The US has conducted 550 drone strikes in Libya since 2011
By Nick Turse, Henrik Moltke & Alice Speri
The United States has conducted approximately 550 drone strikes in Libya since 2011, more than in Somalia, Yemen, or Pakistan, according to interviews and an analysis of open-source data by The Intercept.
PART TWO
Between August and December 2016, according to a statement from AFRICOM, the U.S. carried out “495 precision airstrikes against Vehicle Borne Improvised Explosive Devices, heavy guns, tanks, command and control centers, and fighting positions” in Sirte. Then, in March, Waldhauser, the AFRICOM chief, told the House Armed Services Committee that the U.S. actually “conducted over 500 strikes” during the operation.
AFRICOM spokesperson Samantha Reho clarified Walhauser’s numbers, telling The Intercept that while there were “some subsequent strikes in some desert camps in Libya on January 18, 2017 … 495 is the correct number for the [Odyssey Lightning] campaign.”
Of those 495 strikes, more than 60 percent — approximately 300 — were carried out by MQ-9 Reapers, with the balance conducted by manned Marine Corps aircraft flown from Navy ships off Libya’s coast, accordingto Col. Case Cunningham, the commander of the 432nd Expeditionary Wing at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada, the headquarters of the Air Force’s RPA operations.
“That’s a really significant number,” said Chris Woods of Airwars. “That’s 300 drone strikes on Sirte in just five months. That is a fierce tempo compared to other drone conflicts the United States has been involved in.” The use of drones in Sirte was more intense than across Iraq and Syria during a comparable period of time, Woods added: “This was a significant number of resources focused on a small area.”
Sirte became ground zero for testing new concepts of urban combat involving multiple drones working in sync with indigenous forces and U.S. special operators. “Some of the tactics were created and some of the persistent attack capabilities that hadn’t been used widely before were developed because of this operation,” one of the drone pilots involved in Odyssey Lightning said in an Air Force news release. According to Cunningham, about 70 percent of the Reaper strikes were close air support missions to back up local GNA forces engaged in street-to-street fighting.
The drones often worked in tandem with one another, as well as with Marine Corps helicopters and jets, with the drones helping to guide the conventional aircraft as they attacked, Cunningham said.
Cunningham’s statistics were also published by the Air Force in 2017. Again, neither the Pentagon, AFRICOM, nor USAFE-AFAFRICA could corroborate Cunningham’s figures.
Cunningham explained that the ability of MQ-9s to loiter for many hours overhead allowed the U.S. to “find, fix, track, target, and engage in a very low — single-digit — number of minutes with extremely high precision,” and that it was “not unheard of to see times of less than one minute from a target-find to weapons-effects.”
AFRICOM estimated that 800 to 900 ISIS fighters were killed during Operation Odyssey Lightning, according to Long War Journal, but Cunningham said that not one allegation of a civilian casualty due to U.S. strikes surfaced. New America and Airwars, however, found reports of civilian deaths due to U.S. attacks on Sirte.
Waldhauser told Congress that Odyssey Lightning “can serve as a model for future U.S. operations in the region.” But he admitted to the Senate Armed Services Committee earlier this year that expelling ISIS from its stronghold in Sirte and general disorganization among terrorist groups have “not translated into a stable Libya.”
Despite hundreds of airstrikes in support of the GNA and $635 million in U.S. assistance since 2011, Libya is one of the most fragile states on earth, deemed so dangerous that its U.S. Embassy is located in neighboring Tunisia.
“Libya remains politically and militarily divided, with loyalties shifting based on tribal interests and personalities involved in the struggle for power,” said Waldhauser. “Given this turmoil, the risk of a full-scale civil war remains real.”
IN JULY 2016, just before Odyssey Lightning commenced, the Obama administration issued a report acknowledging 473 drone strikes by the “U.S. Government against terrorist targets outside areas of active hostilities” between January 2009 and December 2015.
The report noted that “areas of active hostilities” in that seven-year period included Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, but didn’t state which other countries might have met that definition and when.
By December 2016, those three war zones had been joined by “certain portions of Libya.” But within a month, Libya had been removed from the list.
At the same time, a number of organizations that track drone strikes, as well as news outlets, offered up estimates of how many such attacks the outgoing president had overseen, all of them focused on countries that were far from any traditional American battlefields. USA Today reported “at least 526” drone strikes during the Obama years.
