Amnesty International warns US may have committed war crimes in Somalia
The US military rejects the report, saying it has killed 800 militants in air strikes over the past two years, but has not hurt or killed a single civilian
Nairobi — The US military may be guilty of war crimes for killing large numbers of civilians in a sharply stepped-up campaign of air strikes in Somalia over the past two years, Amnesty International said. The rights group said it had been able to document 14 civilians killed in investigations of just five air strikes, a tiny fraction of at least 110 such strikes that the US military says it has launched since June 2017. The US military rejected Amnesty’s report. It says it has killed 800 militants in air strikes in Somalia over that period, but has not wounded or killed a single civilian. “We currently assess no civilian casualties have occurred as a result of any US Africa Command (Africom) air strikes,” the US military’s Africa command Africom said in an e-mailed response to Reuters. Brian Castner, Amnesty International’s senior crisis adviser on arms and military operations, said the civilian death toll in the small number of air strikes the rights group was able to investigate s...
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