Pentagon: US Drone in Syria May Have Killed Civilian, Not Terrorist

Facts

• US Central Command on Friday said that the Pentagon is investigating a drone strike targeting a senior al-Qaeda leader in northwest Syria on May 3 that "may have unintentionally resulted" in a civilian casualty instead.¹
• This comes a day after The Washington Post reported that officials were "no longer confident" that an influential figure had been killed in the strike, walking back its original claims.²
• Since the original statement on the operation, US officials haven't identified the intended target of the attack or confirmed the individual killed in the strike.³
• However, the family of 56-year-old Lotfi Hassan Misto identified him as the victim, claiming that the father of 10 had no ties to militant organizations and was tending to his sheep when he was killed.⁴
• The bricklayer and farmer reportedly lived in Qorqanya — close to an alleged area of interest to al-Qaeda — but experts have stressed that it would be "very unusual" for an al-Qaeda leader to operate in that area, which is reportedly controlled by a rival group.⁵
• In 2021, a US drone strike targeting an Islamic State operative killed ten civilians, including seven children, in the closing days of the withdrawal from Afghanistan.⁶

Sources: ¹Al Jazeera, ²Washington Post, ³Daily Mail, ⁴FOX News, ⁵Washington Free Beacon, and ⁶CNN.

Narratives

• Republican narrative, as provided by Red State. Given that no one has been held accountable for the drone striking an entire family in the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, it's no coincidence that the Biden administration has carried out another disastrous counterterrorism operation that killed an innocent person. The lack of accountability for bad decisions has been driving the US government to commit the same mistakes repeatedly.
• Democratic narrative, as provided by New York Times. It's not yet definitely known whether the strike unintentionally killed a civilian, but what is known is that Biden has a laudable record related to the use of drones in counterterrorism operations, as he has reversed a loosening of Obama-era rules under Donald Trump, which allowed the chain of command to approve lethal strikes outside conventional war zones. However, in Syria and Iraq, commanders in the field still retain autonomy to order strikes without the White House's approval.

Predictions