The U.S. did not notify the Iraqi government before conducting airstrikes in the country on Friday, contrary to an assertion by the White House that it did.

During a press call on Friday, White House national security spokesperson retired Adm. John Kirby said, “We did inform the Iraqi government prior to the strikes occurring.”

On Monday, in response to questions from The Intercept, the White House said the Iraqis had not gotten advance warning of the strikes.

“For operational security, we did not provide any kind of official pre-notification with specific details on these strikes,” a National Security Council spokesperson acknowledged. 

During Monday’s State Department press briefing, spokesperson Vedant Patel also acknowledged the Iraqis had not gotten a warning. (The State Department had referred The Intercept’s questions to the White House.)

The Iraqi government has denied that the U.S. provided any warning and has alleged that the strikes killed several civilians. On Saturday, the Iraqi Ministry of Foreign Affairs delivered an official note of protest to the chargé d’affaires of the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad decrying “American aggression.” 

“As well Iraq further emphasized its rejection to be a ground for settling scores between rival countries, as our country is not a place for sending messages, and show of force between adversaries,” a readout of the meeting says.

The U.S. airstrikes came in response to attacks by local militant groups in Iraq and Syria, The Iranian-backed groups have escalated their attacks on American targets in the region since the start of Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip.

The U.S. maintains a force of about 2,500 troops in Iraq, a nominal U.S. ally with close ties to neighboring Iran. The American presence, at Iraq’s invitation, is part of an effort to keep remnants of the Islamic State at bay.

Last month, a coalition of the Iran-backed militias took responsibility for a drone attack against a U.S. base in Jordan that resulted in the death of three U.S. service members, a strike they said was motivated by U.S. support for Israel, as The Intercept has previously reported.

The U.S. retaliation last week focused on 85 targets, the largest attack on Iranian-backed militias since Israel’s war on Gaza began.

Despite the rising tensions in the region, the Biden administration has been at pains to say that its strikes are not part of Israel’s war on Gaza.

“I absolutely don’t agree with your description of a ‘same larger conflict,’” Kirby said in response to a question about the regional fighting. Though he was not asked about Israel’s war, Kirby added, “There’s a conflict going on between Israel and Hamas.”

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A January U.S. Air Force personnel memo obtained by The Intercept describes military orders to be “on standby to forward deploy to support troops in the case of on ground US involvement in the Israel Hamas war.” According to a separate personnel document, the standby order related to personnel deployed last year to Iraq.

While the documents do not suggest that U.S. military ground involvement in the war is forthcoming, the January memo is the latest intimation of the Pentagon’s preparations to support Israel in the wake of Hamas’s October 7 attack. Days after the attack, the U.S. military reportedly put 2,000 troops on prepare-to-deploy orders for potential support to Israel, though from neighboring countries — orders that were confirmed by a procurement document obtained by The Intercept.

The Department of Defense did not respond to a request for comment on the personnel memo about preparing for ground involvement, but in the past the White House has stressed that its support for Israel in the Gaza war would not include boots on the ground.

“There are no plans or intentions to put U.S. boots on the ground in combat in Israel,” White House national security spokesperson John Kirby said on October 17. “But as we’ve also said, we have significant national security interests in the region.” 

Two days after Kirby’s remarks, the White House inadvertently shared a picture of President Joe Biden in Israel posing alongside members of the secretive U.S. special operations units, before quickly deleting it. In late October, the New York Times reported that American special operations personnel were in Israel to help with hostage rescue efforts.

U.S. Still in the Middle East

The documents obtained by The Intercept provide a stark reminder of the pervasive U.S. military presence in the Middle East, with personnel deployed to theaters where many Americans think the mission ended long ago — and how quickly those orders can be repurposed for new conflicts.

The records, for instance, involve personnel deployed to Iraq in support of Operation Inherent Resolve, the U.S. military’s name for the war against the Islamic State group. Though ISIS was driven from its last strongholds years ago, the war persists, providing a legal basis for continued U.S. military presence in Iraq and Syria.

“We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency,” former President Donald Trump tweeted in December 2018. Shortly thereafter, Trump announced that U.S. troops in the country are “all coming back and they’re coming back now.” Trump would later announce that all U.S. troops in Iraq would be withdrawn as well.

Despite the announcements, U.S. forces remained in Syria as well as Iraq, where they are still present to this day. The deployments are “part of a comprehensive strategy to defeat ISIS,” the White House informed Congress in December, “to limit the potential for resurgence of these groups and to mitigate threats to the United States homeland.”

A grim reminder of the longevity of the anti-ISIS deployment emerged Sunday, when three American soldiers were killed in a drone attack on a secret U.S. base in Jordan, near the border of Syria.

“These three fallen heroes were deployed to Jordan in support of Operation Inherent Resolve and the international coalition working to ensure the lasting defeat of ISIS,” Defense Department deputy press secretary Sabrina Singh said in a press briefing on Monday. 

ISIS, however, did not launch the drone that killed the American soldiers. It was an alliance of Iraqi militias backed by Iran, according to the Pentagon.

The deaths represent the first U.S. troops killed since the October 7 Hamas attack. And they may not be the last, if the militia claiming responsibility for the attacks is to be believed. A senior official from an alliance of Iraqi militia groups claiming credit for the attack tied it to U.S. support for Israel in its Gaza war, as The Intercept previously reported.

“As we said before, if the U.S. keeps supporting Israel, there will [be] escalations,” the senior militia official said. “All U.S. interests in the region are legitimate targets, and we don’t care about U.S. threats to respond.”

With U.S. troops stationed all over the Middle East fighting wars long declared over, there are plenty of targets.

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When an Iraqi militant group killed three U.S. service members at a base in Jordan over the weekend, the militants were clear about their motives: It was retaliation for American support for Israel.

“As we said before, if the U.S. keeps supporting Israel, there will [be] escalations,” a senior official from an alliance of Iraqi militia groups said in claiming responsibility for the attack. “All the U.S. interests in the region are legitimate targets, and we don’t care about U.S. threats to respond.”

The statement is not new or surprising. While the need for U.S. troops to be stationed at the Tower 22 military base — a dusty outpost on the Syria–Jordan border — has a dubious, if any, relationship to U.S. national security, the U.S. presence has been very helpful to Israel. The U.S. military in the region serves to deter Iran as well as Israel’s many other enemies.

Now, establishing deterrence against Israel’s adversaries is threatening to suck the U.S. back into a broader, open conflict in the Middle East. Take, for example, the recent U.S. attacks against the Houthis in Yemen, which began after the rebels attacked ships in the Red Sea to force an Israeli ceasefire in Gaza.

Especially at a time when the U.S. is trying to pivot away from the region, Israel increasingly looks like a liability to U.S. interests in the Middle East. American officials are forced to expend significant economic, political, and military resources to shield Israel’s government from local threats and deflect international outrage over its campaign in Gaza. Israel, it turns out, extracts a tremendous cost from the U.S. — often in treasure but, as the world saw over the weekend in Jordan, sometimes in blood — with few discernable strategic gains for the Americans.

“Israel’s main selling point to its Western sponsors and allies has been its depiction as an omnipotent local gendarme, and the best bulwark of Western interests in the Middle East,” said Mouin Rabbani, a Middle East affairs expert and co-editor of the Arab Studies Institute’s online publication Jadaliyya. “But now that premise doesn’t really hold.”

Today, some Americans are questioning why the U.S. has become so deeply involved in Israel’s war on Gaza, which has inflicted a horrifying civilian toll and is now bringing U.S. troops into conflict across the region.

Yet an observer would be hard-pressed to find any acknowledgement of wavering commitment within Washington. Prominent American politicians have loudly professed the importance of Israel to U.S. strategic interests and values since October 7. In the days after Hamas attacked Israel, President Joe Biden proclaimed, “Well, the truth of the matter is, if there weren’t an Israel, we’d have to invent one” — a refrain he’s used for decades to make the case that supporting Israel is critical to U.S. interests.

Presidential candidates vying to take over Biden’s job have been just as effusive about the U.S.–Israel relationship. Robert F. Kennedy likened the state of Israel to the U.S. “having an aircraft carrier in the Middle East.” In a recent Republican presidential debate, Nikki Haley went so far as to say, “Israel doesn’t need us, we need Israel.”

“U.S. military and diplomatic protection has disincentivized the Israelis from pursuing compromises.”

Israel’s usefulness to the U.S. was arguably at its height during the Cold War. As neighboring Arab states built military and intelligence relationships with the Soviet Union, Israel fought these regimes and portrayed itself as a bulwark of U.S. influence in the region. Since then, the relationship has been almost entirely lopsided, as the U.S. has played a far more helpful role to Israel by helping it confront enemies like Iran and develop strategic ties with the Gulf Arab nations. Despite portraying itself as an ally during the U.S. occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan and counterterror campaigns against Al Qaeda and the Islamic State, Israel was mostly absent — likely because its involvement would provoke condemnation and retaliation, not to mention that few Middle Eastern governments crucial to the coalitions’ operations recognize Israel.

Without a national security rationale for maintaining relations with Israel, domestic political pressure appears to be the primary driver of steadfast U.S. support. The political gains for pro-Israel politicians have ultimately enabled Israel to reject solutions to end the political turmoil in the region, while forcing the U.S. to continue intervening on its behalf.

“U.S military and diplomatic protection has disincentivized the Israelis from pursuing compromises,” said Trita Parsi, co-founder and executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. “When we give unquestioned support and blank checks, we feed the worst behavior of countries that we consider allies.”

Lopsided Relationship

For years, the Tower 22 outpost and other U.S. military bases in Iraq, Syria, and neighboring countries like Jordan have been criticized for making U.S. troops sitting ducks with no benefit to U.S. interests.

And yet thousands of troops are stationed throughout the Middle East, some for the protection of maritime shipping or counterterrorism operations, but many for fighting a proxy war against Iran. The U.S. has made huge efforts for years to deter Iran on Israel’s behalf — owing mostly to hostile and frequently antisemitic rhetoric from Iran — while hawkish Israeli leaders have sabotaged efforts at détente like the 2015 Iran nuclear deal.

U.S. military officials periodically criticize the impact of uncritical U.S. support for Israel on American interests in the region, where Israel remains unpopular for its policies against Palestinians. These complaints, even from U.S. military officials, have often been walked back under political pressure. Despite repeated vows by American leaders to reduce the country’s footprint in the Middle East, the U.S.’s commitment to Israel has turned into military involvement across the region. There are strikes against the Houthis in Yemen, aircraft carriers in the eastern Mediterranean to deter Hezbollah in Lebanon, and skirmishes with Iranian-backed militias in Syria and Iraq.

The costs for the U.S. from this new era of conflict are rapidly adding up. According to a recent report in Politico, an estimated $1.6 billion has already been spent on unanticipated U.S. military expenses in the region since October 7 — a price tag Pentagon officials say they cannot pay without a new budget from Congress. Global ammunition shortages are also forcing the U.S. to scramble to replenish its depleted supplies at a time when it is also struggling to contain threats in Europe and East Asia.

For Israel, however, the U.S.’s presence only fortifies its strategic initiatives. “The Israelis view the American presence in the region as very important, because it creates a backstop for them,” said Parsi. “The U.S. presence gives Israel greater maneuverability to carry out strikes in places like Syria and Lebanon, but also a sense of deterrence against those who would like to retaliate against them, since it may mean that the U.S. is dragged into the conflict as well.”

It is increasingly clear that the longer the U.S. maintains a lopsided relationship with Israel, not only will it remain stuck in the region, but also the less likely that Israel will compromise with its neighbors to achieve peace.

Over seven decades after its creation, Israel has failed to come to terms with most of its neighbors and refused many diplomatic opportunities that could have ended much of the violence in the Mideast. Arab governments have recently proposed a new plan that would end the war and create a Palestinian state in exchange for regional recognition of Israel, which Israeli leaders have already rejected.

The Israelis themselves had been clear about these dynamics. Despite progress on limited agreements like the Abraham Accords, which would normalize Israeli relations with Gulf Arab monarchies, Israeli officials have reiterated that they are averse to any more significant deals that would allow the U.S. to draw down its presence in the region. That will make it much harder to leave a part of the world where the U.S. has few interests, yet continues to lose much in terms of resources, reputation, and lives.

“As more and more people have come to the conclusion that the U.S. doesn’t need to be in the Middle East at the same level militarily,” Parsi said, “they will begin to question what the purpose is of having this military alliance with Israel.”

