The U.S. military has released drone video that it says shows Islamic State fighters in Mosul deliberately putting civilians in harm’s way, like reported by washingtonexaminer.com
Last month, a spokesman for the U.S. military in Iraq accused the Islamic State of rounding up groups of Iraqis, forcing them at gunpoint into buildings, and then using the buildings as firing positions, with the intent of creating mass casualties.
The grainy black and white video is about just over two minutes long, and was edited from hours of overhead surveillance by a U.S. drone flying over West Mosul in the March 29.
The next day, Army Col. Joseph Scrocca, a U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad, told Pentagon reporters in a phone briefing that the Islamic State was engaging in a new, more “sinister” tactic of using civilians, not just a human shields, but as strategically placed hostages to make the coalition airstrikes appear reckless.
“ISIS is smuggling civilians into buildings, so we won’t see them, and trying to bait the coalition to attack to take advantage of the public outcry and deter action in the future,” Scrocca said at the time.
However, a spokesman for the U.S. command, which declassified the video, was careful to say the overhead imagery could not show what was in the minds of the Islamic State fighters.
“We don’t know what they were intending to do with the civilians who were at the compound,” said Col. John Thomas, who said nevertheless the video shows how ISIS put’s innocent civilians in the line of fire.
“The video shows actions, and those actions include establishing a firing position, knowingly while civilians were present, and then initiating fire against CTS [Iraq’s elite Counter Terrorism Service] forces, who were advancing on that position,” Thomas told reporters by phone from Central Command headquarters in Tampa, Fla.
“We observed those civilians and therefore did not respond with an airstrike against the position, as we might have had we not know that civilians were there,” Thomas said.
The video did not appear to substantiate the most disturbing allegation, that the civilians were marched into a building at gunpoint and one was executed on the spot.
“Armed ISIS fighters forced civilians into a building, killing one who resisted, and then used that building as a fighting position against the CTS, [Iraq’s elite Counter Terrorism Service],” Scrocca said last month.
But the portion of the video released Friday showed no such incident, and the U.S. Central Command offered no explanation for the discrepancy.
In a response to a question about the lack of evidence for the alleged execution, Col. Thomas said in an email, “The video does not, in and of itself, show the ISIS fighters’ intent.”
