‘Awesome! A nice step forward”, Liesbeth Zegveld calls through her telephone from a windy Amsterdam. The lawyer who assists many Iraqi civilian victims in their legal battle against the State of the Netherlands thinks it is “wonderful” that Defense put a rich database on the internet on Thursday. It contains a lot of searchable data about all more than six hundred Dutch bombings on Islamic State targets. The database contains information about the place, date, time and circumstances of attacks at the time. “Now to find someone,” says Zegveld, “who will go to all those places in Iraq and Syria to check whether civilians have been killed in the Dutch bombings.”
On Thursday it was announced that Defense will investigate the news from NRC, NOS and Nieuwsuur that seven civilians from two families in the Iraqi city of Mosul died as a result of a Dutch air raid in March 2016. This raised the question of whether more incidents of this type have occurred. To give the media and others the opportunity to investigate this further, the Ministry of Defense also opened on Thursday a database in which everyone can search by location, date and time of bombing. With this, the Ministry of Defense strives for “maximum possible transparency”, according to Minister Kajsa Ollongren (D66).
Media strategy
“Oh, what can I say about that database,” sighs military historian Christ Klep, also by telephone. He is less impressed than Zegveld with the new openness of Defense. Why does the ministry put others to work, Klep wonders, and does it not itself disclose all available information about attacks where something went wrong?
“I recognize a lot of patterns from the past,” says Klep, who previously worked for the Ministry of Defence. “On difficult subjects – such as the Iraqi civilian casualties – the ministry always releases just enough material to satisfy news-hungry media. But she also doesn’t give away so much that the military will make it difficult. The Defense officials then hope that the umpteenth media storm will blow over and the public will lose interest. In the case of the Srebrenica drama in 1995, information trickled out little by little. It took a long time before it became fully clear what had happened.”
Is the disclosure of the database indeed a sophisticated media strategy by the Ministry of Defence, mainly intended to survive new revelations about civilian casualties? Or did the ministry take a meaningful step towards more openness and less secrecy on Thursday? Experts clearly disagree. Zegveld sees the published database as a good starting point for a new search for more incidents involving civilian deaths. “I hope that the Ministry of Defense translates the list into Arabic,” she says. “Then people in Iraq and Syria can also search it. That can result in a nice bottom-up process.”
Military historian Klep is mainly sceptical. He is afraid that the general public will drop out at the umpteenth civilian death story. If it succeeds at all, says the former journalist, to make that story. Many of the targets hit are in media-inaccessible areas in Syria. And in many other cases, the inhabitants of that time have moved away, which makes it very difficult to inquire about the exact circumstances.
In addition, according to Klep, important information is missing on the website, such as the type of bombs and the strength of the explosives used. “As a result, we do not know how deadly the explosions were at the time, and how risky for the environment of the target that was attacked.”
Historic
According to a Defense spokesman, this – mostly secret – information was deliberately not released. According to him, the database is intended to be able to search for bombings in specific places where users suspect that something went wrong. To help those visitors, the database contains coordinates of the targets in Iraq and Syria that Dutch F-16s attacked at the time.
There may have been “dozens of incidents”, war historian Christ Klep thinks
On balance, there has been more praise than criticism of Ollongren’s announcement in recent days, also abroad. A leading American researcher in the field of civilian casualties, Larry Lewis, speaks of a “historic step”. Lewis says of the opened database: “It is a strong example of transparency. I hope other members of the coalition feel encouraged to share the same level of openness.”
Until now, says Lewis, other countries have not dared to take such a step. In fact, last week it became clear how little the British armed forces cooperate with revelations about civilian casualties. The newspaper The Guardianhad spent months investigating, together with NGO Airwars, the consequences of six British bombings in Mosul in 2016 and 2017. Dozens of civilians were said to have been killed in British air raids. However, the Ministry of Defense did not want to confirm any of the findings.
According to experts such as Lewis, the British example makes clear how important the work of Airwars has been in showing that the war against IS was less ‘clean’ than the West always claimed. Since its foundation in 2014, it has developed into a global opponent of Western armed forces. The organization with its headquarters in London had its own rich database of media in the US (The New York Times), Britain (The Guardian) and the Netherlands (NRC, NOSand News hour) bee. The organization with a small staff receives money from private organizations such as a trust fund of British Quakers.
The Airwars website lists thousands of documented cases of potential civilian casualty incidents in Iraq and Syria. They are fed with reports from local and social media, and an assessment by the staff of the likelihood that civilians have been killed or injured.
The importance of the soundness and precision of the information provided by Airwars has also become apparent in the Netherlands in recent months. The Ministry of Defense was only willing to confirm Airwars material if the target designation was precise enough. Simply naming a town or village, as often happened in the Airwars material, was not enough. Partly because of this, dozens of ‘candidates’ dropped out of a list of 148 incidents that NRC, NOS and Nieuwsuur handed over to Defense last year. In the end – for the time being – one case remained: the one in Mosul with seven deaths.
One incident on a list of no less than 48 bombings: isn’t that exactly what the international anti-IS coalition had always argued about the ‘clean war’ with hardly any civilian casualties? The text of Minister Ollongren’s letter of Thursday breathed that suggestion: “NOS and NRC submitted 148 suspicions of civilian casualties as a result of coalition deployment to the Ministry of Defence, asking whether there was any question of Dutch involvement. Based on the (…) disclosed information, in one case this led to my decision to launch an internal investigation into a new suspicion of civilian casualties.”
What was important was right not Ollongren’s letter stated: that many of those “148 suspicions” could not be investigated because the information from Airwars was not precise enough, according to the Ministry of Defense.
Military historian Christ Klep thinks the letter is a good example of handy ‘framing’ by the ministry. He considers it quite possible that not one, but “dozens of incidents” are hidden behind the more than six hundred bombings. “As a rule of thumb, after all, something goes wrong in four to five percent of all bombings, resulting in civilian casualties.”
Cat and mouse game
Some experts are surprised at the interaction between Defense and the media. One of them is Lauren Gould, lecturer in Conflict Studies at the University of Utrecht. Gould is a member of a group of interlocutors (Airwars, Pax, Open State Foundation, Amnesty) of the Ministry of Defense who are committed to more openness about civilian casualties. Gould says there must be an end to the “cat and mouse game between Defense and media”. She thinks publishing the database is a good first step. “It contains valuable information.” But she also believes that the Ministry of Defense should be generous with requests for more information. There seem to be enough of them: since Thursday, leading data specialists from various corners of the world have descended on the English-language database. Gould: “Now it comes down to whether the Ministry of Defense fulfills its promises about more transparency.”
A benevolent gesture from Defense has already been made. The spokesperson promises to go internally with Zegveld’s suggestion to have the database translated into Arabic.
Read the NRC research story here: Seven innocent civilians were killed in a Dutch bombing raid on IS in Mosul. How could it go so wrong?
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of April 1, 2023