Domestic Interests

Absent a compelling foreign policy rationale, the strongest advocacy for U.S. support for Israel largely comes from the American political establishment. Powerful pro-Israel lobby groups in the U.S. like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee use a combination of money, political messaging, and coercion to push for uniform pro-Israel support in Congress. Their fight has only become fiercer as public support for the U.S.–Israel relationship declines among younger Americans and liberals.

“The routine description of the U.S.–Israeli relationship as a close alliance is mostly a function of American domestic politics, and how Israel fits into those politics, rather than an apolitical consideration of U.S. interests overseas or national strategy,” said Paul Pillar, a former CIA analyst and expert on the Middle East.

After two decades of bloody and fruitless conflicts in the Middle East, Biden may find himself between Iraq and a hard place. A strong military response to the drone strike against U.S. troops in Jordan that risks triggering a broader war is unlikely to be popular among Americans, many of whom have made no secret of their clear desire to end U.S. involvement in the region. The escalating crisis is revealing U.S. and Israeli priorities to be mismatched.

“Recent events, particularly the Israeli assault on the Gaza Strip, underscore the substantial gulf between our interests and the policies being pursued by the Israeli government,” Pillar said. “It is plain for all to see that these differences are substantial, even as the Biden administration has bent over backwards to support the Israeli government, despite the enormous horror taking place in Gaza.”

U.S. intelligence and political officials are currently trying to engineer a ceasefire between Hamas and Israel in Gaza, an agreement that would be in the U.S.’s interest toward an end to the war and deescalation of regional conflict. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, however, has suggested that those discussions may run counter to his own interests.

“As long as the war continues, he will retain his position, power, and political coalition, while fending off the day he will have to face a political reckoning,” said Pillar. “From his point of view, expanding the war and dragging the U.S. in deeper, even beyond what is going on in Yemen and the Red Sea, would be in his interest, even as it would be against U.S. interests.”

And so it is that, with little choice left, the Biden administration promised to retaliate forcefully for the deaths of the three troops in Jordan. With growing anti-war sentiment in the U.S., however, it is not clear how far its response will go. Biden is left facing a situation where domestic politics, particularly the influence of pro-Israel groups and politicians, continue to pull the U.S. military into a region where it is losing precious lives and resources, all with little to show in return.

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Amid a raft of U.S. strikes targeting Houthi rebels in Yemen, the Pentagon has boots on the ground in the country — a fact the Defense Department has recently refused to acknowledge.

“A small number of United States military personnel are deployed to Yemen to conduct operations against al-Qa’ida in the Arabian Peninsula and ISIS,” the White House told Congress in its most recent War Powers Act report on December 7. 

This month, the U.S. began its military campaign against the Houthis for attacking shipping vessels in the Red Sea, a move the Yemeni rebels said was aimed at getting Israel to end its assault on Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

As the U.S. began to attack, defense officials suddenly became more reticent about the American military presence in Yemen. In a press briefing on January 17, Pentagon press secretary Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder was asked if he could give assurances that the U.S. had no troops on the ground in Yemen. Ryder responded, “I’m not aware of any U.S. forces on the ground.”

The National Security Council and the Defense Department did not respond to requests for comment.

“It’s possible that U.S. forces are spread so widely around the globe that not even the professional tasked with knowing that can keep track of it all,” said Erik Sperling, the executive director of Just Foreign Policy, who worked on Yemen as a Capitol Hill staffer. “But it’s also possible that, given the dramatic expansion in US presence in the region in recent months, he is trying to skirt the question to avoid greater scrutiny.”

“It’s possible that U.S. forces are spread so widely around the globe that not even the professional tasked with knowing that can keep track of it all.”

The Yemen conflict is a touchy subject for the Biden administration, which has repeatedly said that it is taking care not to allow Israel’s war in Gaza to metastasize into a broader regional war. As it has become increasingly difficult to deny the threat of a growing conflict, the administration is nonetheless trying.

“We currently assess that the fight between Israel and Hamas continues to remain contained in Gaza,” Ryder said on January 17, following strikes on the Houthis by the U.S. and coalition partners. 

“We don’t think that we are at war,” Pentagon deputy press secretary Sabrina Singh said the next day, on January 18. “We don’t want to see a regional war.”

Her remarks were met with incredulity by one member of the press corps, who quipped: “We’ve bombed them five times now … if this isn’t war, what is war?” 

Despite the rhetoric, tension with the Houthis has reached its highest point in years. 

The U.S. has conducted eight rounds of strikes on Houthi targets in the past month alone. On December 18, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin announced the creation of a U.S.-led coalition to defend ships against Houthi attacks called Operation Prosperity Guardian. Since then, the coalition has conducted both cruise missile strikes and airstrikes on Houthi targets in Yemen.

The strikes came after attacks by the Houthis on merchant ships in the Red Sea, through which a substantial amount of global shipping passes. The Houthis, a rebel group in Yemen that controls most of the country’s most populous territories, blockaded the Red Sea, with the stated objective of halting Israel’s war in Gaza.

The U.S. military has quietly assigned a name to its operation targeting Houthi assets in Yemen. Observers have pointed out that formal names for operations suggest they will be long term in nature. (Officials have not identified an end date for the fight against the Houthis.) Called “Poseidon Archer,” the name for the anti-Houthi strikes is another fact the Biden administration has refused to acknowledge.

“So, this mission is just, ‘We’re striking the Houthis?’” cracked one member of the White House press corps after spokesperson John Kirby declined to provide the name. “I would — I’d refer you to the Pentagon if they’ve given it an operational name or not,” Kirby responded. “That’s really for them to speak to.”

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Three drone strikes last year by the government of Burkina Faso killed scores of civilians, according to a report released Thursday by Human Rights Watch. The attacks, targeting Islamist militants in crowded marketplaces and at a funeral, left at least 60 civilians dead and dozens more injured.

The drone strikes in Burkina Faso and Mali are just the latest in a yearslong string of atrocities carried out as part of Burkina Faso’s counterterrorism campaign against the Al Qaeda-linked Jama’at Nasr al-Islam wal Muslimin, or JNIM, and other Islamist militant groups that operate in the West African Sahel.

“The Burkina Faso military used one of the most accurate weapons in its arsenal to attack large groups of people, causing the loss of numerous civilian lives in violation of the laws of war,” said Ilaria Allegrozzi, senior Sahel researcher at Human Rights Watch, or HRW. “The Burkinabè government should urgently and impartially investigate these apparent war crimes, hold those responsible to account, and provide adequate support for the victims and their families.”

Burkina Faso’s government-controlled media said that all three attacks targeted and killed militants; none mentioned any civilian harm. Last August, for example, Radiodiffusion Télévision du Burkina, Burkina Faso’s government-run national television network, reported a “successful” airstrike on Islamist militants who were “preparing large-scale attacks.” After geolocating the strike site from the video, Human Rights Watch interviewed witnesses to the attack, which occurred during the weekly market day near the northern edge of the Bouro village. Survivors said that members of JNIM, which controls Bouro and the surrounding area, had arrived at the packed marketplace just before the strike.

“The market was full of civilians when the drone hit,” a 25-year-old man told HRW, noting that people travel from “all over” the region to buy and sell animals there. HRW obtained a list of 28 people killed in the attack, compiled by survivors and confirmed by two local authorities, but witnesses said the death toll was far higher. “There were hundreds of people at the market at the time of the strike,” said a 45-year-old man. “We counted 70 dead, but we only identified 28 of them. The other bodies were unrecognizable.”

The Burkinabè Embassy in Washington, D.C., did not respond to repeated requests from The Intercept to speak with the defense attaché or other officials.

“Little or No Concern for Civilian Harm”

The Burkinabè military conducted the strikes with Turkish-made Bayraktar TB2 drones, which it acquired in 2022. At the time, Burkina Faso’s Ministry of Defense and Veterans Affairs defended the use of the country’s “limited financial resources” on drones and helicopters, touting their surveillance capabilities, the increased firepower they would provide, and their potential for “humanitarian actions for the benefit of our population.” Human Rights Watch documented casualties and damage consistent with the type of laser-guided bombs delivered by these drones.

“The Burkina Faso military repeatedly carried out drone strikes in crowded areas with little or no concern for civilian harm,” Allegrozzi said, noting that governments that provide such weapons to Burkina Faso risk complicity in war crimes.

Turkey isn’t alone in its support of the Burkinabè military. The United States has assisted Burkina Faso with counterterrorism aid since the 2000s, providing funds, weapons, equipment, and American advisers, as well as deploying commandos on low-profile combat missions. In that time, however, militant Islamist violence has skyrocketed. Across all of Africa, the State Department counted just 23 casualties from terrorist attacks in 2002 and 2003. Burkina Faso alone saw 6,130 deaths from terrorist attacks between July 2022 and July 2023, according to the Defense Department’s Africa Center for Strategic Studies, a Pentagon research institution.

U.S.-trained Burkinabè military officers have also repeatedly overthrown the government, in 2014, 2015, and twice in 2022. Following military coups, U.S. law generally restricts countries from receiving military aid, but the U.S. has continued to provide training to Burkinabè forces, according to Gen. Michael Langley, the chief of Africa Command, or AFRICOM. Last year, for example, Burkinabè forces took part in Flintlock 2023, an annual exercise sponsored by U.S. Special Operations Command Africa. (Several past Flintlock attendees have overthrown the government, including Lt. Col. Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba, who carried out one of the 2022 coups.)

American assistance has continued despite widespread documentation of Burkinabè government atrocities and the “Leahy law,” which prohibits U.S. funding for foreign security forces implicated in gross violations of human rights. “The military has been credibly accused of various instances of human rights abuses and has been implicated in the extrajudicial killings of children by human rights organizations and journalists,” the Pentagon’s Africa Center noted in reference to Burkina Faso last year. A little over a month before Langley told members of the House Armed Services Committee about continued U.S. support for Burkina Faso, Burkinabè soldiers, accompanied by militia, arrested 16 men in the Ekeou village, at least nine of whom were later found executed, according to Human Rights Watch. In April 2023, less than a month after Langley’s admission, the Burkinabè military massacred at least 156 civilians, including 45 children, in the village of Karma. And state-backed militia reportedly killed at least 70 civilians in the Zaongo village last November.

“As some U.S. military assistance still goes to Burkina Faso, under the Leahy law, the U.S. should be determining if human rights violations by members of Burkina’s junta are occurring and if the aid being provided follows U.S. law,” HRW’s Allegrozzi told The Intercept. “Human Rights Watch has repeatedly documented serious abuses perpetrated by Burkinabè security forces, including mass executions and enforced disappearances of hundreds of civilians.”

Neither AFRICOM nor the State Department responded to detailed questions about the extent of U.S. support for Burkina Faso and reports of atrocities by Burkinabè forces.

“People Were Screaming and Running”

In late September 2023, Radiodiffusion Télévision du Burkina reported on a drone strike against supposed motorbike-riding Islamist militants who traveled from Mali to a compound in Burkina Faso’s Bidi village. Locals told Human Rights Watch, however, that the attack hit a funeral for a local woman, attended by more than 100 people, and that there were no fighters at the compound at the time.

“It hit the tent where the old and wise men were sitting and praying for the old woman who died. The explosion was so strong and loud that the ground trembled and I fell,” a 54-year-old farmer who survived the attack told HRW. “People were screaming and running. Everyone was looking for his relatives and friends or fleeing. I saw many bodies on the ground, scattered, some torn into pieces.” Survivors said that 24 civilian men and a boy were killed, and 17 others were injured.

On November 18, another Burkinabè drone strike hit a market in Mali. That evening, Radiodiffusion Télévision du Burkina reported that the Burkinabè military launched attacks on “terrorists,” hitting a “logistics base” for Islamist fighters. The video shows at least three munitions striking a crowded marketplace.

Human Rights Watch used the video and accounts from survivors to identify Boulkessi, Mali — located in an area controlled by Islamist militants — as the site of the attack. Witnesses said that several armed JNIM fighters were present but that the overwhelming majority of those in the marketplace were civilians.

“The market was beginning to fill up with lots of people, only men, mostly civilians. Women are not allowed to go to the market because of the Islamic law imposed by the jihadists,” a 21-year-old survivor told HRW. “At around 10 a.m., I didn’t see anything coming but a bomb that fell on us like an arrow, then another bomb, and a third one … I was wounded in the arm by shrapnel … I helped my comrades get out of the market despite my injury … unfortunately, one of us died along the way – he had been wounded in the stomach.” Survivors provided HRW with a list of the names of seven civilians killed and five wounded in the strike.

