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Pro-Assad group kills Rev. Paolo Dall’Oglio in North east Syria, Atassi says LOCALS 2013-08-12:
Senior Official in the Free Syrian Army have confirmed the execution of Rev. Paolo Dall’Oglio, Jesuit Priest in Ar Raqqa, North east Syria.
Lma al-Attasi, Secretary General of the Syrian national Front affirmed to Zaman Alwasl that the prominent Italian Jesuit, Dall’Oglio, who has been kidnapped by an Islamist group on July 29, was killed in Ar Raqqa, North east Syria.
Attasi has accused the Assad Intelligence by penetrating the ranks of the Islamic groups and contributing in the murder. “The Assad regime should carry the full responsibility.” Some western governments of hiding the news of Dall’Oglio’s killing, she added.
Dall’Oglio was an outspoken supporter of the uprising against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
The Rev. Paolo Dall’Oglio, 58, lived for three decades in Syria, where he established an ecumenical community at Mar Musa on the site of an early Christian monastery, engaging in interfaith dialogue with Muslims and forging close ties with the local population.
He was expelled in 2012 by the Assad government for his support of the rebels.
The Reuters news agency reported that Dall’Oglio was abducted in the eastern city of Raqqa by members of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, an Islamist group with ties to al-Qaida.
Zaman Alwasl-Exclusive
A documentary about conspiracy theories takes a horrific turn after the filmmakers uncover an ancient and dangerous secret society.
It was, surely, one of the most eloquently written pleas for a pay rise ever composed.
On July 1, the Columbia Journalism Review carried an 1,800-word first-person piece by Francesca Borri, an Italian freelance journalist working in Syria, bemoaning her shabby treatment at the hands of editors who wanted only “the blood, the bang-bang” for their bucks – and a measly 70 bucks a pop at that.
When, in between contracting typhoid and getting shot in the knee, she tried to write about something more complex, “I am answered with: ‘What’s this? Six thousand words and nobody died?'”
The article went viral and provoked a storm of the usual polarised responses, from “No words to explain how deep your words reached my soul, Francesca … Fantastic, lyrical, brutal, honest article” to “No one is forcing you to remain in the hell that is Syria … This is one of the most self-absorbed, self-indulgent pity parties I’ve ever read”.
Since her article appeared, Borri has gone to ground, popping up once to write for The Guardian, to complain that “I want to talk about Syria, not just my role as a freelance journalist”. As one of her correspondents wrote, “More than 100,000 dead and the piece on Syria that went viral worldwide is a piece about journalists.”
But buried within her original article was a searing indictment of all the foreign journalists who have flocked to Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Syria to feast on the high drama and vivid imagery of the Arab Spring.
“We pretend to be here so that nobody will be able to say, ‘But I didn’t know what was happening in Syria’,” she wrote. “The truth is, we are failures … nobody understands anything about Syria – only blood, blood, blood. And that’s why the Syrians cannot stand us now.”
When she first arrived in Syria, Borri said, “Syrians stopped me and said, ‘Thank you for showing the world the regime’s crimes’. Today, a man stopped me; he told me, ‘Shame on you’.”
Have western journalists really outstayed their welcome on the fault lines of the Arab Spring?
It all began so euphorically, and not exactly objectively, as was made clear by an independent analysis last year of the impartiality and accuracy of the BBC’s coverage of 44 key days between December 2010 and January 2012.
“The voices of regime opponents, expressing their exhilaration and euphoria, predominated in the space of a few weeks in early 2011,” concluded the report, carried out by Loughborough University’s Communication Research Centre in the United Kingdom.
Some of the large number of western reporters in Tahrir Square, it concluded, had been swept up in the moment and some reporting had taken on “a euphoric character as it captured predominantly the reactions of regime critics rather than supporters … a narrative of revolutionary liberal protesters, ‘the people’, pitted against brutal dictators, was established.”
As the Arab Spring dragged on, of course, the multiple complexities inevitably began to filter through into western media coverage.
This, says Gene Policinski, the chief operating officer of the Newseum, the museum of journalism in Washington DC, is “a very common development in long-running news events”. When journalists arrive, “the stories that open tend to be … mixed in with a hope that ‘Now that you’re here, our message will get out’.
“What happens over time is everything from ‘Why are you talking to the other people, we’re the good guys?’, to exposing the natural rifts, disappointments and sometimes failures that occur within the side that you are covering.”
