PICTURED: An explosion rockets a district in the Syrian city of Raqqa, after American bombs destroyed it. Task Force 9, or Talon Anvil, may have had a hand in it.

Story at a glance…

• The New York Times unveils Talon Anvil, a covert op that killed civilians all over Syria with loosely monitored drone bombing.

• Internal complaints and reports on the shadowy team were almost all ignored in both the military and intelligence offices.

• The group subverted restrictions on strikes, ignored the rules of engagement regarding civilians, and no prosecutions have been announced.

A large investigation by the New York Times into a highly-classified task force operating during the Syrian dirty war has revealed that the shadowy 20-man team known as “Talon Anvil” killed perhaps thousands of civilians by cynically bypassing restrictions on bomb-dropping aimed at minimizing civilian deaths.

Evidence such as chat room records, interviews with former-members and other officials from the military and CIA that operated alongside Talon Anvil, drone footage, and more, went into the report which details that alongside fighting ISIS, Talon Anvil’s bombs were responsible for multiple war crimes which seem to have been absorbed and shelved by the military and intelligence bureaucracies, gone uninvestigated and more importantly, unpunished.

These war crimes include blowing up boats packed with refugees fleeing across the Euphrates River from the American bombing of the ISIS stronghold city of Raqqa, killing at least 30. In March 2017, a 500-pound bomb was dropped at Talon Anvil’s urging on a poorly-identified building in the Syrian town of Karama. 23 were killed or seriously wounded and another 30 were injured.

War crimes such as these have a long and storied history of being completely ignored. Philipp Kastner, a law professor at the University of Washington, details that the United States, across all her international invasions, occupations, and police actions, has never prosecuted a soldier under international criminal law as was used in the Nurnberg Trials.

Of the company that committed the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, Kastner writes, “[the trials] only involved domestic, and not international, crimes. The trials were also held separately to avoid creating parallels with the war crimes trials in Nuremberg…” In the end a single Lieutenant: William Calley, was convicted, and while sentenced to hard labor for the rest of his life, ended up free after 3 years of house arrest.

Similarly since the dawn of the so-called Terror Wars, and since the 1996 War Crimes Act, no soldier has ever been charged under it: not through all the years of torture in Abu Ghraib, Bagram, and the Salt Pit. Despite this there is virtually no domestic jurisprudence for punishing soldiers or other operators under war crimes or other parallels to international law either. The same is nearly true for close ally the UK, who have convicted just one single soldier in all their post 9/11 overseas operations.

As if epitomizing this, last year the U.S. actually tried to place economic sanctions on members of the International Criminal Court, the only international body with the authority to prosecute war crimes, genocide, or crimes against humanity, for its investigations into American war crimes in Afghanistan.

Talon Anvil, war crimes, and negligence

Talon Anvil officially didn’t exist, reports the Times, but their efforts certainly did. As a covert “strike cell” their jobs were to operate in bland offices in total secrecy to gather, put together, and act on intelligence of various kinds to launch hellfire missiles and laser-guided bombs, mostly from reaper and predator drones, but also from manned aircraft.

Their strike-mongering led to 112,000 bombs and missiles being expended during their 2014-2019 lifespan. But similarly to what The Intercept revealed in their report on Obama’s drone assassination program, the intelligence was rarely of high quality and almost never vetted, while the boundaries constraining the use of bombs in civilian areas were repeatedly subverted, the profile of those killed and those to be killed was essentially enemy until proven otherwise, and the operators came to view sheer numbers as the only fair reflection of success.

Everyone from whom the Times requested comment either denied any wrongdoing by the outfit, or to comment altogether. However internally this silence seems to have been absent.

The New York Times wrote:

As bad strikes mounted, the four military officials said, Talon Anvil’s partners sounded the alarm. Pilots over Syria at times refused to drop bombs because Talon Anvil wanted to hit questionable targets in densely populated areas. Senior C.I.A. officers complained to Special Operations leaders about the disturbing pattern of strikes. Air Force teams doing intelligence work argued with Talon Anvil over a secure phone known as the red line. And even within Talon Anvil, some members at times refused to participate in strikes targeting people who did not seem to be in the fight.

Talon Anvil which was identified as Task Force 9 by the Times, was behind an attack that killed 80 civilians during the March 18th battle near the Syrian town of Baghuz in 2019. Three 500-pound bombs were dropped, the first one on a single group of people, and two more on groups fleeing the blast. Current Defense Secretary, former-General Lloyd Austin, appointed the inspector general of the Army to investigate the bombing.

“The Times investigation showed that the death toll — 80 people — was almost immediately apparent to military officials. A legal officer flagged the bombing as a possible war crime that required an investigation,” the Times wrote in November. However the report containing the IG’s findings was held up, and stripped of any mention of the strike..

Rules of engagement

Under the Obama Administration’s guidelines for bombings, attacks had to be authorized by a general. Even after Trump reduced this as far down the command structure as a sergeant, there was still an intelligence-gathering process that had to be undertaken before a bombing could be authorized.

However a loophole existed which the operators of Talon Anvil, who often grew jaded by the amount of footage of explosions and flying body parts they were charged with watching everyday, managed to exploit. If a strike could be justified as an act of self-defense, far fewer criteria had to be met. And so most of the strikes from early-2017 on were justified as defensive, even if they took place as much as 100 miles from where American forces might be operating.

The CIA, who often worked alongside Talon Anvil, were allegedly “shocked” when witnessing how many strikes were authorized with no regard for civilians, though former agency members told the Times that there was plenty of evidence that all of their reports of this unjust killing were never taken seriously by anyone at Joint Special Operations Command, or the CIA.

This internal scrutiny was noted, however, and was adjusted for. A former Air Force intelligence officer began noticing that in the moments before a bomb landed on someone’s head, car hood, or roof, the drone camera would abruptly look away, which the official, having seen it multiple times, realized was the task force’s own deliberate attempts to hide their culpability should the drone footage be released.

The Times has tried to go after this footage, and more information on Talon Anvil, but all of it is classified, and their attempts have failed.

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