Human Rights Watch did not receive a response to its allegations from the government of Burkina Faso.

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The Nigerian military conducted an airstrike last month on a religious festival in the northern part of the country, killing scores of Nigerian civilians. Thirty minutes later, the military launched a second missile, killing dozens more, including people trying to rescue victims of the first strike.

The December 3 attack killed more than 120 villagers celebrating Maulud, the birthday of the Islamic prophet Muhammad, according to Amnesty International. But in a press call ahead of U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s trip to Nigeria and several other African nations this week, a State Department official expressed annoyance when journalists asked about regional insecurity and coups, complaining that the press was not focusing on the “fun” aspects of the trip. She then challenged The Intercept’s characterization of the drone attack and defended Nigeria’s handling of the aftermath of the December airstrikes in the village of Tudun Biri.

“I wouldn’t call it an attack,” Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Molly Phee told The Intercept on the January 18 call. “The Nigerians have admitted it was an operational error that tragically killed people in Kaduna State.”

“The one thing that is clear in this case is the fact that the military launched an attack which inadvertently killed innocent people,” Anietie Ewang, Human Rights Watch’s Nigeria researcher told The Intercept. “There should be less focus on semantics and more effort to ensure accountability and a stop to these unacceptable mistakes that have caused needless deaths, pain, and suffering.”

Last month’s attacks were just the latest of hundreds of Nigerian airstrikes that have killed thousands of Nigerians, including a 2017 attack on a displaced persons camp in Rann, Nigeria, that killed more than 160 civilians, many of them children. In 2022, The Intercept exclusively revealed that the attack was referred to as an instance of “U.S.-Nigerian operations” in a formerly secret U.S. military document.

While the drone that conducted the December 2023 attack was most likely a Turkish-made Bayraktar TB2, Nigeria has killed a growing number of civilians even as the United States has strengthened military ties with the West African nation and signed off on its purchase of attack aircraft and lethal munitions. The strike on Tudun Biri came just two days before a group of senators urged the Biden administration to ensure greater oversight of Israel’s use of U.S.-provided weapons in Gaza. The State Department did not answer questions about U.S. monitoring of American weapons transferred to Nigeria.

“In addition to recognizing civilian harm when it happens, it’s also important that the U.S. push for accountability and justice for that harm — both in U.S. military operations and also in partner operations, like with the case in Nigeria,” Rep. Sara Jacobs, D-Calif., told The Intercept. “I have long emphasized the importance of upholding human rights in our security relationship with Nigeria and will continue to push the State Department on this issue.”

“You Guys Are Bumming Me Out”

Phee spoke with reporters on a conference call ahead of Blinken’s trip to Cabo Verde, Cote d’Ivoire, Nigeria, and Angola. The visit is his third overseas mission of 2024, following a 10-nation trip to the Middle East and a three-day sojourn to the World Economic Forum in Switzerland and amid ongoing crises in Ukraine, Gaza, and the Red Sea that have buffeted the Biden White House. The State Department emphasized that Blinken would “highlight how the United States has accelerated the U.S.-Africa partnership” regarding climate, food, and health security. During the press call, Phee took exception to repeated questions about turmoil in the West African Sahel that strayed from her “positive” messaging. “You guys are bumming me out because you’re not talking about any of the really fun and positive, forward-looking things we’ll be doing,” she said.

Blinken will spend Tuesday and Wednesday in Nigeria, where he will meet with President Bola Tinubu and Foreign Minister Yusuf Tuggar to discuss economic opportunities, trade, and countering terrorism.

Nigeria is West Africa’s economic leader and plays a major role in regional security issues, including responses to the coups and spiraling militant Islamist violence in the Sahel region. The country is also waging a long-running war against extremist militants and armed groups that it typically refers to as “bandits.”

Between 2000 and 2022, the U.S. provided, facilitated, or approved more than $2 billion in security aid and weapons and equipment sales to Nigeria, according to a report by Brown University’s Center for Human Rights and Humanitarian Studies, the Security Assistance Monitor at the Center for International Policy, and InterAction. Over that time, the U.S. also carried out more than 41,000 training courses for Nigerian military personnel.

In 2021, the U.S. delivered to Nigeria 12 Super Tucano warplanes as part of a $593 million package, approved by the State Department in 2017 that also included bombs and rockets. Last May, as part of the sale, the U.S. completed a $38 million project to construct new facilities for those aircraft.

In 2022, the State Department approved the sale to Nigeria of nearly $1 billion in AH-1Z attack helicopters and supporting munitions and equipment. “The proposed sale will better equip Nigeria to contribute to shared security objectives [and] promote regional stability,” reads a Defense Department press release.

Last year, Reps. Jacobs and Chris Smith, R-N.J., called on the Biden administration to scuttle the nearly $1 billion attack helicopter deal. “We write to express our concern with current U.S. policy on and military support to Nigeria,” the lawmakers said, urging “a review of security assistance and cooperation programs in Nigeria, including a risk assessment of civilian casualties and abuses.” The Biden administration eventually held a classified briefing to address lawmakers’ questions, according to a source on Capitol Hill.

“The United States and other countries providing security assistance to Nigeria must conduct thorough assessments of civilian harm risks and condition their assistance on thorough investigations into civilian harm incidents as well as concrete changes to rules of engagement and procedures that address the risks and gaps identified,” said Vianney Bisimwa, the regional director of the Sahel program at Center for Civilians in Conflict, or CIVIC.

“A Propaganda Scheme”

Phee lauded the Nigerian government’s response to the December 2023 drone strike. “They acted with transparency, immediately acknowledged the horrific accident. They set up a reparation process and a transparent investigation,” she told The Intercept. “So, they have, I think, responded to that tragedy in a constructive way that will contribute to rebuilding confidence of the Nigerian people and the security services.” Amnesty International reported, however, that the Nigerian military engaged in a cover-up and offered contradictory explanations for that attack — first claiming the airstrike was a mistake and then, as Amnesty put it, that “suspected bandits had embedded with civilians.”

The Nigerian military has a long history of errant attacks on innocent people and has repeatedly denied responsibility for strikes and frequently been accused of covering up civilian deaths, including running what a 2023 investigation by Nigeria’s Premium Times called “a systemic propaganda scheme to keep the atrocities of its troops under wraps.”

In addition to the December 2023 strike in Tudun Biri, an attack last January killed 39 civilians and injured at least six others. Witnesses and local officials said a December 2022 strike that targeted “bandits” killed at least 64 people, including civilians. An August 2022 attack that the Nigerian military said killed a Boko Haram commander actually left at least eight civilians dead. In February 2022, a reported Nigerian airstrike on a village in neighboring Niger killed at least 12 civilians. In September 2021, following an initial denial, the Nigerian Air Force admitted that it attacked a village, killing 10 civilians and injuring another 20. That April, a Nigerian military helicopter reportedly launched indiscriminate attacks on homes, farms, and a school. And the January 17, 2017, airstrike on a displaced persons camp in Rann, Nigeria — which a secret U.S. military investigation said involved the United States — killed more than 160 civilians and seriously wounded more than 120 people.

In 2022, the Protection of Civilians in Conflict Caucus — of which Jacobs is a founder — called on Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to disclose details of the U.S. role in the 2017 airstrike on the displaced persons camp. That year, the Pentagon missed a 90-day deadline to provide answers and, last week, refused to say whether Austin ever provided the information. “As with all correspondences received, the Department responds to the authors of the letter as appropriate,” Pentagon spokesperson Lisa Lawrence told The Intercept. “I do not have anything further to share at this time.” 

A source on Capitol Hill told The Intercept that the Biden administration briefed members of Congress on the 2017 attack but declined to provide details because the information was classified.

A 2023 Reuters analysis of data compiled by the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project, a U.S.-based armed violence monitoring group, found that even outside Nigeria’s three northeastern states beset by its long-running war against Islamist militants, more than 2,600 people were killed in 248 airstrikes during the previous five years. Most victims were identified as “communal militia,” a catchall category that includes local self-defense forces, criminal gangs, and so-called bandits. An analysis by Action on Armed Violence, a U.K.-based organization that investigates civilian harm, counted 14 airstrikes that killed 399 civilians and injured 310 others between 2010 and 2023.

“There has been a concerning pattern of deadly strikes in Nigeria and civilians have paid a heavy price. This cannot go on,” said CIVC’s Bisimwa. “Scrutiny into the conduct of military operations of Nigeria’s air force is a must.”

Phee told The Intercept that Blinken would “definitely” speak to Tinubu about the strikes on Tudun Biri, noting that “promoting and protecting human rights” is “part of our ongoing dialogue” with Nigeria’s government. She went on to say that the State Department hosted a Nigerian delegation for four hours of discussion last week on such issues. “So, I’m certain,” she said, that “the Secretary will talk about it when he sees the president and the foreign minister.”

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Israel’s unrelenting assault on the Gaza Strip is beginning to tip the Middle East into a wider regional conflict. In the past week, the Houthis in Yemen emerged as an unlikely power player, successfully disrupting global shipping in the name of Palestinians in Gaza and goading the U.S. into launching a series of airstrikes in a failed bid at deterrence.

Over the past three months, the Houthis have attacked merchant ships passing through the Red Sea, an unexpected military intervention aimed at forcing Israel to end its U.S.-backed offensive in Gaza and allow aid into the besieged territory.

The Houthis’ squeeze on the critical trade route is already impacting the global economy: Spooked shipping companies have diverted vessels toward more costly routes, with risk insurance premiums and global shipping prices rising. The effects of the attempted blockade could soon be seen in the costs of oil and consumer goods worldwide.

The U.S. Navy, considered the security guarantor of maritime shipping routes across much of the world, was eventually pressured into action. Since last week, the U.S. launched five airstrikes on Houthi positions. The Houthis doubled down. They fired at passing ships with several more rounds of missiles and drones. The targets included U.S. commercial vessels and a U.S. Navy warship — signs that the rebels were only emboldened by the U.S. volley.

During a White House press briefing on Thursday, President Joe Biden acknowledged that the airstrikes were not stopping the Houthis but said the U.S. would keep targeting the group anyway.

With its decision to attack, the Biden administration appears to have opened itself up to a geopolitical checkmate by the Houthis. Escalating the strikes against the rebels will likely bring more shipping disruptions — potentially counterproductive to mitigating economic consequences — and risk a full-blown regional war. Negotiating or submitting to the demands of a nonstate militia group from one of the poorest countries in the world would be seen by many as a U.S. surrender and would boost the Houthis’ newfound popularity.

Battle-hardened in a brutal civil war with a Saudi-backed Yemeni government-in-exile, the Houthis look unready to back down, even inviting the wider conflict.

“The Houthis absolutely want this conflict,” said Iona Craig, a journalist and political specialist focused on Yemen. “It is part of their ideology, whose anti-American element was formed during the period of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. They now very much see themselves as the defenders of Palestinians and the people of Gaza.”

“The Houthis absolutely want this conflict. … They now very much see themselves as the defenders of Palestinians and the people of Gaza.”

With the Houthis undeterred, the U.S. State Department took a different approach on Wednesday, designating the militia as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist group, a partial reversal of its decision in 2021 to remove the Houthis from the more stringent Foreign Terrorist Organization list. The new designation makes the Houthis subject to economic and political sanctions but avoids the stricter rules of the FTO list. Humanitarian groups said harsher measures would impede aid to areas of Yemen that Houthis came to control during the civil war.

Two hours after being redesignated as a terror group in the U.S., the Houthis targeted a U.S. carrier ship, and the U.S. responded with another round of strikes.

“The Biden administration seems to be hoping that degrading Houthi capabilities will coerce them to stop, but that doesn’t appear to be working,” Daniel DePetris, a fellow at Defense Priorities, a foreign policy think tank based in Washington, told The Intercept. “Everyone is deterrable, and the Houthis are not lunatics. But the problem when dealing with nonstate actors is that it requires more force to get them to change their strategic calculus.”

He added, “The Saudis also thought that they could beat the Houthis militarily without having to address any of the political demands that they were making.”

Ragtag Rebels to Regional Aspirations

Once a small, ragtag army, the Houthis learned to hit back against much more powerful militaries over years of civil war and foreign intervention — acquiring knowledge they appear to be putting into practice against the U.S.