It is, says Policinski, a veteran print and broadcast journalist and one of the founding editors of USA Today, always a good idea “to make clear from the start if you are a journalist parachuting into an ongoing news story that you’re not there to tell one side.
“Western journalists come out of a culture where telling both sides is at least a goal [but] very often in most of the world you’re dealing with people who are familiar with a government-controlled or funded media, where they’re accustomed to only one side of the story being told. When you reach out to that other side it’s often very confusing – they’re not expecting that. ‘You’re here with me now, you must be politically aligned with me’.”
Ed Giles, an Australian photographer who has worked in the Middle East since 2006 and has been in Cairo for the past two years, says that such disappointed expectations lie behind the antagonism western journalists are currently experiencing in Cairo.
“Recently there was a brief campaign against CNN from the anti-Morsi, pro-military side of the spectrum, because CNN had been using the word ‘coup’ to describe what was happening,” he says, between assignments for a magazine. “As a side effect of that a lot of TV reporters in particular, but also other western journalists like myself, were hassled.”
But in his experience, there never really was a honeymoon period for western journalists covering the Arab Spring.
“I don’t know if attitudes have changed that much,” he says. “It’s always been a bit extreme – there are peaks and troughs. Whenever things are really tense, like they are right now here, and the rhetoric from the various powers-that-be cranks up against ‘foreign hands’, foreign journalists come under scrutiny.”
As a result, from time to time foreign journalists experience antagonism: “I’ve been yelled at and there have been occasions where I have had to leave a scene where the crowd are angry and they’ve taken the position that journalists and foreigners aren’t welcome, or that you’re a spy.” But “actually I’ve been quite fortunate. I know people who’ve had very much worse experiences than me, who’ve been surrounded by crowds and forced into buildings and had to hide”.
Matt Bradley, an American former National staffer who has been in Cairo for more than four years and now files from Egypt for The Wall Street Journal, knows all about that – and the curious way in which public opinion can shift suddenly and dangerously.
In the days before president Hosni Mubarak was toppled in February 2011, “the xenophobia was intense and I was terrified”, he recalls. “I was chased down the street by guys with machetes and clubs because the Mubarak regime was broadcasting on television that America was behind the revolution, even though America had supported Mubarak for 30 years, and people believed this.”
Ester Meerman, a Dutch photojournalist who files words and pictures from Cairo for newspapers in the Netherlands, is well aware of the anti-American sentiment – and how to avoid it.
“To be honest, I do always make a huge point of people knowing I am not from the US,” she says, and people’s attitude “changes 100 per cent when I tell them I am from the Netherlands”.
Recently, says Bradley – a tall, blond-haired American who stands out in a crowd – The Wall Street Journal has despatched an Egyptian-American staff reporter from New York to mingle with the anti-Morsi crowds in Tahrir Square. “I’m not as excited by 200 people threatening to beat me up as I used to be,” says Bradley. But even his Egyptian-American colleague, with his far superior Arabic, is still hassled when people learn he works for an American paper: “They call him a sell-out, accuse him of being an agent.”
Conversely – and perversely – Bradley currently has no trouble when he visits the pro-Morsi protest camp in Rabaa Al-Adawiya Square, where the Islamists have become much more media-savvy than they used to be.
“I’m very popular down there,” he says, laughing. “When they see a foreigner, they are very welcoming and open. You’ll have 50 people coming up and wanting to talk and show you around, ‘We want to tell our story’. Whereas if you go to Tahrir, where the anti-Morsi march is – and these are secularists, people who I have an ideological affinity to – they want to see your ID, they suspect you’re a spy, and I’ve had people threaten me.”
It is, he says, “very strange to be welcomed by people whose thinking I totally disagree with, but who in fact I find to be quite like-minded”. Bradley is used to the swinging pendulum of public opinion in Egypt, but “in the four and a half years I’ve been here, I haven’t seen [it] shift so dramatically, in such a short period of time, against the Brotherhood and the media – really in a matter of less than a week”.
He, like many observers, is left puzzling over the anti-American fervour in the anti-Morsi camp, which has a direct bearing on how western journalists are perceived and treated.
America has declined to characterise the removal of Morsi by the army as a coup, and on Thursday John Kerry, the US secretary of state, told a CNN affiliate station in Pakistan that “the military was asked to intervene by millions of people … in effect they were restoring democracy”. Yet on the ground, says Bradley, “for the last month in Tahrir Square there’s been this overwhelming feeling that the United States is backing the Muslim Brotherhood, which is very strange and doesn’t make sense. … the whole memory of the fact that this country voted for Mohammed Morsi last year has been replaced by this idea that ‘Morsi was somehow imposed on us and we heroically threw him off’.”
