Now this is the core of the pentagon claim, the van IT says, did not slow down, did not stop at the warning shots. And so the troops employed necessary force and targeted the van. And then when the men fled, the van targeted the men themselves.

Okay, so I mean, the first thing that pops into my head is because you had said this was at night in their firing warning shots and so i'm thinking, what did they see the shots? How you know, would you have time to see the shots? So that's that's my first thought about this.

Yeah I was taking the same thing and I I said, okay, let's reconstruct this I started making my own map um I took the the panic on report and the pictures and the erie surveilLance photos and what they said had happened and I started creating my own google map and I put pins in the various spots. So I found that intersection where the van arrived and I put IT in in that and then I put up in in the spot where the troops fired the warning shots.

There's a picture of that in the report. And then I put a pin in the spot where the troops actually hit the van after a cat moving. And I look at this map that i've reconstructed, and I and I say to myself, wait a minute, the warning shots and the direct shots are in the same place on the road.

So I said, okay, let's give you a conservative estimate. Let's say the van was driving very slowly, fifteen an hour. Uh, how long would you have taken between those warning shots and the moment when the van is hit? And we determined that the van would have only had two or three seconds to respond.

You you reconstructed this in in what you're saying if i'm getting this straight is that between the time the american aircraft in the sky um you know fire these these warning shots um it's only like two or three seconds, which I don't even know. My brain doesn't work that fast. I think most people like IT takes a few seconds to respond. So what you have uncovered is that the men in the van really didn't get a real warning at all.

exactly. I mean, you know from bar cost perspective, it's dark. He's in a van and he, as he says, suddenly he comes under fire and then two or three seconds later, the van takes a direct hit. But you know, in the report, the pentagon says the troops saw this van coming and thought that I was posing a threat.

IT reminds me of like domestically, like the police, like police and neighborhoods, and how sometimes that there is this idea that, you know, the police, they worried, they're scared and they see someone, and they thin the person is a danger or threat. And so they shoot an anger or kill someone who maybe is an armed um or whatever. But they say they had to make a split second decision and they had to protect themselves and they want to you know and that they're just trying to keep everyones safe, like to meet that's what this almost sounds like yeah I mean.

this is a good comparison because this is exactly how the pentagon has portrayed this. You know, this is the heat of the moment troops see this one coming and they feel it's a threat. And you know, that might sound reasonable, but I spoke with an expert, Larry Lewis.

He's from the center for naval analysis. He used to advise the pentagon on how to prevent civilian casualties. And he says he's literally looked at thousands of these kinds of cases. And he says that civilian deaths are preventable tragedy.

What happens too often is that the military does not effectively communicate what IT really wants. They want the van to stop. But what do they use? They use lethal force. So you get this escalation based on misunderstandings.

There are ways for the military to to Better communicate two civilians and people on the ground. Hey, don't come here. Don't approach.

And a two to three second morning, he says, is not one of them. And so I, all these months later, i'm looking at the pentagon's review. And you see right there that the military is decision that these men were combattants. It's still based on that split second judgment that the troops made in that moment.

And you you also reported that the government really didn't have evidence for the claims, uh, that these men were combattants like they didn't provide anything to show. Yes, this they were comment and and that's right.

I mean, we found all kinds of examples of this. The pentagon questioned the veracity of the sources that we interviewed in our reports, but we found no evidence that the pentagon ever did their own interviews with syrians on the ground. Um they said that a pilot thought that he saw a secondary explosion from the van, may be indicated that there were weapons or explosives in the van and then went on and fire directly on the men as they fled the van but you know the panda god admits, yeah we don't know if there were weapons or explosion and in that .

car and certainly you know if you ot at a van like IT seems likely that I would explode like that if you shoot that .

IT from the air that's right and then in the pentagon report itself, there is a recommendation that they provide intelligence in a top secret document, intelligence to show that these men were in battles. We asked the pentagon about that. There is no record that they ever did put that evidence together. So basically I issued the paragon, did have chances to provide more evidence .

and I haven't so is this a cover up by the pentagon?

I don't know. Um it's a question at some experts you know they said trump called this rate impeccable. So maybe there was pressure inside the pagan not to contradict the president, but we have taken our findings to several democratic members of congress who have taken an interest in civilian casualties caused by the U.

S. military. And some senators and house representatives said that they were troubled by what we found. They said I was inexcusable that the pentagon's report was, in their words, flawed. They called on the pentagon to reopen this case immediately.

And this summer, prompted by our reporting, house representative Sarah Jacobs s introduced a bill that would make the pentagon reinvestigate all past cases of civilian harm over the last decade. And I have an update here. The pentagon says he is willing to consider new information in this case um from M P R or from any others.

IT may decide to reopen this case. This is part of a bigger picture. The pentagon has been under a lot of pressure um to to do Better when IT comes to civilian casualties, and they have announced a new center for civilian protection, an entirely new approach to tackle the issue of civilian casualties and military Operations.

So this is is a big issue for them. They seem to be taking IT more seriously now. So we're going to have to see how how they approach this case.

But ultimately, that's that's the policy picture. But how does all of this impact bearcat and how is he doing?

Yeah, i've been speaking with barrett a lot. He has A A lawyer in in new york is a nonprofit group that is advocating his case that has provided some receipts of his work in that olive press in the in the days before the strike provided that evidence to the pantai on hoping that the pantai on will reconsider um and bark t has mixed feelings. He he's grateful for a his story being told, but he is feeling a lot of emotional pain. And my future is .

destroyed. I have a family, kids. And how is the .

stairfoot del doctor and A I M L G as a marvel you have held? Maybe I were killed, and that airstrike IT would have been Better. He has Young children in and he says he's struggles to provide food for his family.

Um he says, why should my children suffer? There are the ones who have been turned into victims here. So he is still hoping that the U.

S. Will acknowledge that they killed and wounded civilians and hoping that the U. S.

Will provide some compensation. So the pentagon says IT is open to reviewing new information. Let's see if they reopen this case.

That was in P, R, S. Daniel estrin to see all the original documents mention in the story, go to in P R dot or slash of first we've got imp s law file, plus the declassified pentagon emails and documents. You can also see photos of barkat and his children, plus maps and video on the road he took the night of the attack.

It's all available in english and in arabic. C on our website, epr dot or flash up first. The reporting of this episode included many people.

Thank you to lama ala. Orion, tom bom. mara.

Part Virginia lozano, alex left panel block dani pencil, epr s middies editor Larry capital and M P R. Chief international editor daily ank. You're listening to the sunday story.

This episode was produced by oriana gables and edited by genie t. Additional music in this episode by ROM tine, our blue are supervising is leana symptoms and I read the gucci is our executive producer. I'm I shara, go up first is back tomorrow with all the news, you need to start a week. Until then, have a great rest year weekend.

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