The Houthis, officially known as Ansarallah, emerged decades ago as a movement opposed to the perceived corruption of the Yemeni government. For the past several years, the group has been at war with the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen and are currently in peace negotiations to end the conflict. The U.S. played a key role in the civil war, heavily arming — and for a time giving direct assistance to — an air campaign by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates that inflicted huge civilian casualties. The onslaught failed to defeat the Houthis.

The civil war became a training ground where the Houthis learned to outmaneuver vastly superior U.S.-made weapons — especially air power — in its current operation in the Red Sea. The rebels use inexpensive anti-ship missiles and small boats to attack the shipping vessels, utilizing the advantage of light and mobile forces that drive up costs and weaken the effectiveness of enemies’ attacks from the air.

“The Houthis have a big force, but they rely on distributing their power broadly across the territory that they control. They rely more on being mobile than on heavy infrastructure,” said Baraa Shiban, a political analyst on Yemen and associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute. “They have survived a long air campaign by two of the stronger militaries in the region, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, and have adapted how to move and operate their forces accordingly.”

The Houthis are often dismissed as mere proxies of Iran, part of a nexus of groups referred to as the “Axis of Resistance,” which includes Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Palestinian militants of Hamas. Analysts, however, say that while Iran does provide the Houthis with money, weapons, and military training, the Houthis operate with relative political independence.

“It is robbing them of their agency when we say that the Houthis are merely stooges of Iran,” Hisham Al-Omeisy, senior adviser on Yemen with the European Institute of Peace, told The Intercept. “They have their own mindset, agenda, and ideology.”

The civil war became a training ground where the Houthis learned to outmaneuver vastly superior U.S.-made weapons.

In its most dramatic display of independence, the Houthis reportedly rebuffed Iranian efforts to stop them from taking the Yemeni capital of Sanaa in 2015, according to U.S. intelligence reports.

The Houthis have long made confrontation with the U.S. and Israel a major plank of their ideology, expressed as a blend of Islamism, anti-imperialism, and overt antisemitism. Along with other Iran-backed groups, the Houthis reject most aspects of the U.S.-backed political order in the region and have made serious threats to the stability of U.S.-allied regimes like Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

“One of the main things people miss about the Houthis is that their end goal is not just Yemen. This is an expansionist group with regional ambitions,” said Al-Omeisy. “This conflict is a perfect opportunity for them to say that they are the real vanguard of the Arab nation, while other leaders are complicit in the suffering of the Palestinians.”

Winning Hearts and Minds

At the center of the unrest in the Red Sea is the crisis in Gaza, which has been devastated by Israeli attacks since the October 7 offensive by Hamas. Though Israeli troops are carrying out the war that has killed more than 24,000 Palestinians, the U.S. is the patron and enabler. The Biden administration continues to offer unblinking financial and diplomatic support to Israel, despite mounting accusations against the U.S. of complicity in genocide.

The Houthis entered the fray almost immediately. In the days after Israel launched its retaliatory assault, the Houthis sent ballistic missiles toward Israel and began its attacks on the Red Sea shipping lanes.

The Houthis have long been a polarizing force in Yemeni politics, but they have seized on anti-American sentiment in the Arab world and the seeming indifference of pro-U.S. regimes to the suffering in Gaza to elevate their geopolitical status. Not only are the Houthis distinguishing themselves as champions of the Palestinian cause, but they are also rehabilitating their reputation at home, where they have struggled to set up a functional government amid civil war. Houthi spokespeople have become fixtures on Arabic-language television stations, where they relish their role challenging the West over the plight of the Palestinians.

Not only are the Houthis distinguishing themselves as champions of the Palestinian cause, but they are also rehabilitating their reputation at home.

Anger toward the U.S. seems likely to grow in the region, as the Biden administration appears to be putting the global economy over Palestinian lives in its strikes on the Houthis.

“The U.S. should consider that these actions in Gaza are enraging people throughout the region,” said Al-Omeisy. “The local perception is that when Palestinian blood was being shed the last three months, no one was bothered, but when the economic interests of the West were threatened, they immediately acted. This message fits right into Houthi rhetoric and is resonating very strongly in the region.”

Their bid is working. Rather than weakening the Houthis, the U.S. airstrikes seem to be boosting the Houthis’ political standing throughout the Middle East, where analysts say public opinion of the U.S. has reached lows not seen since the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. Polls taken among Arabs in the region show widespread anger and disillusionment toward the U.S. since the start of the Gaza war, with far more favorable views of rival countries like China and Russia.

“The Biden administration and U.S. policymakers have not yet grasped how high anti-Americanism is in the region, where it is at a level that we have not seen since the war in Iraq,” Shiban, of Royal United Services Institute, said. “Even if they claim that this is an Israeli operation and we have nothing to do with it, the Arab public does not buy it.”

With the U.S. military now stuck in an exchange of attacks with the Houthis, experts say the Biden administration has no good options.

“I don’t think that the U.S. is trying to engage in regime change in Yemen,” said DePetris, the Defense Priorities fellow, “but if this continues to snowball, that may end up being something that the administration may try to consider.”

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Targeting intelligence — the information used to conduct airstrikes and fire long-range artillery weapons — has played a central role in Israel’s siege of Gaza. A document obtained through the Freedom of Information Act suggests that the U.S. Air Force sent officers specializing in this exact form of intelligence to Israel in late November.

Since the start of Israel’s bombardment in retaliation for Hamas’s strike on October 7, Israel has dropped more than 29,000 bombs on the tiny Gaza Strip, according to a U.S. intelligence report last month. And for the first time in U.S. history, the Biden administration has been flying surveillance drone missions over Gaza since at least early November, ostensibly for hostage recovery by special forces. At the time the drones were revealed, U.S. Gen. Pat Ryder insisted that the special operations forces deployed to Israel to advise on hostage rescue were “not participating in [Israel Defense Forces] target development.”

“I’ve directed my team to share intelligence and deploy additional experts from across the United States government to consult with and advise the Israeli counterparts on hostage recovery efforts,” said President Joe Biden three days after the Hamas attack. 

But several weeks later, on November 21, the U.S. Air Force issued deployment guidelines for officers, including intelligence engagement officers, headed to Israel. Experts say that a team of targeting officers like this would be used to provide satellite intelligence to the Israelis for the purpose of offensive targeting. 

“They’re probably targeting people, targeting officers,” Lawrence Cline, who served as an intelligence engagement officer in Iraq before retirement, told The Intercept. Targeting intelligence refers to the identification and characterization of enemy activities including missile and artillery launches, location of leadership and command and control centers, and key facilities. “What I can see is we’ve got a lot of global assets in terms of satellites and the like and the Israelis have a lot in terms of more localized radar coverage.”

The deployment guidelines were issued by the Pentagon’s Air Force component command for the Middle East, Air Forces Central, on November 21. The document provides deployment instructions to air personnel sent to the country, including an “Air Defense Liaison Team” as well as “airmen assigned as the Intelligence Engagement Officer (IEO).” 

Intelligence engagement officers, Cline explained, coordinate intelligence between the U.S. and partner militaries. When deployed in Iraq, Cline, who now works as an instructor for the Defense Department Counterterrorism Fellowship Program, recalled that he and other IEOs comprised a small team who spent “probably three quarters of our time working with the Iraqis, the other quarter checking in with headquarters,” adding that “it was sort of half and half a liaison and advising.”

Asked about the airmen’s mission, the Defense Intelligence Agency referred questions to the Air Forces Central, which did not respond to a request for comment. Neither the Office of the Secretary of Defense nor Central Command responded to requests for comment. 

The intelligence engagement process provides a low-profile mechanism through which the U.S. can coordinate with the Israeli military, a valuable tool amid the political sensitivity of the conflict.

A U.S. Army primer defines intelligence engagement as a “powerful” tool that is useful “especially when U.S. policy might restrict our interaction,” as it “often does not require large budgets or footprints.” Experts say that may be the case here.

Tyler McBrien, managing editor of Lawfare, a website specializing in national security law, said that there seems to be an “Israel exception” to the U.S. rules around military assistance. 

Past presidents have issued several executive orders banning the U.S. government from carrying out or sponsoring assassinations abroad. This ban has been interpreted to include wartime targeting of civilians, according to a recent Foreign Affairs article by Brian Finucane, a former legal adviser for the State Department who now works for Crisis Group.

And the so-called Leahy law, a set of budget amendments named for Sen. Patrick Leahy, requires the U.S. government to vet foreign military units for “gross violations of human rights” when providing training or aid to those units. Several progressive members of Congress have raised concerns that U.S. aid to Israel — both before and during the present war — violates that requirement.

“For air advisory missions, which I imagine involve intelligence sharing and training, specific domestic legal restrictions such as the Leahy law and the assassination ban would likely come into play,” McBrien said. But the Leahy vetting process is “reversed” for Israel; rather than vetting Israeli military units beforehand, the U.S. State Department sends aid and then waits for reports of violations, according to a recent article by Josh Paul, who resigned from his post as a State Department political-military officer over his concerns with U.S. support for Israel.

“As a general matter, U.S. officials who are providing support to another country during armed conflict would want to make sure they are not aiding and abetting war crimes,” Finucane told The Intercept. He emphasized that the same principle applies to weapons transfers and intelligence sharing.

The Israeli military intentionally strikes Palestinian civilian infrastructure, known as “power targets,” in order to “create a shock,” according to an investigation by the Israeli news website +972 Magazine. Targets are generated using an artificial intelligence system known as “Habsora,” Hebrew for “gospel.”

“Nothing happens by accident,” an Israeli military intelligence source told +972 Magazine. “When a 3-year-old girl is killed in a home in Gaza, it’s because someone in the army decided it wasn’t a big deal for her to be killed — that it was a price worth paying in order to hit [another] target. We are not Hamas. These are not random rockets. Everything is intentional. We know exactly how much collateral damage there is in every home.”

The Biden administration has gone to great lengths to conceal the nature of its support for the Israeli military. The Pentagon quietly tapped a so-called Tiger Team to facilitate weapons assistance to Israel, as The Intercept has previously reported. The administration has also declined to reveal which weapons systems it’s providing Israel and at which quantities, insisting that the secrecy is necessary for security reasons. 

“We’re being careful not to quantify or get into too much detail about what they’re getting — for their own operational security purposes, of course,” White House spokesperson John Kirby told reporters during a press briefing in October. 

This contrasts with its support for Ukraine, about which it has been far more transparent. The administration has provided an itemized list of its weapons assistance to Ukraine, a country facing at least as much of a threat amid the invasion of Russia. The White House has never addressed the incongruity. Past administrations have also provided detailed public information about U.S. targeting support for the Saudi and Emirati military campaigns in Yemen, which U.S. officials claim was meant to reduce civilian casualties.

The secrecy “may reflect the fact that the U.S. has interests that are in tension, the Biden administration has interests that are in tension,” Finucane said. “On the one hand, they want to publicly embrace Israel and support Israel, providing what seems to be unconditional support. On the other hand, they don’t want to be perceived as taking the country into another war in the Middle East.”

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Rep. Sara Jacobs, D-Calif., has urged the Pentagon to immediately make amends to a Somali family following an investigation by The Intercept of a 2018 U.S. drone strike that killed a woman and her 4-year-old daughter.

Her call for action follows a December open letter from two dozen human rights organizations – 14 Somali and 10 international groups — calling on Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to compensate the family for the deaths. The family is also seeking an explanation and an apology.

The April 1, 2018, attack in Somalia killed at least three, and possibly five, civilians, including 22-year-old Luul Dahir Mohamed and her 4-year-old daughter Mariam Shilow Muse. A U.S. military investigation acknowledged the deaths of a woman and child but concluded their identities might never be known. This reporter traveled to Somalia and spoke with seven of their relatives. For more than five years, the family has tried to contact the U.S. government, including through U.S. Africa Command’s online civilian casualty reporting portal, but never received a response.

“I find it deeply troubling that after the Department of Defense confirmed that a U.S. drone strike killed civilians, Luul Dahir Mohamed and her daughter, Mariam Shilow Muse, in 2018, their family has reportedly yet to hear from DoD — even years later,” said Jacobs, a member of the House Armed Services Committee and the House Foreign Affairs Committee, where she serves as ranking member of the subcommittee on Africa. “While the U.S. government can never fully take away their loved ones’ pain, acknowledgment and amends are needed to find peace and healing.”

