MoD has no system to detect civilian harm caused by military, study shows

The Ministry of Defence has no system for examining whether UK military action has killed or injured civilians in war, a study commissioned by the department has revealed.The MoD also “does not maintain a central register of civilian harm incidents or allegations” and, despite mass casualties caused by other countries, has concluded there is no need to do so because its existing mitigation is considered effective.Processes that did exist – and led to the payments of £31.8m in more than 6,500 cases relating to incidents of civilian death, injury and torture relating to Iraq and Afghanistan – have now “fallen into disuse”, the study said.The revelation that the British military does not investigate war crime allegations systematically comes after it emerged that the Foreign Office was closing its international humanitarian law unit, which investigates the conduct of other countries.It was made in a seven-page review summary released last week by the MoD in response to freedom of information requests made by Ceasefire, an international charity representing civilian rights in conflicts.Mae Thompson, an advocacy officer from Ceasefire, said: “The UK’s inability to detect civilian harm calls into question its ability to comply with international humanitarian law, which requires states to take ‘constant care’ to spare the civilian population and take ‘all feasible precautions’ to avoid or minimise civilian harm.”The MoD summary conceded the UK “lacks a coherent policy framework” for mitigating civilian casualties and that relevant responsibilities were not contained in a single unit but instead “are dispersed across multiple domains”.It concluded that “the prevention of civilian harm is deeply embedded” in the military’s targeting community, which led to “a high degree” of institutional confidence that civilian harm caused by current UK operations was “extremely unlikely”.But the study warned that in the absence of a formal system, the British military risked “being reactive rather than proactive” – and that its reputation could be at risk from “a mobilising event” involving multiple civilian casualties.An MoD spokesperson said that while all military operations carried risk, the UK military relied on “careful targeting and weapons use” and that it investigated “all credible allegations of civilian casualties”.They said the UK also conducted battle damage assessments after strikes and that the review confirmed “that our methods are sophisticated and robust” and that “mitigation practices have been diligently applied”.A girls’ primary school in Minab, southern Iran, was bombed on the first day of the US-Israeli attack on Iran, killing 175 people, most of them children, according to Iran. Preliminary investigations indicate that the school was hit by a US Tomahawk cruise missile as a result of a targeting mistake.British forces remain on high alert in the Middle East, where pilots and drone crews have been protecting allies and bases in Iraq, Qatar and Cyprus – while RAF pilots and drone crews have flown over 11,500 missions against Islamic State in Syria and Iraq since 2014.Britain says it killed one civilian by mistake during the Operation Shader mission against IS, which is still ongoing, but other studies conclude the casualty figures are higher based on further disclosures by US Central Command and on the ground research.A study by Action on Armed Violence, a conflict monitor, reported that 29 civilians were likely to have been killed in nine RAF airstrikes in Iraq and Syria between 2016 and 2018. A second analysis by Airwars, a specialist group, concluded that 26 civilians were killed in six airstrikes in the city of Mosul alone.The MoD summary said that while other countries had “driven forward policies” for civilian harm reduction, they did so after conducting airstrikes that led to mass casualties, while the UK had not made a similar deadly mistake.“In contrast to the Dutch and US, the UK has lacked a galvanising [event] whereby the mass civilian casualties have forced the need and political urgency to strengthen its response systems,” the summary said.The US review was commissioned after a New York Times investigation concluded 10 civilians, including seven children, were killed in Kabul, Afghanistan in August 2021, under the then president, Joe Biden, as the US left the country. But under the Trump administration the US effort has been significantly cut back amid a focus on enhancing “lethality”.A Dutch F-16 bombed a weapons factory in Hawija, Iraq, in June 2015 which killed an estimated 85 civilians when it led to an unexpected secondary explosion. The Dutch government apologised for the incident in January.Megan Karlshøj-Pedersen, a policy specialist at Airwars, said the MoD summary confirmed “the UK does not have systems in place to monitor what happens to civilians after it conducts an airstrike” and “the most lethal arm of the state is not capable of understanding the human cost of its actions”.The full analysis, the MoD said, had been merged into a related study and contained material that was considered too sensitive to publish. “Thirteen separate teams within the MoD would be required to review the document and redact classified information,” the department said.