Warren calls for congressional inquiry into botched Syrian strike from 2019

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A drone strike that killed an unknown number of civilians and its apparent cover-up deserve an investigation from Capitol Hill, according to Sen. Elizabeth Warren.

The Massachusetts Democrat called for the Senate Armed Services Committee to investigate the March 2019 drone strike in Baghuz, Syria, that killed roughly 80 people.

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The strike was first reported by the New York Times roughly two weeks ago, and the Pentagon announced on Monday that U.S. Army Forces Commander Gen. Michael Garrett would investigate the strike. He’ll have 90 days to conduct the inquiry and submit his findings.

“The civilian casualties from the strike, and military officials’ repeated attempts to conceal the potential war crime appear to demonstrate multiple failures by military and civilian leaders,” Warren wrote in her Nov. 18 letter to Committee Chairman Jack Reed.

Personnel at the U.S. military’s Combined Air Operations Center at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar were in “stunned disbelief” immediately after an American F-15E attack jet, without warning, dropped a 500-pound bomb and another jet dropped two more on the people who survived the first one, the New York Times reported.

Central Command, which oversaw the aerial war campaign in Syria, first said two of the three bombs were 2,000-pound, precision-guided munitions, though it later corrected the record. CENTCOM also acknowledged that 80 people were killed in the strike, adding that 16 of them were fighters and four were civilians, but the status of the other 60 people was unclear.

An Air Force intelligence officer in the operations center called an Air Force lawyer responsible for determining the legality of a strike, who commanded the airmen to preserve all video and other evidence, per the New York Times. There was a possibility the strike constituted a war crime.

A classified American special operations unit, Task Force 9, which was in charge of ground operations in Syria, called in the bombing. The military command in Qatar was unaware of the impending strike at the time.

“The Special Operations task force that undertook the strike repeatedly skirted rules designed to prevent and respond to civilian harm, and that after the strike was flagged as a potential war crime, U.S. military officials at multiple levels circumvented legally mandated reporting and investigation requirements, falsified strike log entries to cover up the incident, bulldozed the blast site, and repeatedly stalled inquiries,” Warren wrote.

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“The Senate Armed Services Committee must seek answers about this strike and its aftermath and hold anyone found in violation of law or established procedures to account,” the lawmaker added.

“Leadership just seemed so set on burying this,” Gene Tate, one of the people who worked on the case for the inspector general, told the New York Times. “It makes you lose faith in the system when people are trying to do what’s right, but no one in positions of leadership wants to hear it.”

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