Jacobs’s call for reparations comes on the heels of the Pentagon’s late-December release of its long-awaited “Instruction on Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response,” or DoD-I, which established the Pentagon’s “policies, responsibilities, and procedures for mitigating and responding to civilian harm.”

The document, mandated under the 2019 National Defense Authorization Act, or NDAA, and approved by Austin, directs the military to “acknowledge civilian harm resulting from U.S. military operations and respond to individuals and communities affected by U.S. military operations” including “expressing condolences” and providing so-called ex gratia payments to next of kin.

“We welcome this policy, which is both the first of its kind and long overdue. But like any policy, what’s on paper is just the first step,” said Annie Shiel, the U.S. advocacy director for the Center for Civilians in Conflict, one of the groups that authored the open letter about the Somalia strike. “The real measure of its success will be in implementation, and how or whether it delivers results for civilians – both by preventing a repetition of the devastating civilian harm caused by U.S. operations over the last twenty years, and by finally delivering answers and accountability to the many civilians harmed in those operations who are still waiting for acknowledgement from the U.S. government.”

Although the DoD-I also mentions “ensur[ing] a free flow of information to media and the public” and the need for public affairs personnel to “provide timely and accurate responses to public inquiries and requests related to civilian harm,” the Pentagon did not respond to questions about the letter to Austin, the DoD-I, or Jacobs’s comments. Another set of questions about civilian harm, emailed to the Defense Department in September 2022, also have yet to be answered. “I have pressed for responses to your questions,” Pentagon spokesperson Lisa Lawrence wrote in an email late last month. “As with all queries, it takes time to coordinate.”

In 2022, following increased scrutiny of the U.S. military’s killing of civilians; underreporting of noncombatant casualties; failures of accountability; and outright impunity in Afghanistan, Libya, Iraq, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, and elsewhere, the Pentagon pledged reforms. The 36-page Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Action Plan, known in Washington as the CHMR-AP, provides a blueprint for improving how the Pentagon addresses noncombatant deaths but lacks clear mechanisms for addressing past civilian harm. Jacobs — founder and co-chair of the Protection of Civilians in Conflict Caucus — has been one of the foremost elected officials pressing the Pentagon to take greater accountability for civilian casualties. Last July, she introduced the Civilian Harm Review and Reassessment Act, which would require the Defense Department to examine and reinvestigate past civilian casualty allegations, stretching back to 2011, and make amends if necessary. 

The 2024 NDAA, passed late last year, included another provision, authored by Jacobs and Rep. Jason Crow, D-Colo., requiring the director of national intelligence to notify Congress if U.S. intelligence, used by a third party, results in civilian casualties. Jacobs’s efforts also led to a Government Accountability Office assessment of the effectiveness of civilian harm training including an evaluation of the efficacy of current methods. That report, due by March 1, is nearly complete according to Chuck Young, a GAO spokesperson.

“After U.S. military operations have caused civilian harm, victims, survivors, and their families often face significant obstacles to getting answers and acknowledgment from the U.S. government, let alone amends for what happened,” Jacobs told The Intercept, referencing the April 2018 drone attack that killed Luul and Mariam. “I urge the Department of Defense to live up to its responsibility in the CHMR-AP to make amends for past civilian harm and immediately address this case.”

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Weapons used by the Israel Defense Forces, security cabinet leaks, and stories about people held hostage by Hamas — these are some of the eight subjects the media are forbidden from reporting in Israel, according to a document obtained by The Intercept.

The document, a censorship order issued by the Israeli military to the media as part of its war on Hamas, has not been previously reported. The memo, written in English, was an unusual move for the IDF’s censor, which has been part of the Israel military for more than seven decades.

“I haven’t ever seen instructions like this sent from the censor aside from general notices broadly telling outlets to comply, and even then it was only sent to certain people,” said Michael Omer-Man, a former editor-in-chief of the Israel’s +972 Magazine and today the director of research for Israel–Palestine at Democracy in the Arab World Now, or DAWN, a U.S. advocacy group.

Titled “Operation ‘Swords of Iron’ Israeli Chief Censor Directive to the Media,” the order is not dated, but its reference to Operation Swords of Iron — the name of Israel’s current military operation in Gaza — makes clear that it was issued sometime after Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel. The order is signed by the chief censor of the Israel Defense Forces, Brig. Gen. Kobi Mandelblit. (The Israeli Military Censor did not respond to a request for comment on the memo.)

The document was provided to The Intercept by a source who himself was given a copy by the Israeli military. An identical document appears on the Israeli government’s website.

“In light of the current security situation and the intensive media coverage, we wish to encourage you to submit to the Censorship all materials dealing with the activities of the Israeli Defense Forces (I.D.F.) and the Israeli security forces prior to their broadcast,” the order says. “Please update your staff of the content of this letter, with an emphasis on the news desk and field reporters.”

The order enumerates eight topics the media are forbidden from reporting on without prior approval from the Israeli Military Censor. Some of the topics touch on hot-button political issues in Israel and internationally, such as potentially embarrassing revelations about weapons used by Israel or captured by Hamas, discussions of security cabinet meetings, and the Israeli hostages in Gaza — an issue that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been widely criticized for mishandling.

The memo also bans reporting on details of military operations, Israeli intelligence, rocket attacks that hit sensitive locations in Israel, cyberattacks, and visits by senior military officials to the battlefield.

Concerns about the politicization of the military censor are not merely hypothetical. Last month, the Israeli censor reportedly complained that Netanyahu was pressuring him to crack down on certain media outlets without legitimate reason. Netanyahu denied the charge.

Self-Censorship and Secrecy

The Israeli Military Censor is a unit located within the IDF’s Military Intelligence Directorate. The unit is commanded by the chief censor, a military officer appointed by the defense minister.

Since Israel’s war on Hamas started, more than 6,500 new items were either completely censored or partially censored by the Israeli government, Guy Lurie, a research fellow at Jerusalem-based Israel Democracy Institute, told The Intercept.

To put the figure in context, Lurie said it was about four times more than before the war started, citing a report in the Israeli outlet Shakuf based on freedom of information requests. The number of submissions to the censor, however, are significantly higher at this time of heightened conflict, so Lurie noted that news items are facing a normal level of censorship in light of the ratio to total submissions.

The actual number new stories affected by the censor, however, can never be quantified. Because of a system of close relationships and a feeling for what to expect, Israeli journalists can censor themselves.

“People self-censor, people do not even try to report the stories they know won’t get through,” Omer-Man said. “And that is really showing right now in how little regular Israelis are seeing in the press about what is happening in Gaza to Palestinians.”

It is these kinds of unofficial censorship that give the censor in Israel its power, said experts.

In a 2022, a State Department report on human rights in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories took on the military censor, singling out out two Arabic-language newspapers in occupied East Jerusalem. While noting that the IDF censor didn’t review the papers, the State Department said, “Editors and journalists from those publications, however, reported they engaged in self-censorship due to fear of retribution by Israeli authorities.”

At one time, the censor had an Editors Committee composed of three members: one from the press, one from the military, and a publicly elected member who served as chair. Though the Editors Committee no longer officially exists, a similar, albeit informal body still maintains some sway.

Though the law that mandates the censor gives it widespread powers, the censor maintains its respectability in Israel by being politically independent and exercising restraint, especially in comparison to other countries in the region.

“People self-censor, people do not even try to report the stories they know won’t get through.”

“If you look at the law that governs censorship, it’s really draconian in terms of the formal authorities the censor has,” Lurie told The Intercept. “But it’s mitigated by this informal arrangement.”

Almost all of it happens in secret: Committee discussions are confidential, as are most communiques between media outlets and the censor.

Asked why the processes are so secretive and why even the news organizations won’t speak out, one Western journalist based in Israel and Palestine, who asked for anonymity to avoid reprisals, had a blunt assessment: “Because it’s embarrassing.”

Foreign Press and the Censor

That the memo of directives for the current Israeli war on Gaza was in English suggests that it was intended for Western media. Foreign journalists working in Israel must obtain government permission, including a declaration that they will abide by the censor.

“In order to get a visa as a journalist, you have to get approval from GPO” — Government Press Office — “and therefore you have to sign a document that says you will comply with the censor,” said Omer-Man. “That in itself is probably against the ethics guidelines at a bunch of papers.”

Nonetheless, many journalists do sign the document. While The Associated Press, for instance, didn’t respond to The Intercept’s query about whether it cooperates with the military censor, the news wire has in the past reported on the issue, including admitting that it holds itself to the directive.

“The Associated Press has agreed, like other organizations, to abide by the rules of the censor, which is a condition for receiving permission to operate as a media organization in Israel,” the agency wrote in a 2006 story. “Reporters are expected to censor themselves and not report any of the forbidden material.”

Asked if it complied with guidance from Israel’s military censor and whether its compliance had changed since the onset of the war, Azhar AlFadl Miranda, the communications director for the Washington Post, told The Intercept in an email, “We aren’t able to share insight,” adding that “we don’t publicly discuss our editorial decisions.”

The New York Times told The Intercept, “The New York Times reports independently on the full spectrum of this complex conflict. We do not submit coverage to the Israeli military censor.” (Reuters did not answer The Intercept’s questions.)

Foreign press that cooperates with the censor is subject to the same system: Many stories don’t get passed through the censor, but certain issues merit submitting the stories.

“They know that they need to pass onto the censor reports that they want to publish on certain subjects,” said Lurie. “There are subjects that the media know that they need to get the censor’s approval.”

One of the things that makes the written, English-language censorship order unusual, however, is the order’s overt reference to the Hamas war. “I’ve never seen that for a specific war,” Lurie said.

“There are subjects that the media know that they need to get the censor’s approval.”

One subject known to be sensitive in Israel is the country’s covert nuclear arsenal. In 2004, BBC journalist Simon Wilson interviewed Mordechai Vanunu, a whistleblower on the nuclear program, who had just been released from prison. The Israeli censors demanded copies of the interview, but Wilson did not comply.

Wilson was then barred from reentry, and the Israel government demanded an apology. Initially, the BBC refused to furnish one, but eventually the worldwide news giant folded.

“He confirms that after the Vanunu interview he was contacted by the censors and was asked to give them the tapes. He did not do so. He regrets the difficulties this caused,” the BBC said in the apology. “He undertakes to obey the regulations in future and understands that any further violation will result in his visa being revoked.”

The apology, like so much else of the censor’s work, was to have remained secret, according to a 2005 Guardian story, but the BBC accidentally posted it on its website, before quickly removing it.

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A lawsuit filed Wednesday says the U.S. government violated the First Amendment when it prevented a U.S.-based organization from hosting people sanctioned by the U.S. as speakers at a conference earlier this year. The suit, if successful, could have far-reaching implications for placing federal limits on freedom of speech when sanctioned or otherwise designated people or groups are involved.

The complaint, filed by Columbia University’s Knight First Amendment Institute, argues that the decision made by the Office of Foreign Assets Control could have consequences for public discourse, including whether news outlets could publish interviews with individuals designated under U.S. sanctions law.

For the lawyers bringing the suit, the current curtailment of speech based on sanctions amounts to the policing of thought. 

“The question at the core of the case is what control the U.S. government has over the American mind and whether it can effectively insulate Americans from ideas and people who it decides are off-limits,” said Alex Abdo, litigation director of the Knight Institute. “That is an extraordinarily dangerous authority.”

In January, the Foundation for Global Political Exchange, a U.S. nonprofit that organizes small-group discussions across the political spectrum in the Middle East, held an event in Beirut aimed at fostering political dialogue about Lebanon.

The Foundation sought to include five influential political figures in Lebanon who were either sanctioned by the U.S. government or were members of a designated organization. Two of the potential speakers were members of the Lebanese Parliament, one was a senior representative of the sanctioned Palestinian militant group Hamas, and two others were members of Hezbollah, which the U.S. government considers a terrorist organization but remains a major political party within Lebanon.

“The public gets to decide for itself which ideas to credit and which ones to reject. That is what the First Amendment is supposed to protect.”

Out of prudence, the Foundation informed OFAC, the agency that regulates sanctions, that some of the participants were on the sanctions list or affiliated with sanctioned groups. The agency was categorical in its response: Any event held by Americans with designated individuals was prohibited and risked civil or criminal penalties. OFAC claimed that inviting any of the five people — even those who were members of sanctioned organizations but not themselves listed as individuals — would violate the law by giving them “a platform for them to speak” that would provide a “service,” according to the lawsuit. (OFAC did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

The lawsuit argues that OFAC has no legal authority to prevent Americans from engaging in conversation with people on the sanctions list. The Foundation’s event was specifically protected by legal and regulatory exemptions on the exchange of information and ideas, it claims.