The Council on Foreign Relations cited “542 drone strikes that … killed an estimated 3,797 people, including 324 civilians.” The Bureau of Investigative Journalism came up with “563 strikes, largely by drones, [that] targeted Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen … compared to 57 strikes under [President George W.] Bush.”
The 541 drone strikes in Libya during the Obama years, therefore, equal or possibly exceed the number of attacks carried out in Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen at the same time.
“These drone strike numbers are shockingly high and not widely known,” Hina Shamsi, the director of the American Civil Liberties Union National Security Project, told The Intercept.
“They underscore that the Obama administration’s record on transparency about its use of lethal force abroad was deeply inadequate.”
When it comes to analyzing drone strikes, Libya apparently fell through the cracks. RPA attacks go largely uncounted in designated “areas of active hostilities,” which included Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria — and, at times, Libya — under Obama. With already limited media and NGO resources focused on countries like Somalia, Yemen, and Pakistan, few noticed as Libya became one of the most targeted nations on earth.
The situation in regard to “areas of active hostilities” has become even more muddled today.
Daphne Eviatar of Amnesty International USA notes that while it has been reported that the Trump administration has loosened restrictions on drone strikes outside armed conflict zones — Libya among them — the government has refused to publicly acknowledge this shift in policy.
“When it complied with the congressional mandate to report on changes to its legal framework earlier this year, the bulk of the information, including any changes in the rules on who can be targeted and protection of civilians, was classified,” said Eviatar.
“That was a huge step backward from the Obama administration, which, after years of its own secrecy, in 2016 finally did at least explain the legal and policy framework it was operating under.”
“Strikes and counterterrorism operations are conducted under authorities provided by Congress in the Authorization for the Use of Military Force and in accordance with international law,” Maj. Sheryll Klinkel, a Pentagon spokesperson, told The Intercept. “There is no additional or specific information on authorities that are publicly available.”
“IDO NOT see a role in Libya,” saidPresident Donald Trump last April. “I think the United States has, right now, enough roles.”
And for the first eight months of the Trump administration, there were no acknowledged U.S. drone strikes. But last fall, that changed. Three days of attacks in September, two in October, and two in November were followed by strikes this year in January and March. Two more strikes this month bring the total to 18 airstrikes, according to AFRICOM press releases and confirmed media reports.
The command has, however, officially redefined these 18 attacks to 11 strikes in order “to better align with AFRICOM’s internal operational reporting,” spokesperson Samantha Reho told The Intercept.
Referencing a September 24, 2017, press release that noted that U.S. forces had conducted “six precision airstrikes in Libya” two days earlier, Reho explained that the command now “counts that incident as one strike with six separate engagements, whereas we initially wrote it as six strikes.”
An AFRICOM official, speaking on background, claimed that the higher counts were a “blunder” and the command changed policies after realizing that the numbers reported to Congress did not match those being released to the public.
AFRICOM’s change in how it defines and counts airstrikes comes at a time when the Trump administration has sought to keep such information under wraps.
In a break from past policy, AFRICOM no longer proactively announces attacks in Libya, increasingly offering comment about airstrikes only when questioned.
According to New America and Airwars, less than 50 percent of reported airstrikes by all parties to the conflict are officially declared, and the United States is the most transparent. But the bar is set very low. The U.S. military refuses, for example, to provide even basic information about acknowledged attacks.
“We usually don’t disclose which bases and aircraft are involved and where they originate from for strikes,” Klinkel, the Pentagon spokesperson, told The Intercept.
“President Obama left a legacy of expansive claims of war authority without congressional authorization in multiple parts of the world, with lethal strike and civilian casualty counts largely shrouded in secrecy until the end of his administration,” said Shamsi of the ACLU.
“That legacy is now in the hands of President Trump, who is using it to the detriment of our system of checks and balances, the transparency needed for democratic accountability, and meaningful recognition of harm to civilians.”
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Nick Turse is a contributing writer for The Intercept, reporting on national security and foreign policy.
Henrik Moltke is an investigative journalist and documentary filmmaker.
Alice Speri reports on justice, immigration, and civil rights. She is originally from Italy and lives in the Bronx.
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