Pentagon to Investigate 2019 Syria Airstrike That Killed Women and Children

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has ordered an investigation into a 2019 U.S. strike in Syria that killed dozens of people, including women and children, but that wasn’t publicly acknowledged by the military until this year, the Defense Department said Monday.

Gen. Michael X. Garrett, who is in charge of Army Forces Command, will lead the inquiry and will look at the number of civilians killed, whether the U.S. complied with the laws of war in launching the attack, how the military records such events, and whether anyone should be held accountable for the deaths, Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said.

The defense chief sought Gen. Garrett to lead the investigation because he wasn’t part of the decision to launch the strike and therefore could lead a dispassionate review, Mr. Kirby said.

Mr. Kirby didn’t say why the defense chief hadn’t ordered an investigation until now.

But the decision follows a New York Times investigation that reported this month that the U.S. military sought to hide the outcome of the strike and never investigated it, even after the decision to launch it immediately raised questions internally. The strike, carried out in March 2019 in the Syrian city of Baghuz, killed approximately 80 people.

A military spokesman later described the decision to not conduct the investigation an “administrative oversight.”

In March 2019, U.S.-backed forces engaged in heavy fighting with Islamic State militants holed up in Baghouz. The Times reported that on March 18, 2019 a special-operations unit, Task Force 9, composed largely of members of Army Delta Force, ordered an Air Force F-15E to drop three bombs on a crowd of people, killing some during the first strike and others in subsequent strikes as they fled.

The U.S. military subsequently acknowledged the strike and described it as a defensive mission that killed 16 suspected Islamic State fighters and four civilians. U.S. Central Command, which is responsible for military operations in the Middle East and Afghanistan, said it wasn’t initially clear if the remaining 60 casualties, which included women and children, were also members of ISIS.

This is at least the second such investigation Mr. Austin has ordered this year. After an Aug. 29 strike in Kabul killed 10 civilians, including seven children, a three-star Air Force general led a 45-day investigation that asked many of the same questions.

That classified report concluded that the military made a mistake but that the military was “not unreasonable” and no international laws were violated.

It is unclear whether the new report will be released upon completion.