“OFAC is assuming the authority to control whom Americans get to hear from and by extension what views Americans hold,” Anna Diakun, a staff attorney at the Knight Institute, told The Intercept. “But the public gets to decide for itself which ideas to credit and which ones to reject. That is what the First Amendment is supposed to protect.”

OFAC is part of the U.S. Treasury Department and administers and regulates sanctions against individuals and organizations abroad. U.S. sanctions often shift based on political conditions. Given the Foundation’s mission to promote political dialogue, particularly in conflict-stricken regions, the decision to restrict the event in Beirut could be at odds with U.S. political goals, the suit argues.

“While the government sometimes has legitimate interests in imposing sanctions on groups that are hostile to the United States or engaged in human rights abuses,” the complaint states, “prohibiting the Foundation from engaging in political dialogue with designated individuals undermines rather than serves those interests.”

On its face, the case deals with the specific situation of an American organization hosting people on the U.S. sanctions list at events. But the lawsuit argues that OFAC’s decision could be applied to political speech more broadly, making it effectively illegal for Americans to speak with people out of favor with the U.S. government, including restricting journalists from publishing interviews with sanctioned individuals, which is often necessary when reporting on conflicts abroad.

“OFAC legal theory would allow it to criminalize journalists who want to engage with ideas and individuals that the U.S. government disfavors,” Abdo said. “That is a tool of autocracy, not democracy where people get to decide which ideas to engage with.”

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Two Dozen human rights organizations called on the Pentagon Monday to make amends to a Somali family following an investigation by The Intercept of a 2018 U.S. drone strike that killed a woman and her 4-year-old daughter.

The 14 Somali groups and 10 international organizations devoted to the protection of civilians urged Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III to take immediate action. The family is seeking an explanation, an apology, and compensation.

“New reporting illustrates how in multiple cases of civilian harm in Somalia confirmed by the U.S. government, civilian victims, survivors, and their families have yet to receive answers, acknowledgement, and amends despite their sustained efforts to reach authorities over several years,” reads the open letter, which was shared with The Intercept.

The April 1, 2018, attack in Somalia killed at least three, and possibly five, civilians, including 22-year-old Luul Dahir Mohamed and her 4-year-old daughter Mariam Shilow Muse. A U.S. military investigation acknowledged the deaths of a woman and child but concluded their identities might never be known. This reporter traveled to Somalia and spoke with seven of their relatives. “They know innocent people were killed, but they’ve never told us a reason or apologized. No one has been held accountable,” said Abdi Dahir Mohammed, one of Luul’s brothers. “We’ve been hurt — and humiliated.”

The Pentagon’s inquiry found that the Americans who conducted the strike were confused and inexperienced and that they argued about basic details, like how many passengers were in the targeted vehicle, according to a report obtained by The Intercept under the Freedom of Information Act after multiple requests, appeals, and a lawsuit. The U.S. task force members mistook a woman and a child for an adult male and killed Luul and Mariam in a follow-up strike as they ran from the truck in which they had hitched a ride to visit relatives. Despite this, the investigation — by the unit that conducted the attack — concluded that standard operating procedures and the rules of engagement were followed. No one was ever held accountable for the deaths.

The human rights advocates’ letter asks Austin to “take immediate steps to address the requests of families whose loved ones were killed or injured by U.S. airstrikes in Somalia” after the U.S. military ignored repeated attempts by another of Luul’s brothers, 38-year-old Abubakar Dahir Mohamed, to contact U.S. Africa Command, or AFRICOM.

“For more than five years, we have tried to make sure the identities of Luul and Mariam are known to the U.S.,” Abubakar wrote in a recent op-ed for The Continent. “I now know that the U.S. military has admitted not only to killing Luul and Mariam, but doing so even after they survived the first strike. It killed them as Luul fled the car. … The U.S. has said this in its reports, and individual officers have spoken to journalists. But it has never said this to us. No one has contacted us at all.”

Congress appropriates millions of dollars annually for the Defense Department to compensate families of civilians killed or injured in U.S. attacks, but the Pentagon has shown an aversion to confronting its mistakes and rarely makes compensation payments, even in cases as clear cut as this one.

“The U.S. response thus far stands in stark contrast to this administration’s stated priorities of mitigating, responding to, and learning from civilian harm,” reads the letter. “We urge the Department of Defense to urgently make long-overdue amends in consultation with Abubakar’s family and their representatives, including condolence payments and an explanation for why their demands appear to have been ignored until now.”

When asked if Luul’s family deserves compensation and if an apology and amends would be offered, the Office of the Secretary of Defense replied, “We do not have anything to provide for you on this right now.” AFRICOM also failed to answer The Intercept’s questions about contacting Luul’s family and providing compensation.

Last year, in response to increasing public reporting on America’s killing of civilians; underreporting of noncombatant casualties; failures of accountability; and outright impunity in Afghanistan, Libya, Iraq, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, and elsewhere, the Pentagon pledged reforms. The 36-page Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Action Plan, known in Washington as the CHMR-AP, provides a blueprint for improving how the Pentagon addresses noncombatant deaths, but lacks mechanisms for addressing past civilian harm. 

“Although the CHMR-AP does not specifically provide for a re-examination of past incidents, nothing in the CHMR-AP prevents review of incidents in light of new information and appropriate reconsideration of past assessments and decisions under the improved processes and practices that the CHMR-AP seeks to establish,” Pentagon spokesperson Lisa Lawrence wrote in an email response to The Intercept’s questions.

“Making good on the Defense Department’s commitments to improve how the U.S. prevents and responds to civilian harm must include reckoning with the harms of the last 20-plus years of U.S. operations,” said Annie Shiel, U.S. advocacy director of the Center for Civilians in Conflict, one of the signatories of the letter. “The U.S. has at its disposal at least $3 million annually to make condolence payments to civilian victims and survivors — payments that we know provide both tangible assistance and symbolic meaning for families grieving and rebuilding from unimaginable loss. In this case and in others in Somalia and around the world, the U.S. owes it to survivors to make amends in whatever way is most meaningful for them — be that a formal apology, answers about what happened to their loved ones and why, condolence payments, or other assistance.” 

The letter was also signed by Airwars, Amnesty International USA, the Association of Concerned Africa Scholars (USA), Caddalaad Doon, Coalition of Somali Human Rights Defenders, Columbia Law School Human Rights Institute, Hiraan Women Development and Family Care, Human Rights Watch, Juba Aid for Peace and Development Organization, Jubaland Youth Leaders, Kalkal Human Rights Development Organization, Marginalized Community Advocacy Network, PAX, People’s Aspiration and Human Rights Organization, Reprieve US, Resilience Hope Foundation, Somali Awareness and Social Development Organization, Somali Legal Action Network, Victim Advocates International, Waamo, Women and Child Support Organization, Youth Initiative and Human Rights Advocacy, and Zomia Center. In addition to the 2018 strike investigated by The Intercept, the letter mentions several other cases in which U.S. attacks in Somalia harmed civilians, including a 2020 drone strike that killed a teenage girl as she was sitting down to dinner with her family. Her relatives have also been trying for years to contact the U.S. in search of an explanation but have received no response, the letter says.

Advocates say that the deaths of Luul and Mariam provide the Pentagon with a unique opportunity to make good on long-standing promises to improve its mitigation of civilian harm and learn from past mistakes. A drone pilot and analyst, who served in Somalia the year Luul and Mariam were killed and spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the attack was no anomaly. “When I went to Africa, it seemed like no one was paying attention. It was like, ‘We can do whatever we want,’” he told The Intercept. When he counted the civilians he knew the U.S. had killed and compared that tally with publicly announced figures, he said, “the numbers just didn’t add up.”

“Our clients in this case began attempting to contact AFRICOM and the DoD in the immediate days after Luul and Mariam were killed and have followed every procedure these institutions have made available,” said Clare Brown, the deputy director of Victim Advocates International, an organization that supports victims of serious international crimes, including war crimes, and is now representing Luul’s family. “We are in the process of compiling a case which we intend to transmit to the U.S. through every possible portal, in the hope of finally getting a response. The family has the same ask they have been making for the past five and a half years — for both compensation and to be told, face to face, what happened to their sister and her daughter on that day in April 2018.”

Luul’s family was traumatized by the airstrike and has suffered for more than half a decade. Her brothers say their elderly father — who died earlier this month — never recovered from his daughter’s sudden death. Luul’s 6-year-old son, Mohamed Shilow Muse, constantly asks why Luul left him and is terrified of being alone. If he sees or hears a drone, he hides beneath a tree.

“Since the strike, our family has been broken apart. It has been more than five years since it happened, but we have not been able to move on,” Abubakar wrote. “But in all that time, even as we have contacted [the U.S. government] in every way we know how, we have never been able to even start a process of getting justice. The U.S. has never even acknowledged our existence.”

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The Pentagon is working to expedite weapons exports to Israel by deploying a so-called Tiger Team of experts to facilitate the transfers, according to procurement records reviewed by The Intercept. Some of the arms sales will be carried out through a new Army initiative designed specifically for the provision of weapons to Israel.

The Israel-specific program, called the Israel Significant Initiatives Group, is located within the Army’s Defense Exports and Cooperation office, which oversees policy for U.S. arms sales.

The Tiger Team meets daily with the Pentagon’s Defense Security Cooperation Agency, or DSCA, which executes U.S. arms sales, to overcome barriers to arms sales to Israel. The “tiger team,” a crisis rapid response team involving a diverse set of experts, is supposed to examine potential bottlenecks and delays in weapons transfers and offer advice for alleviating the issues.

The existence of both the Tiger Team and the Israel Significant Initiatives Group have not been previously reported.

“As implementer of the vast majority of both State and Defense Department security assistance, DSCA sits at the center of our arms transfers to Israel,” said Josh Paul, a former director for the State Department’s Bureau of Political-Military Affairs, which oversees U.S. arms transfers. He said the creation of a Tiger Team is a policy choice by President Joe Biden to get weapons to Israel as fast as possible.

“This shows that at all levels of government, from policy to implementation, the Biden Administration is doing all it can to rush arms to Israel despite President Biden’s recent explicit statement that Israel’s bombing of Gaza is ‘indiscriminate,’ and despite extensive reporting that the arms we are providing are causing massive civilian casualties,” said Paul, who resigned from the State Department in protest of the Biden administration’s ongoing weapons assistance to Israel. “This will not be a proud moment for the Biden Administration, the State Department – or for DSCA.”

The Defense Department did not respond to multiple requests for comment about the Tiger Team and the Israel Significant Initiatives Group.

According to a source familiar with the Tiger Team, who asked for anonymity to discuss sensitive deliberations, the group of experts has raised harm to civilians in Gaza as a potential issue with U.S. weapons sales to Israel.

“The Tiger Team is looking at issues of civilian harm, and is raising those issues, but is being met with absolute lack of interest and direction from the top to keep the process moving,” the source said.

“The Tiger Team is looking at issues of civilian harm, and is raising those issues, but is being met with absolute lack of interest.”

Both the Tiger Team and the Israel Significant Initiatives Group are using defense contractors to staff up. Reference to the Tiger Team appears in a job posting by the Hoplite Group.

“In response to the 7 October 2023 attacks by Hamas on Israel, the Defense Security Cooperation Agency has served as the implementer of the Foreign Military Sales (FMS) process with Israel,” the job listing says. “There is a desire to generate real-time Lessons Learned to assess major bottlenecks, anticipate major hurdles to overcome, and analyze the limits of FMS support to Partner Nations.”

Another defense contractor, Sigmatech, listed a position for an “operations support specialist” to work on the Israel Significant Initiatives Group. The listing has since been removed.

The White House convened a Tiger Team in preparation for the Russian invasion of Ukraine, according to the Washington Post. After the invasion, the Tiger Team reportedly developed contingency plans for how to respond in the event that Russian President Vladimir Putin resorted to chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons.

According to Paul, the new Tiger Team for Israel shows that the arms sales system, already supercharged after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, is still not fast enough for the administration.

“The assembling of a Tiger Team demonstrates that the Biden administration believes that all of the existing mechanisms of arms transfer — mechanisms which have proved their extreme ability to expedite arms transfers to Ukraine for the past two years — do not work fast enough,” Paul said.