Patrick Kingsley, Egypt correspondent for the United Kingdom’s Guardian newspaper since January, has also witnessed the effects of this curious case of mass double-think.
“There has definitely been a change in the way foreign journalists have been received in Egypt in the past month or two,” he says. Partly this is down to the “upsurge in xenophobia” caused by the new military-backed regime using nationalism to win support for its actions.
“But foreign journalists are also suddenly mistrusted by the millions of people who backed Morsi’s overthrow because many Egyptians resent the way foreign media has largely portrayed what happened as a coup, rather than a revolution,” he says.
There have, he says, been “several reports of western journalists getting escorted out of protests by anti-Morsi protesters because of their newspaper’s reporting on events”, but that fate has also befallen journalists working for Al Jazeera’s Arabic channel, based in Qatar and seen as “Brotherhood-friendly”.
“In my reporting,” says Kingsley, “I have avoided using words that imply a judgement on what is a very complex and nuanced issue – but I have still been criticised for reporting on recent army abuses.”
Meanwhile, “Morsi supporters have been very hostile to local journalists, because they believe locals will not give them a fair wrap” – as witnessed by protests last week at a media centre in 6th of October City, home to a number of private Arabic satellite TV stations – while they have been welcoming to their western counterparts, “as they think a good international write-up may help persuade diplomats to pressure the army into treating them better.
“This marks a change from the previous six months, when it was hard to get hold of Brotherhood spokespeople, particularly if they thought your coverage was unfavourable to them.”
Doubtless, perceptions of journalists, wherever they are from, are shaped by geopolitical events. “Journalists,” says John Downey, professor of comparative media at Loughborough University’s Communication Research Centre, which analysed the BBC’s Arab Spring coverage, “are often seen as appendages to states.”
For example, in the UK the BBC is, by and large, regarded as an independent, unbiased source of information. In the occupied territories, however, it is not.
“The BBC’s coverage of Israel’s occupation differs so markedly from the reality on the ground, that it is difficult to see how it can be viewed as a trusted news source on this subject,” says Ameena Saleem, who monitors media coverage in the UK for the Palestine Solidarity Campaign.
The corporation’s coverage “is focused on rockets fired from Gaza and what it likes to call ‘clashes between Palestinian youth and the Israeli army’. Background and context do not make an appearance.”
That’s not an uncommon complaint about western journalism in the Middle East.
In March this year, Atiaf Zaid Alwazir, co-founder of the media advocacy group SupportYemen, wrote a telling opinion article for the Yemen Times. Thanks to a lack of meaningful engagement, she said, “the media narrative on Yemen is completely flawed”. The parachute journalists who were dropped in and out of the country knew very little about it and, as a result, a nation of 24 million people, “from different backgrounds, regions, sects, dialects and landscapes, has been reduced to [stories about] Al Qaeda, wars, poverty, qat, tribalism, or the ancestral home of Osama Bin Laden”.
Distrust in the western media is nothing new – nor is it exclusively an Arab phenomenon. A Gallup poll in the States last September found that a record 60 per cent of Americans had “little or no trust in the mass media to report the news fully, accurately, and fairly”.
And, sometimes, that distrust is well-founded.
Confidence in the impartiality of the western media in the Middle East was surely shaken in 2004 when The New York Times admitted that many of its articles that had wrongly reported the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq prior to the 2003 invasion had “depended at least in part on information from a circle of Iraqi informants, defectors and exiles bent on ‘regime change'”.
The newspaper, and other media outlets, had been fed juicy bits of misinformation by anti-Saddam groups, and had not sought to verify them independently.
“Editors at several levels who should have been challenging reporters and pressing for more skepticism were perhaps too intent on rushing scoops into the paper,” read the subsequent mea culpa from the paper.
“Accounts of Iraqi defectors were not always weighed against their strong desire to have Saddam Hussein ousted. Articles based on dire claims about Iraq tended to get prominent display, while follow-up articles that called the original ones into question were sometimes buried. In some cases, there was no follow-up at all.”
Some attribute the disconnect between protestors of the Arab Spring and the traditional western media to the rise of citizen journalism, which initially drove global coverage of events. The report commissioned by the BBC Trust into the corporation’s coverage throughout the fast-moving days of 2011 noted that among the jubilant protesters journalists encountered, and to some extent relied upon, “young, liberal, western-facing and technologically adept demonstrators”.
