Back in February 2019, an American armed contingent killed civilians in one of dozens of air strikes on Somalia. The African Command’s report on what happened will only be made public today.
U.S. troops killed civilians in Africa – the command delayed the investigation for a year.
This was reported by the agency “Associated Press” on Monday, April 27.
Earlier, in a comment to journalists of the agency, Major General William Gayler, who is responsible for operations of the African Command, claimed that during an air strike on February 23, 2019 in Kunyo-Barrow two members of the terrorist group “Al-Shabaab” were killed.
It soon became clear that two civilians were the victims of the attack and three others were injured. The command was forced to launch an investigation, which lasted over a year. It was only after the issue was raised by the public in early 2020 that the military had to plead guilty.
William Gayler, commenting on the situation, began to argue that the U.S. military had nothing to do with it, and civilians were killed by “secondary explosions” – detonation of ammunition from al-Shabaab.
According to Associated Press, a copy of the report, which is due for publication on Monday, was in the possession of the editorial staff. It covers the period from 1 February 2019 to 31 March 2020. According to the document, the U.S. has carried out 91 air strikes on Somalia and Libya during this period. In addition, it refers to twenty cases where the victims of American attacks were civilians. The investigation was conducted only on the aforementioned incident.