The Defense Exports and Cooperation office has previously touted its work providing security assistance to allied countries. Over the past year, for example, it has posted copies of several Defense Department press releases detailing security assistance to Ukraine, as well as other partner countries like Colombia and the Philippines. 

“U.S. Sends Ukraine $400 Million in Military Equipment,” a March press release is titled. The release includes a picture of a tank unit billowing smoke from its howitzers. Another press release, from December of last year, detailed a security package to Ukraine, right down to the specific numbers of munitions like artillery, tank, and mortar rounds. 

When it comes to Israel, the Defense Exports and Cooperation office has not posted a single press release this year. Secrecy has been a hallmark of the Biden administration’s weapons transfers to Israel, as The Intercept has previously reported.

White House spokesperson John Kirby acknowledged the secrecy in October. “We’re being careful not to quantify or get into too much detail about what they’re getting — for their own operational security purposes, of course,” he told reporters. 

Shortly after the October 7 Hamas surprise attack against Israel, the White House asked Congress to remove key restrictions on Israel’s ability to access U.S. weapons stockpiles in the country, as The Intercept reported last month. The White House request sought to “allow for the transfer of all categories of defense articles” from the stockpiles, as well as to remove requirements that such weapons be obsolete or surplus in nature.

In other instances of weapons sales to Israel, the administration has cut out Congress entirely. Last week, the Biden administration bypassed Congress to authorize the sale of 13,000 tank shells to Israel.

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As one of his final foreign policy acts as president, in January 2021 Donald Trump added Cuba to the list of “State Sponsors of Terror,” reversing the Obama administration’s 2015 determination that the designation was no longer appropriate. 

The incoming Biden administration pledged to Congress it would start the process of overturning Trump’s redesignation, which by statute requires a six-month review process. Yet in a private briefing last week on Capitol Hill, State Department official Eric Jacobstein stunned members of Congress by telling them that the department has not even begun the review process, according to three sources in the room.

In the briefing, Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., inquired as to the status of the review. In order to remove Cuba from the list, statute requires at least a six-month review period. The news that the State Department had not even launched the review came as a surprise to McGovern and others in the room, and meant that the delisting couldn’t occur before mid-2024 at the earliest. McGovern pressed Jacobstein, noting that Congress had previously been assured that a review was underway. Jacobstein, according to sources in the room, said that perhaps there had been some misunderstanding around a different review of sanctions policies that State was undertaking. 

“I don’t think they were prepared to respond to how upset members were,” said one Democrat, who was granted anonymity to discuss the private meeting. “They were furious.” 

Vedant Patel, a spokesperson for the State Department, declined to comment on a closed-door meeting in Congress, and additionally declined to directly confirm or deny whether a review was ongoing. “We’re not going to comment on the deliberative process as it relates to the status of any designation,” said Patel. “Any review of Cuba’s status on the SST list — should one ever happen — would be based on the law and criteria established by Congress.”

McGovern, however, had already been told that such a review was ongoing, according to multiple sources who heard directly from McGovern about the State Department’s messaging. 

Biden’s refusal to even review Cuba’s status marks a strong rebuke of one of the Obama administration’s signature foreign policy achievements, the move toward normalizing relations with Cuba. 

The Trump administration’s rationale for redesignating Cuba as a sponsor of terror relied heavily on the country having hosted representatives from FARC and ELN, two armed guerrilla movements designated by the U.S. as terror groups. But in October 2022, Colombian President Gustavo Petro, in a joint press conference with Secretary of State Antony Blinken, noted that Colombia itself, in cooperation with the Obama administration, had asked Cuba to host the FARC and ELN members as part of peace talks. The move by the Trump administration was “an injustice,” he said, and ought to be undone. “It is not us [Colombia] who must correct it, but it does need to be corrected,” added Petro, himself a onetime guerrilla.

“When it comes to Cuba,” Blinken said at the press conference, “and when it comes to the state sponsor of terrorism designation, we have clear laws, clear criteria, clear requirements, and we will continue as necessary to revisit those to see if Cuba continues to merit that designation.” Blinken’s public claim — “we will continue as necessary to revisit” the designation — coupled with private assurances from the State Department left members of Congress certain that a review was underway. 

Blinken was also asked about Cuba’s status in a hearing in March 2023 and said that Cuba had yet to meet the requirements to be removed from the list. “In both of these instances the Secretary was reiterating what we’ve said previously — should there be rescission of the SST status, it would need to be consistent with specific statutory criteria for rescinding a SST determination,” Patel said.

The terror designation makes it difficult for Cubans to do international business, crushing an already fragile economy. The U.S. hard-line approach to Cuba has coincided with a surge in desperate migration, with Cubans now making up a substantial portion of the migrants arriving at the southern border. Nearly 425,000 Cubans have fled for the United States in fiscal years 2022 and 2023, shattering previous records. Instead of moving to stem the flow by focusing on root causes in Cuba, the Biden White House has been signaling support in recent days for Republican-backed border policies. 

Hopes for a shift on Cuba policy have not just been fueled by the State Department’s misleading pledges about a review, but also by a semi-public moment picked up by a hot mic ahead of the previous State of the Union, in which Biden approached New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez, one of the chamber’s leading Cuba hawks, and told him the two needed to chat. “Bob, I gotta talk to you about Cuba,” Biden told him. Menendez has since been indicted as an alleged intelligence asset of Egypt, and there is no indication the two have talked about Cuba. 

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Twenty-six-year-old U.S. Army infantry veteran Thomas Latham is one of countless young people on TikTok, but he’s used it for a different purpose than most: recruiting veterans to staff secret U.S. military bases in Israel. 

“Being a contractor is lit, in America this view would be $4,000 a month,” says the superimposed text on a TikTok post by Latham. His phone camera pans across the view from a high-rise in the Israeli town of Beersheba. In 2017, the Israeli military celebrated the construction of a U.S. military base in the town — a presence the Pentagon tried to downplay. 

The video is one among many on Latham’s feed, where he frequently extolls life as a military contractor. Latham regularly posts job opportunities to help veterans trying to find work after the military, he said in an interview with The Intercept. At first, the TikTok posts came as part of his work as a recruiter for the private security contractor Triple Canopy. Since leaving Triple Canopy, he’s recruited for other firms, too, but sometimes he just posts.

Thanks to the job listings and other commentary, Latham’s TikTok account provides a rare glimpse into the secretive world of national security contracting.

“People like me because I don’t gatekeep information.”

“I think what makes it work so well is it’s an industry clouded in mystery,” Latham told The Intercept. “People like me because I don’t gatekeep information.”

Amid all the self-serving talk in the military contracting world about service and honor, Latham’s honesty stands out, especially when it comes to companies’ real motive: their bottom line. “Private defense companies after seeing another conflict on European soil,” says the text on one TikTok, as a camera zooms in on a tuxedo-clad man opening his arms and grinning.

“Private contracting, regardless in which realm — you need conflict you need things to guard. You need things to protect,” Latham said. “Without anything going on, contracts are not going to pay as much.”

For critics of U.S. defense spending, however, the contracts speak to a bloated military budget that outsources its own security, creating a windfall for private security firms to do what used to be a government job.

“It really speaks to our priorities that the Pentagon has divested from essential functions like base security,” said Julia Gledhill, an analyst at the Project on Government Oversight’s Center for Defense Information, who noted that defense priorities seemed to be tailored to contractors.

Latham worked as a recruiter for Triple Canopy until March, before taking up a recruiting contract for a smaller firm, which he declined to identify. (Though Latham still posts contracting opportunities, he said he now works for the U.S. Forest Service.)

Many job listings of the sort posted by Latham require government security clearances, meaning that potential candidates will frequently be military veterans or those who have already worked in the private security world. Both communities, and the significant overlap between them, can be insular and are known for informal sharing networks.

“As mysterious as the defense industry is, I managed to open a gate for Triple Canopy,” Latham wrote in a LinkedIn post, “to a direct market of qualified individuals.”

Younger Recruits

With companies needing to reach a younger candidate pool for contracting gigs, Latham is at the vanguard of recruiting. He is using TikTok, the China-based social media giant that allows for sharing short, often informally made video clips, as a new vein for tapping into the networks of qualified potential applicants. TikTok is especially popular among young users who, like Latham, peruse and post on the platform to engage with everything from entertainment to news.

William Hartung, an expert on defense contracting with the Quincy Institute, said companies like Triple Canopy may be taking the novel approach to expand their reach among candidates. He said, “It may be as simple as seeking platforms where they are more likely to reach younger potential recruits.”

After leaving the army in 2021, Latham was approached by Triple Canopy about a job in Kuwait. He was so excited, he took to TikTok to post a 15-second video letting people know how much they could make working there. The post quickly went viral. Triple Canopy took note — and offered him the recruiter job. (Constellis, which owns Triple Canopy, did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)

“The reason why I got into this was to help veterans land jobs in a field that they’re already familiar with,” Latham said. “I understand how it is to be a veteran, how hard it is to find a job in a bunch of different industries you never really fit in.”

The golden age of private security contracting, Latham said, was during the Iraq War. In the era following the September 11 attacks, the Bush administration sought to privatize its global war effort, handing companies contracts for everything from logistics to providing security. In the first 10 years of the Iraq War, the U.S. spent nearly $140 billion on contracts with businesses, private security contractors among them.

The most notorious of the private security firms was Blackwater, which massacred 17 Iraqi civilians in a single notorious incident and kicked off a national discussion about contractor accountability — and a lengthy legal fight.

In one TikTok post referencing the Iraq era, Latham makes light of a 2014 merger between Triple Canopy and Academi, Blackwater’s successor. A TikTok user asked Latham in a comment, “Isn’t Academi formerly known as Blackwater?” Latham refers to the firm in a response as “a company that shall not be named.” He cracks, “I’m unsure; I’ve never heard of that company before and neither have you.”

Whatever the companies’ names, the post-September 11 wars were a windfall for the industry — and for the cohort of veterans and other security personnel who found new, if sometimes dangerous, employment. At the height of the security contractor boom, Marine veterans could make as much as $200,000 a year.

“I’ve met people that were veterans. They were like, ‘Yo, dude, I have no money, I have nothing.’ Now they’re making money that they would never even imagine.”

“I’ve met people that were veterans. They were like, ‘Yo, dude, I have no money, I have nothing.’ Now they’re making money that they would never even imagine,” Latham said. “You kind of feel good after being a part of that.”

Hartung said the jobs offer veterans opportunities to make an income that might not otherwise be available to them. “Many veterans struggle to find adequately paying jobs when they leave the service, especially those with families to support,” he said. “Working as a private security contractor can be relatively well paying, and it uses skills that ex-military personnel learned during their time of service.”

As the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan wound down, fewer employment opportunities became available, though Latham said newer conflicts might change that. In January, he posted a listing on TikTok for a Triple Canopy gig in Germany, where the Pentagon’s European Command runs much of its effort to support Ukraine’s defense against the Russian invasion.

“A Lot More in Play With Particularly Israel”

“Ever since Hamas invaded Israel,” Latham said in a TikTok two days after the attack, “there’s been chatter about if we’re gonna get out there and expand within Israel.” The chatter, he explained, was coming from “a lot of my buddies in the private sector.” In the TikTok, Latham superimposes himself in front of a screengrab of a contract listing for a security detail in Jerusalem. The job listing doesn’t disclose who the work is for, and Latham, using his expertise, sorts through some possibilities.

He says in passing that “there are contracts that have dropped” to support U.S. Special Operations Forces, the military’s secretive elite units, which the Pentagon has acknowledged are operating in Israel.

Latham concludes that the job listing is likely for a position with SOC, a Virginia-based security firm, to work for WPS — or World Protective Service, which does security for the U.S. State Department around the globe. After naming a few of the listing’s requirements, he said, “So it just makes sense that it’s a WPS contract and it’s SOC’s WPS contract — if I was a betting man.”

“There’s a lot more in play with particularly Israel that not a lot of people know about. We have military bases there.”

The video is typical, with Latham explaining to both potential security recruits and laypeople about how the contracting jobs work, but also delving into the geopolitics that drive the industry. The short video about the Israel posting offers Latham’s explanation why assignments are cropping up there in the aftermath of the Hamas attack: because U.S. installations there were “taken completely off guard by all this.”

“There’s a lot more in play with particularly Israel that not a lot of people know about,” Latham says. “We have military bases there, multiple military bases there.”