Certainly, social media was to play a central part as western news organisations scrambled to get reporters, photographers and camera teams on the ground. User-generated content (UGC) – footage taken on video phones, chiefly – came into its own, despite the fact that “it was not clear … who the authors of a significant proportion of UGC were”.
The report found that some 46 UGC clips used by the BBC had no clear authorship. Among those whose origin was known, only 12 were attributable to government sources while 86 came from opposition activists, demonstrators and other members of “The People”.
The dangers of reliance on such citizen journalism became apparent in the middle of June 2011, when many news organisations, including the BBC, fell for the hoax that was the “Gay girl in Damascus” blog.
The author, “Amina Arraf”, had written critically about President Bashar Al Assad’s regime and had been written about by western journalists at length – but interviewed only by email. When a blog entry supposedly written by her cousin reported that Amina had been abducted by armed men, activists launched a much-reported campaign to free her – until the real blogger, one Tom MacMaster, revealed he was a 40-year-old American studying at Edinburgh University.
The rise of new media may have helped to alter perceptions among the protesters of the Arab Spring of the need for an elite class of professional journalists, no longer seen as the sole conduit through which messages can be broadcast to the world.
“New media,” says the Newseum’s Gene Policinski, “gives them an opportunity to tell their side much more easily to the large community. And then again, when a discordant story appears written by someone else, perhaps entirely accurate – let’s say about a rift in the leadership of a particular group – that’s often seen as an antagonistic story, contrary to the message they are trying to put out. By reporting on news that’s not flattering, you are contrary to the message that people feel much more empowered to deliver ‘unsullied’.”
And for this, says Rosie Garthwaite, a former producer-presenter for Al Jazeera in Doha, traditional news organisations may have only themselves to blame.
Garthwaite, who now runs Media Dante, her own TV production company in Doha, believes a “pullback of investment in the Middle East [by international news organisations] has led to a lower standard and general understanding in journalism, which has been evidenced in the Arab Spring”.
This has both encouraged and provoked the spread of “citizen journalism”, often seen as a cheap alternative to maintaining expensive staffers on the ground, “but the problem is that you need to have a proper investment in and understanding of a country if you’re going to get to grips with the story”.
Certainly, media outlets everywhere are struggling to manage – and monetise – the phenomenon, with some big players effectively institutionalising the exploitation of citizen journalism. The Guardian’s Witness project, billed as “Your chance to have videos, photos and stories featured on The Guardian“, grants the paper the right to use contributors’ material in any way it sees fit, without payment. CNN’s iReport – “Share your story, discuss the issues” – likewise grants the organisation a “perpetual, worldwide licence … without payment to you or any third party”.
Reporters, too, now tweet and blog about the news they are covering (though they, at least, are being paid to do so). Blake Hounshell, now deputy editor of Politico magazine, began tweeting about the Arab unrest in January 2011. In July that year he wrote an article for Foreign Policy, headlined “The revolution will be tweeted”, after watching young protesters tweeting from a demonstration against Hosni Mubarak.
“These weren’t revolutionaries so much as they were reporters, translating their struggle for the rest of us,” he wrote. Twitter had become “the essential tool for following and understanding the momentous changes sweeping the Arab region”.
And, in the same way that those momentous changes impact most directly on the people living through them, so the journalists who face the greatest dangers and obstacles in reporting the Arab Spring are not westerners but natives of the countries undergoing upheaval.
Being a foreign correspondent in a time of war has always been a risky business, as the towering engraved-glass memorial gallery at Washington’s Newseum vividly attests – and particularly so if you happened to be working for The Times of London in the turbulent second half of the 19th century. The first three names etched into the glass panels were all Times correspondents who lost their lives overseas in the line of duty between 1855 and 1870.
But fast-forward 160 years, and 2,244 lives, to the past four years of the Arab Spring and the two-storey glass offers a sobering insight that puts the concerns of an underpaid Italian stringer in Syria into context.
The memorial is re-dedicated, and updated, every year, and on May 13 the freshly engraved names of 82 journalists who died covering the news around the world during 2012 were unveiled.
Thirty of them were killed in Syria, but only four of the 30 journalists who died covering events in Syria in 2012 will resonate with western readers. They are Marie Colvin, the veteran American journalist killed in Homs in February last year while on assignment for the Sunday Times, along with French photographer Remi Ochlik, and Anthony Shadid, the two-times Pulitzer-prize-winning Lebanese-American who was working for The New York Times and suffered a fatal asthma attack the same month while trying to flee Syria, and Mika Yamamoto, a reporter for Japan Press, shot dead in August while travelling with the Free Syrian Army in Aleppo.
