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On the evening of 16 March 2017, a US drone strike targeted Sayidina Omar Ibn al-Khattab Mosque in al-Jinah, in Aleppo province, Syria. According to witnesses, the strike took place when close to three hundred people were in the building. Most were gathering for the night prayer, while others remained in the smaller ‘winter prayer hall’ where a religious seminar had just finished.
The Syrian Civil Defense, also known as the White Helmets, claimed to have recovered the bodies of thirty-eight civilians, including five children. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported forty-two dead.
US Central Command claimed responsibility for the strike, saying: ‘US forces conducted an airstrike on an al-Qaeda in Syria meeting on March 16th, killing several terrorists’.
The statement incorrectly identified the ruined building as a ‘partially constructed community meeting hall’, incorrectly located it in Idlib province, and claimed that there was no indication of civilian casualties.
Later, the Pentagon released an image of the building, insisting that US forces ‘deliberately did not target the mosque at the left edge of the photo’. In fact, the destroyed building was also a mosque, in frequent use by locals.
Witness testimonies, and photographs of the building taken before the strike, suggest that few of the rooms had doors separating them from one another. The building was open to the public, and a large number of local residents regularly visited.
All of this makes it unlikely that a meeting of senior al-Qaeda operatives would have been taking place at the time of the strike.
Update
08.08.2017
A report by the United Nations’ Commission of Inquiry on Syria concluded that US forces ‘lacked an understanding of the actual target’ and ‘failed to take all feasible precautions to avoid or minimize incidental loss of civilian life’, and was ‘in violation of international humanitarian law’.
Methodology
Methodology
This case hinged on the architectural questions raised by the strike: what was the function of the building? What can its arhcitectural characteristics before the strike, and the state of the ruin afterwards, tell us about the incident? Can those characteristics help us to challenge what was reported about the strike? Should civilian casualties have been expected in such a building?
We interviewed the mosque’s original designer, as well as survivors of the attack and the director of the rescue operation. We cross-referenced what we learned from those interviews against imagery of the building, and commissioned further photographic surveys on the ground. Much of the source imagery was provided by Bellingcat, while Human Rights Watch worked with us to corroborate findings, identify munitions, and find witnesses. Airwars provided further advice and research.