Secret US military unit repeatedly killed civilians in campaign against Daesh

14 December, 2021 07:59

An American military base in Al-Omar Oil Field in eastern Syria came under rocket attack yesterday, Rai Al-Youm reported, no party claimed responsibility for the incident. The military base is located in the countryside of Syria's Deir Ez-Zor region, local sources said. Al-Omar is the largest oil field in Syria. Sources reported the sound of four explosions and smoke around the oil field which US forces and international troops use as a base. According to the sources, American drones immediately flew in the skies above the oil field. Prior to the rocket attack, armed groups launched several projectiles at another military base housing American forces. Meanwhile, Rai Al-Youm said the Syrian news agency SANA reported that there had been several explosions inside an American military base in Al-Tanf area in the eastern countryside of Homs.

A covert unit in the US military which was tasked to fight against Daesh, instead repeatedly killed Syrian civilians throughout its campaign, a report by the New York Times has revealed.

According to the report, which cited both former and current American military and intelligence officials, the unit operated between 2014 until 2019 – the years when Daesh was most active and territorially defeated – and was named Talon Anvil.

It was tasked to strike Daesh’s squads, convoys, command centres and car bombs but, along the way, it caused massive collateral damage and the loss of numerous civilians’ lives. Its methods even reportedly shocked much of the military and those in the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

By having “circumvented rules imposed to protect non-combatants” and operating in a loose manner with regards to standard rules of engagement, one of the sources told the paper that the cell was killing farmers during their harvest, children on the street, families who were fleeing and villagers who sheltered in buildings.

The report stated that the vast majority of airstrikes in Syria were called in, not by the senior branches of the military, but by the small unit of Talon Anvil itself, which was responsible for the firing of 112,000 bombs and missiles.

“They were ruthlessly efficient and good at their jobs,” a former Air Force intelligence officer, who was part of the cell for two years, said. “But they also made a lot of bad strikes.”

The NYT’s report comes, after it was also reported a month ago, that the US had killed at least 80 civilians in a series of airstrikes on the former Daesh stronghold of Baghuz in March 2019, and had, thereafter, attempted to cover it up. There was also much confusion amongst military commanders and defence officials about how the strikes were ordered.

According to the paper, though, it was later found that the strikes were called in by a covert special forces task force which was conducting ground operations in the area, and were launched by Talon Anvil.

Following those reports of the strikes and their civilian casualties, former and current senior Special Operations officers denied the widespread and frequent occurrence of reckless airstrikes, insisting that the utmost had been done to limit any civilian casualties.

With the revelation of Talon Anvil and its operations, however, the officers’ claims are vulnerable to dispute.