Few in the West will have heard of any of the remaining 26 who died in Syria. All were Syrian journalists, of whom 18 were caught in the crossfire and eight were singled out for assassination by one side or the other.
Their deaths, memorialised on frosted panes of glass in Washington DC, serve as a brutal reminder that in journalism, as in everyday life, the vagaries of covering the Arab Spring should be seen not so much as a western difficulty, as an Arab tragedy.
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Headlines
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- New Iranian President Hassan Rouhani Urges End to Sanctions
- Zimbabwean Opposition Disputes Re-election of President Mugabe
- U.S. Issues Conflicting Messages on Pakistan Drone Strikes
- Egypt: Muslim Brotherhood Leaders to Face Trial; Nobel Winner Tawakkul Karman Denied Entry
- Israeli Cabinet Expands List of Settlements Eligible for Subsidies
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- U.S. Judge Extends Hold on Wisconsin Anti-Abortion Law
- Wisconsin Man Sentenced to 10 Years for Plot to Kill Abortion Doctor
- Sikhs Mark 1st Anniversary of Temple Shooting in Oak Creek, Wisconsin
- More Than 200 Arrested in “Summer Heat” Protest at Chevron Refinery in California
- Dream Defenders Win “Stand Your Ground” Hearings, Remain in Florida Capitol
- Sculptor Removes Contested Quotation from Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial
- Civil Rights Attorney Julius Chambers Dies at 76
What a week it has been. The Khaldiyeh district in Homs was overrun by Assad’s army, the Syrian rebels are in disarray, Syrian women forced to offer “survival sex” in Lebanon, and fatwas in Aleppo banning the croissant. Well, I have to say I am impressed with the historical knowledge and zealousness of whoever thought that one up, after all the croissant was a symbol of the second defeat of the Ottomans at the gates of Vienna. The people there were so jubilant at this victory that an enterprising baker came up with the idea of the “croissant” after seeing the crescents of the Ottomans. In all fairness the Ottomans did also give Europe the inspiration for cappuccinos in return, so we really should call it even. But that hasn’t fazed the hapless zealots who seem intent on righting every historic wrong of the past four hundred years, although I don’t really understand how right it is that the Ottomans were trying to conquer Vienna in the first place, but I guess if the Ottomans lost then that is supposed to be a bad thing, and since they were Muslims and we are Muslims then that means we lost at Vienna, right?
This is all such a farce, Syria is such a farce. Has anybody looked at Bashar al Assad? What makes me feel like crying is that anybody would think this person is a leader, let alone inspirational. He sits there and pretends to be Mr Big Man in his expensive suits, and I bet you those suits weren’t even tailored by a Syrian – even though Syrians are probably the best tailors in the world, and barbers too (it’s true). His adoring fans celebrate a great “victory” in Homs, as they did in Qusair, and pretend as if they have something to be proud of. Have they even seen what those two places look like now? For goodness’ sake any more victories and there won’t be a country left to rebuild. But they don’t listen or see, they just tell us they feel “sad”. And then we have to listen to their constant drone about how “arming” the revolution was a mistake and a betrayal. Their shooting the jaws off adolescent boys wasn’t reason enough for these jingoistic Assad fans. After all what would people say if they saw Syrians as nothing more than a dysfunctional and inbred family? And how embarrassing would it be for young Hafez and his Acton mummy to shop in London and pretend to be normal if everybody knew that they came from a country that was as unfashionable and icky as Afghanistan. No, weaponizing this conflict was a big mistake, you hear me? and all you people who supported this revolution should be ashamed of yourselves. Think how embarrassed you’ve made Bashar Assad in front of the world. After all everybody knows that even though his allies are Iran and Russia what he and his wife really want is to get “in” with the West. It’s just like with the Ottomans really. They tried to invade Europe, then tried to join it, and all they ever wanted was to be Europeans. But what did the Ottomans get? Croissants thrown right back in their face. Oh the agony.
