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Nick Turse's first piece for TomDispatch focused on, as I put it at the time, "how fully the worlds of toy-making and war-making, of toy companies, video-game outfits, movie studios, and the Pentagon have meshed." That was in October 2003, only months after President George W. Bush and crew had ordered the invasion of Iraq. Nick then wrote: "The military is now in the midst of a full-scale occupation of the entertainment industry, conducted with far more skill (and enthusiasm on the part of the occupied) than the one in Iraq." Decades later, looking back, I'm struck that, in his initial piece for this site, he also had the following line: "Last holiday season the Forward Command Post, a bombed-out dollhouse from hell, rankled many consumers who objected to a toy that seemed to glorify civilian casualties and so prompted an outcry that caused JC Penney to withdraw it from sale and KBToys to stop stocking the item."
In all the years that followed, from the publication of his classic book Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam to late last night, one powerful focus for him has been just how expendable American forces have regularly found local civilians to be. As the remarkable Jonathan Schell wrote in 2013 of Nick's masterwork on this country's nightmarish Vietnam War of the last century, "Turse discovers that episodes of devastation, murder, massacre, rape, and torture once considered isolated atrocities were in fact the norm, adding up to a continuous stream of atrocity, unfolding, year after year, throughout that country." Similarly, in 2008 in a TomDispatch piece all too grimly entitled "Big Game Hunting in Iraq," he described how, "from the commander-in-chief to low-ranking snipers, a language of dehumanization that includes the idea of hunting humans as if they were animals has crept into our world -- unnoticed and unnoted in the mainstream media."
Unnoticed and unnoted there indeed -- but not by Turse. In fact, he's never stopped noticing that grim reality. As he wrote at The Intercept only recently, "During the first 20 years of the war on terror, the U.S. conducted more than 91,000 airstrikes across seven major conflict zones -- Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen -- and killed up to 48,308 civilians, according to a 2021 analysis by Airwars, a U.K.-based airstrike monitoring group." So, today, it seems all too appropriate that he should focus on one tiny aspect of that never-ending war on terror he's followed all these years deep into Africa -- two dead Somali civilians, a child and her mother, taken out by an American drone and how little anyone responsible in this country gives a damn. Tom
Remote Warfare and Expendable People
Forever War Means Never Having to Say You're Sorry
By Nick Turse
In war, people die for absurd reasons or often no reason at all. They die due to accidents of birth, the misfortune of being born in the wrong place -- Cambodia or Gaza, Afghanistan or Ukraine -- at the wrong time. They die due to happenstance, choosing to shelter indoors when they should have taken cover outside or because they ventured out into a hell-storm of destruction when they should have stayed put. They die in the most gruesome ways -- shot in the street, obliterated by artillery, eviscerated by air strikes. Their bodies are torn apart, burned, or vaporized by weapons designed to destroy people. Their deaths are chalked up to misfortune, mistake, or military necessity.
Since September 2001, the United States has been fighting its "war on terror" -- what's now referred to as this country's "Forever Wars." It's been involved in Somalia almost that entire time. U.S. Special Operations forces were first dispatched there in 2002, followed over the years by more "security assistance," troops, contractors, helicopters, and drones. American airstrikes in Somalia, which began under President George W. Bush in 2007, have continued under Presidents Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden as part of a conflict that has smoldered and flared for more than two decades. In that time, the U.S. has launched 282 attacks, including 31 declared strikes under Biden. The U.S. admits it has killed five civilians in its attacks. The UK-based air strike monitoring group Airwars says the number is as much as 3,100% higher.
On April 1, 2018, Luul Dahir Mohamed, a 22-year-old woman, and her 4-year-old daughter Mariam Shilow Muse were added to that civilian death toll when they were killed in a U.S. drone strike in El Buur, Somalia.
Luul and Mariam were civilians. They died due to a whirlwind of misfortune -- a confluence of bad luck and bad policies, none of it their fault, all of it beyond their control. They died, in part, because the United States is fighting the Somali terror group al-Shabaab even though Congress has never declared such a war and the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force on which the justification for the conflict rests predates the group's existence. They died because Somalia has limited options when it comes to rural public transport and they caught a ride with the wrong people. They died because the United States claims that its brand of drone warfare is predicated on precision strikes with little collateral damage despite independent evidence clearly demonstrating otherwise.
In this case, members of the American strike cell that conducted the attack got almost everything wrong. They bickered about even basic information like how many people were in the pickup truck they attacked. They mistook a woman for a man and they never saw the young girl at all. They didn't know what they were looking at, but they nonetheless launched a Hellfire missile that hit the truck as it motored down a dirt road.
Even after all of that, Luul and Mariam might have survived. Following the strike, the Americans -- watching live footage from the drone hovering over the scene -- saw someone bolt from the vehicle and begin running for her life. At that moment, they could have paused and reevaluated the situation. They could have taken one more hard look and, in the process, let a mother and child live. Instead, they launched a second missile.
What Luul's brother, Qasim Dahir Mohamed -- the first person on the scene -- found was horrific. Luul's left leg was mutilated, and the top of her head was gone. She died clutching Mariam whose tiny body looked, he said, "like a sieve."
In 2019, the U.S. military admitted that it had killed a civilian woman and child in that April 1, 2018, drone strike. But when, while reporting for The Intercept, I met Luul's relatives last year in Somalia's capital, Mogadishu, they were still waiting for the Pentagon to contact them about an apology and compensation. I had obtained a copy of the internal U.S. military investigation which the family had never seen. It did acknowledge the deaths of a woman and child but concluded that their identities might never be known.
Expendable People
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