Besides, all this revolutionary business distracts us from our sacred mission, Palestine. The rebels you see, are part of a global conspiracy but at the same time we are one and the same, family. You understand. On the radio we have alternating narratives. One narrative wishes to kill these people and squash them like cockroaches. The catchphrases on fascist Assad radio channels like Sham FM is that “God willing we are going to make Syria better than it was. We are going to take it back”. Take it back from whom exactly? And who do you mean by “we”? Oh, yes, “we” is anybody who worships that lame duck you call a president, the one whose only accomplishment in life was to be the son of Hafez Assad. At least that dictator fought his way to power – not that that would ever wipe away his crime in Hama of course.
The other narrative on those radio channels is that these people we are fighting are “our brothers” and that they can be reasoned with to put their weapons down and “reconcile”. We’ll all sit down around the fire in a bedouin camp, the elders will talk of great things and nod their heads as they drink the bitter coffee, and we will magnanimously forgo the wrongs of the past and agree to unite our ranks once again. We’ll just blame this on the Jews – who are everywhere apparently and had planned this entire Arab Spring just after writing the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
People think I’m joking, but we do have Syrians in Syria who believe this stuff. I would know as I’ve met some of them – in fact some of them are even family. That’s what happens to a nation that is cut off from the outside world and stops reading and asking questions. It becomes inbred and stupid. This is the Syria that Assad is trying to defend, because it is the only Syria he can rule over indefinitely. Anything else and people start prodding and poking, sticking their noses in all sorts of things such as elections, free associations, books and other such dangerous and seditious activities. Anyway I’m tired now and I’ve had enough of writing. The only thing I found remotely inspirational and interesting this week was that Youtube video of a young Syrian officer who decided to put his weapon down and actually speak to Syrians instead of killing them. He’s dead, apparently he was killed a few months ago, and now all the pro-Assadists have mental erections because they finally found somebody in their ranks who wasn’t an animal. That’s how it always is in Syria, we never hear of good news until it’s too late.
If proved, US targeting of rescuers who respond to scene of earlier explosions are clearly “war crimes”
The Bureau’s field researcher found five double-tap strikes took place in mid-2012, one of which also struck a mosqueA field investigation by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism in Pakistan’s tribal areas appears to confirm that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) last year briefly revived the controversial tactic of deliberately targeting rescuers at the scene of a previous drone strike. The tactic has previously been labelled a possible war crime by two UN investigators.
The Bureau’s new study focused mainly on strikes around a single village in North Waziristan – attacks that were aimed at one of al Qaeda’s few remaining senior figures, Yahya al-Libi. He was finally killed by a CIA drone strike on June 4 2012.
The Bureau’s field researcher found five double-tap strikes took place in mid-2012, one of which also struck a mosque
Congressional aides have previously been reported as describing to the Los Angeles Times reviewing a CIA video showing Yahya al-Libi alone being killed. But the Bureau’s field research appears to confirm what others reported at the time – that al-Libi’s death was part of a sequence of strikes on the same location that killed up to 16 people.
If correct, that would indicate that Congressional aides were not shown crucial additional video material.
The CIA has robustly rejected the charge. Spokesman Edward Price told the Bureau: ‘The CIA takes its commitment to Congressional oversight with the utmost seriousness. The Agency provides accurate and timely information consistent with our obligation to the oversight Committees. Any accusation alleging otherwise is baseless.’
Tactic revived
The Bureau first broke the story of the CIA’s deliberate targeting of rescuers in a February 2012 investigation for the Sunday Times. It found evidence of 11 attacks on rescuers – so-called ‘double-tap’ strikes – in Pakistan’s tribal areas between 2009 and 2011, along with a drone strike deliberately targeting a funeral, causing mass casualties.
Reports of these controversial tactics ended by July 2011. But credible news reports emerged a year later indicating that double-tap strikes had been revived.
International media including the BBC, CNN and news agency AFP variously reported that rescuers had been targeted on five occasions between May 24 and July 23 2012, with a mosque and prayers for the dead also reportedly bombed.
The Bureau commissioned a report into the alleged attacks from Mushtaq Yusufzai, a respected journalist based in Peshawar, who reports regularly for NBC and for local paper The News.
Over a period of months, Yusufzai – who has extensive government, Taliban and civilian contacts throughout Waziristan – built up a detailed understanding of the attacks through his sources.
His findings indicate that five double-tap strikes did indeed take place again in mid-2012, one of which also struck a mosque. In total 53 people were killed in these attacks with 57 injured, the report suggests.
Yusufzai could find no evidence to support media claims that rescuers had been targeted on two further occasions.
No confirmed civilian deaths were reported by local communities in any of the strikes. A woman and three children were reportedly injured in one of the attacks. Yusufzai says: ‘It is possible some civilians were killed, but we don’t know’.
However a parallel investigation by legal charity Reprieve reports that eight civilians died in a double-tap strike on July 6 2012 (see below), with the possibility of further civilian deaths in a July 23 attack.
Islamabad-based lawyer Shahzad Akbar says Reprieve’s findings are based on interviews with villagers from affected areas.
‘On both occasions [in July] our independent investigation showed a high number of civilians who were rescuers were killed in the strikes,’ says Akbar.
While some 2012 double-tap strikes appear to have been aimed at al Qaeda’s Yahya al-Libi, Reprieve believes both July attacks were focused on killing another senior militant, Sadiq Noor.
Noor is deputy to militant leader Hafiz Gul Bahadur. Both men are long-time targets for the CIA because of their support for the Taliban’s Afghan insurgency. Noor had falsely been reported killed on at least two previous occasions. It is not known whether he survived either of the strikes.
The Bureau’s field research finds that – as widely reported at the time – on May 24 2012 a CIA-controlled armed drone hit a mosque in the village of Hasukhel in North Waziristan, killing some worshippers. Six further people were killed in a second drone strike shortly afterwards as they took part in rescue work, according to Yusufzai’s sources.
On June 3 2012, two Taliban commanders and their men were targeted as they visited the village of Gangi Khel in South Waziristan to attend funeral prayers for a relative killed in an earlier drone strike. Despite reports that the two commanders were killed, the Bureau’s research finds both men survived and there were no fatalities.
An attack on June 4 2012 ultimately killed al Qaeda second-in-command Yahya al-Libi. Despite US claims that al-Libi alone died, Bureau research appears to corroborate multiple accounts indicating that at least 16 people, all alleged militants, died in a series of missile strikes. This reportedly included the deliberate targeting of rescuers. Congressional oversight committee staffers reportedly told the LA Times they had seen video showing only al-Libi’s death. They may have been unaware of additional strikes. The CIA told the Bureau it ‘provides accurate and timely information consistent with our obligation to the oversight Committees. Any accusation alleging otherwise is baseless.’
On July 6 2012, a group of alleged militants were targeted and killed as they ate dinner with local tribesmen. Another nearby mixed group who were praying were not attacked. After waiting 30 minutes rescue work began. CIA drones then returned, killing 12 others including three brothers. Legal charity Reprieve reports eyewitnesses as identifying eight civilians killed in the attack, who it names as Salay Khan; Mir Jahan Gul; Allah Mir Khan; Noor Bhadshah Khan; Mir Gull Jan; Batkai Jan; Gallop Haji Jan and Gull Saeed Khan.
An initial attack on a house in Dre Nishtar in the Shawal valley on July 23 2012 killed five alleged militants. Local villagers refused to assist in aid work because they feared a fresh attack. Alleged militants involved in the rescue were then targeted in a second strike, with a further seven killed and eight injured. Reprieve believes civilians may also have died in this attack, and is continuing to investigate.
No evidence could be found for a claimed attack on rescuers on May 28 2012. Instead, Yusufzai’s sources said two separate linked strikes took place. An initial 4am attack failed to destroy a truck. The vehicle was pursued and destroyed 10 minutes later as it passed through Hasukhel village, killing seven alleged militants. Four civilians including three children were also injured when a nearby house was damaged.
Similarly, the Bureau can find no evidence to support a claimed double-tap attack on June 14 2012 in Miranshah. Instead, one individual died on the building’s roof, in what Yusufzai’s sources describe as a highly precise attack causing minimal structural damage.
Special rules?
The rescuer strikes examined by Yusufzai all appear to have been aimed at very senior militants – so-called High Value Targets. Under international humanitarian law, the greater the threat a target represents, and the more imminent that threat is deemed to be, the greater the leeway for targeting. The Bureau’s findings suggest that strikes on rescuers are still permitted in certain circumstances, such as in the pursuit of a high value target such as Yahya al-Libi.
The Bureau’s original investigation into the deliberate targeting of rescuers found that a significant number of civilians had been reported killed, alongside Taliban rescuers.
It was the presence of civilians amid groups of rescuers which meant the US may have committed war crimes, according to the UN’s special rapporteur on extrajudicial executions. Christof Heyns noted in June 2012:
If civilian ‘rescuers’ are indeed being intentionally targeted, there is no doubt about the law: those strikes are a war crime.
Heyns’ colleague Ben Emmerson QC, UN special rapporteur on torture, also told reporters in October 2012: ‘The Bureau has alleged that since President Obama took office at least 50 civilians were killed in follow-up strikes when they had gone to help victims and more than 20 civilians have also been attacked in deliberate strikes on funerals and mourners. Christof Heyns… has described such attacks, if they prove to have happened, as war crimes. I would endorse that view.’
The Bureau understands that Emmerson’s ongoing UN investigation into drone strikes is likely to engage with the issue of targeting first responders.
Bureau field researcher Mushtaq Yusufzai notes that civilians now rarely appear to take part in rescue operations, and are often prevented from doing so by militants. They also fear further CIA attacks, he says.
As Bureau field researcher Mushtaq Yusufzai notes, civilians now rarely appear to take part in rescue operations’
Sarah Knuckey is an international lawyer at the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice, based at New York University’s School of Law. An adviser to UN rapporteur Christof Heyns, Knuckey also co-authored the 2012 report Living Under Drones, which gathered substantial testimony in Pakistan about strikes on rescuers.
‘The threat of the “double tap” reportedly deters not only the spontaneous humanitarian instinct of neighbours and bystanders in the immediate vicinity of strikes, but also professional humanitarian workers providing emergency medical relief to the wounded,’ the report noted.
Commenting on the Bureau’s latest findings, Knuckey says civilians cannot be targeted under the laws of war.
But she adds: ‘Secondary strikes are not necessarily unlawful. If, for example, secondary strikes are carried out on additional military targets who come to the area of a first strike, the strikes might comply with the laws of war. And the Bureau’s findings of no evidence of civilian harm from the 2012 strikes they investigated suggest that proper precautions in attack may have been taken for those strikes.
‘The key question around the legality of secondary strikes is: On what basis is the US making the assessment that the ‘rescuers’ are legitimate military targets? Is the US assuming that anyone coming to a second strike is also a militant, or does it have – for each rescuer – intelligence on that person’s militant status? If secondary strikes take place within 10-20 minutes of a first strike, is that sufficient time to determine militancy?’
Stark contrast
The US has not generally responded to the issue of double-tap strikes. But three months after the 2012 attacks, a senior diplomat denied that civilian rescuers were ever ‘deliberately’ targeted by the CIA.
A group of US peace activists visiting Pakistan in October 2012 were told by acting US ambassador Richard E Hoagland: ’For at least the last several years that I have been here in Pakistan and more intimately associated with the knowledge of this [drone campaign], there was never any deliberate strikes against civilian rescuers.’
The US Senate and House intelligence committees are charged with overseeing the CIA’s drone targeted killing project. But there is an unexplained disparity between an account of what committee members were shown by the CIA on a particular strike, and what other sources report.
Is the US assuming that anyone coming to a second strike is also a militant, or does it have – for each rescuer – intelligence on that person’s militant status?’
Sarah Knuckey, New York University
Yahya al-Libi, al Qaeda’s second-in-command, was killed by the CIA on June 4 2012 in a strike on the village of Hassokhel in North Waziristan.
Almost all media reports at the time placed the death toll at 15-18. Sources including the Washington Post said rescuers were targeted and killed at the scene.
But the US has consistently denied this. ‘American officials said that Mr Libi was the only person who died in the attack, although others were present in the compound,’ the New York Times noted.
In July 2012, the Los Angeles Times published a detailed account of the workings of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees. According to reporter Ken Dilanian, staffers from both committees visit CIA headquarters once a month, where they watch video and review other evidence relating to drone strikes.
‘The BBC and other news organisations quoted local officials saying that 15 “suspected militants” were killed in the June 4 Pakistan strike that killed al Libi,’ Dilanian reports. ‘But the [CIA] video shows that he alone was killed, congressional aides say.’
The Bureau’s findings are in stark contrast, appearing to confirm original news reports that rescuers were indeed targeted at the time and that many more died.
According to Yusufzai’s sources, an initial 4am attack on a small house in the village of Hassokhel killed five. A dozen people ‘including Arabs, Turkmen and local tribesmen’ then started rescue work.
But as they were removing bodies, the CIA’s drones reportedly struck again – killing 10 more, including Yahya al-Libi, ‘who was observing the rescue operation when he too came under missile attack,’ the source said.
Neither the House nor Senate intelligence committees were prepared to comment on the disparity between these reports.
The Bureau approached the CIA for comment on the latest sequence of rescuer strikes. While declining to comment on most questions, spokesman Edward Price robustly denied the suggestion that the oversight committees may have been misled.
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