Latham is referring to the web of bases the U.S. quietly maintains in Israel. In August, the Pentagon awarded a $38.5 million contract to build facilities for housing troops at a secret base in Israel, The Intercept recently reported.

Other bases include weapons stockpiles the U.S. military has maintained in the country since the 1980s, originally intended for use by the U.S. in the event of a regional war but which Israel has increasingly drawn on for its own purposes over the years. (President Joe Biden recently asked Congress to remove nearly all restrictions on Israel’s ability to access the stockpiles, as The Intercept reported last month.)

Last year, the U.S. Army awarded Triple Canopy a $21 million contract for armed security guards at an undisclosed and not previously reported communications site in Israel, according to procurement records. The work requires a secret-level security clearance.

Latham’s TikTok account, with some 17,000 followers, appears to drive significant numbers of people to private security job opportunities. Data Latham posted on engagement with links on his social media postings show over 1,000 people clicking through to each one of three security job postings in Israel, Kuwait, and Germany — the countries he has said he recruits for.

The conflict between compensation and undesirable locations is a recurring theme in Latham’s posts.

“When you thought you were done with international contracts, yet the offer though,” another TikTok is captioned. 

“6 figures take home is cool and all, but what’s the living conditions lol?” a user replies. “A tent for 175k? Nah.”

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Henry Kissinger, national security adviser and secretary of state under two presidents and longtime éminence grise of the U.S. foreign policy establishment, died on November 29 at his home in Connecticut. He was 100 years old.

Kissinger helped to prolong the Vietnam War and expand that conflict into neutral Cambodia; facilitated genocides in Cambodia, East Timor, and Bangladesh; accelerated civil wars in southern Africa; and supported coups and death squads throughout Latin America. He had the blood of at least 3 million people on his hands, according to his biographer Greg Grandin. 

There were “few people who have had a hand in as much death and destruction, as much human suffering, in so many places around the world as Henry Kissinger,” said veteran war crimes prosecutor Reed Brody.

A 2023 investigation by The Intercept found that Kissinger — perhaps the most powerful national security adviser in American history and the chief architect of U.S. war policy in Southeast Asia from 1969 to 1975 — was responsible for more civilian deaths in Cambodia than was previously known, according to an exclusive archive of U.S. military documents and interviews with Cambodian survivors and American witnesses.

The Intercept disclosed previously unpublished, unreported, and under-appreciated evidence of hundreds of civilian casualties that were kept secret during the war and remained almost entirely unknown to the American people. Kissinger bore significant responsibility for attacks in Cambodia that killed as many as 150,000 civilians — up to six times more noncombatants than the United States has killed in airstrikes since 9/11, according to experts.

Born Heinz Alfred Kissinger in Fürth, Germany, on May 27, 1923, he immigrated to the United States in 1938, among a wave of Jews fleeing Nazi oppression. Kissinger became a U.S. citizen in 1943 and served in the U.S. Army’s Counter Intelligence Corps during World War II. After graduating summa cum laude from Harvard College in 1950, he earned an M.A. in 1952 and a Ph.D. two years later. He then joined the Harvard faculty, with appointments in the Department of Government and at the Center for International Affairs. While teaching at Harvard, he was a consultant for the administrations of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson before serving as national security adviser from 1969 to 1975 and secretary of state from 1973 to 1977 under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. A proponent of realpolitik, Kissinger greatly influenced U.S. foreign policy while serving in government and, in the decades that followed, counseled U.S. presidents and sat on numerous corporate and government advisory boards while authoring a small library of bestselling books on history and diplomacy.

Kissinger married Ann Fleischer in 1949; the two were divorced in 1964. In 1974, he married Nancy Maginnes. He is survived by his wife, two children from his first marriage, Elizabeth and David, and five grandchildren.

As National Security Adviser, Kissinger played a key role in prolonging the U.S. wars in Southeast Asia, resulting in the deaths of tens of thousands of American troops and hundreds of thousands of Cambodians, Laotians, and Vietnamese. During his tenure, the United States dropped 9 billion pounds of munitions on Indochina.

In 1973, the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to Kissinger and his North Vietnamese counterpart Le Duc Tho “for jointly having negotiated a cease fire in Vietnam in 1973.”

“There is no other comparable honor,” Kissinger would later write of the prize he received for an agreement to end a war he encouraged and extended, a pact that not only failed to stop that conflict but also was almost immediately violated by all parties. Documents released in 2023 show that the prize — among the most controversial in the award’s history — was given despite the understanding that the war was unlikely to end due to the truce.

Tho refused the award. He said that the U.S. had breached the agreement and aided and encouraged its South Vietnamese allies to do the same, while also casting the deal as an American capitulation. “During the last 18 years, the United States undertook a war of aggression against Vietnam,” he wrote. “American imperialism has been defeated.”

North Vietnam and its revolutionary allies in South Vietnam would topple the U.S.-backed government in Saigon two years later, in 1975. That same year, due in large part to Nixon and Kissinger’s expansion of the war into the tiny, neutral nation of Cambodia, the American-backed military regime there fell to the genocidal Khmer Rouge, whose campaign of overwork, torture, and murder then killed 2 million people, roughly 20 percent of the population. Kissinger almost immediately sought to make common cause with the génocidaires. “You should also tell the Cambodians that we will be friends with them. They are murderous thugs, but we won’t let that stand in our way. We are prepared to improve relations with them,” he told Thailand’s foreign minister.

As secretary of state and national security adviser, Kissinger spearheaded efforts to improve relations with the former Soviet Union and “opened” the People’s Republic of China to the West for the first time since Mao Zedong came to power in 1949. Kissinger also supported genocidal militaries in Pakistan and Indonesia. In the former, Nixon and his national security adviser backed a dictator who — according to CIA estimates — slaughtered hundreds of thousands of civilians; in the latter, Ford and Kissinger gave President Suharto the go-ahead for an invasion of East Timor that resulted in about 200,000 deaths — around a quarter of the entire population.

In Latin America, Nixon and Kissinger plotted to overturn the democratic election of Chile’s socialist president Salvador Allende. This included Kissinger’s supervision of covert operations — such as the botched kidnapping of Chilean Gen. René Schneider that ended in Schneider’s murder — to destabilize Chile and prompt a military coup. “You did a great service to the West in overthrowing Allende,” Kissinger later told Gen. Augusto Pinochet, the leader of the military junta that went on to kill thousands of Chileans. In Argentina, Kissinger gave another green light, this time to a terror campaign of torture, forced disappearances, and murder by a military junta that overthrew President Isabel Perón. During a June 1976 meeting, Kissinger told the junta’s foreign minister, César Augusto Guzzetti: “If there are things that have to be done, you should do them quickly.” The so-called Dirty War that followed would claim the lives of an estimated 30,000 Argentine civilians.

Kissinger’s diplomacy also stoked a war in Angola and prolonged apartheid in South Africa. In the Middle East, he sold out the Kurds in Iraq and, wrote Grandin, “left that region in chaos, setting the stage for crises that continue to afflict humanity.”

Through a combination of raw ambition, media manipulation, and an uncanny ability to obscure the truth and avoid scandal, Kissinger transformed himself from a college professor and bureaucrat into the most celebrated American diplomat of the 20th century and a bona fide celebrity. Hailed as the “Playboy of the Western Wing” and the “sex symbol of the Nixon administration,” he was photographed with starlets and became a fodder for the gossip columns. While dozens of his White House colleagues were laid low by myriad Watergate crimes, which cost Nixon his job in 1974, Kissinger skirted the scandal and emerged a media darling.

“We were half-convinced that nothing was beyond the capacity of this remarkable man,” ABC News’s Ted Koppel said in a 1974 documentary, describing Kissinger as “the most admired man in America.” There was, however, another side to the public figure often praised for his wit and geniality, according to Carolyn Eisenberg, author of “Never Lose: Nixon, Kissinger and the Illusion of National Security,” who spent a decade reading Kissinger’s White House telephone transcripts and listening to tapes of his unvarnished conversations. “He had a disturbed personality and was unbelievably adolescent. He admitted he was egotistical, but he was far beyond that,” she told The Intercept. “He was, in many respects, very much stuck at age 14. His opportunism was boundless. His need to be important, to be a celebrity, was gigantic.”

“He was, in many respects, very much stuck at age 14. His opportunism was boundless. His need to be important, to be a celebrity, was gigantic.”

Kissinger was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom — America’s highest civilian award — in 1977. In 1982, he founded Kissinger Associates, an international consulting group that became a revolving door refuge for top national security officials looking to cash in on their government service. The firm leveraged their and Kissinger’s reputations and contacts to help huge multinational corporations, banks, and financial institutions — including American Express, Anheuser-Busch, Coca-Cola, Heinz, Fiat, Volvo, Ericsson, and Daewoo — broker deals with governments. “A big part of Henry Kissinger’s legacy is the corruption of American foreign policymaking,” Matt Duss, a former adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders, told Vox in 2023. “It is blurring the line, if not outright erasing the line, between the making of foreign policy and corporate interests.”

Kissinger counseled every U.S. president from Nixon through Donald Trump and served as a member of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board from 1984 to 1990 and the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board from 2001 to 2016. After being tapped to head the 9/11 Commission, families of victims raised questions about potential conflicts of interest due to Kissinger’s financial ties with governments that could be implicated in the commission’s work. Kissinger quit rather than hand over a list of his consultancy’s clients.

In his 2001 book-length indictment, “The Trial of Henry Kissinger,” Christopher Hitchens called for Kissinger’s prosecution “for war crimes, for crimes against humanity, and for offenses against common or customary or international law, including conspiracy to commit murder, kidnap, and torture” from Argentina, Bangladesh, Chile and East Timor to Cambodia, Laos, Uruguay, and Vietnam.

Kissinger ducked questions about the bombing of Cambodia, muddied the truth in public comments, and spent half his life lying about his role in the killings there. In the early 2000s, Kissinger was sought for questioning in connection with human rights abuses by former South American military dictatorships, but he evaded investigators, once declining to appear before a court in France and bolting from Paris after receiving a summons. He was never charged or prosecuted for deaths for which he bore responsibility.

“Much of the world considered Kissinger to be a war criminal, but who would have dared put the handcuffs on an American secretary of state?” asked Brody, who brought historic legal cases against Pinochet, Chadian dictator Hissène Habré, and others. “Kissinger was not once even questioned by a court about any of his alleged crimes, much less prosecuted.”

Kissinger continued to win coveted awards, and hobnobbed with the rich and famous at black-tie White House dinners, Hamptons galas, and other invitation-only events. By the 2010s, the Republican diplomat had become a darling of mainstream Democrats and remained so until his death. Hillary Clinton called Kissinger “a friend” and said she “relied on his counsel” while serving as secretary of state under President Barack Obama. Samantha Power, who built her reputation and career on human rights advocacy and went on to serve as the Obama administration’s ambassador to the U.N. and the Biden administration’s head of the U.S. Agency for International Development, befriended Kissinger before receiving the American Academy of Berlin’s Henry A. Kissinger Prize from Kissinger himself. Biden’s secretary of state, Antony Blinken, also had a long, cordial relationship with his distant predecessor.

Kissinger was repeatedly feted for his 100th birthday in May 2023. A black-tie gala at the New York Public Library was attended by Blinken; Power; Biden’s CIA director, William J. Burns; disgraced former CIA director and four-star Gen. David Petraeus; fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg; New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft; former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg; former Google CEO Eric Schmidt; and the Catholic Archbishop of New York Timothy M. Dolan, among other luminaries.

To mark Kissinger’s centenary, Koppel — who became Kissinger’s friend following the 1974 documentary — conducted a sympathetic interview for CBS News that nonetheless broached the charges that dogged Kissinger for decades. “There are people at our broadcast who are questioning the legitimacy of even doing an interview with you. They feel that strongly about what they consider, I’ll put it in language they would use, your criminality,” said Koppel.

“That’s a reflection of their ignorance,” Kissinger replied.

When Koppel brought up the bombing of Cambodia, Kissinger got angry. “Come on. We have been bombing with drones and all kinds of weapons every guerilla unit that we were opposing,” he shot back. “It’s been the same in every administration that I’ve been part of.”

“The consequences in Cambodia were particularly —”

“Come on now.”

“No, no, no, were particularly —”

“This is a program you’re doing because I’m gonna be 100 years old,” Kissinger growled. “And you’re picking a topic of something that happened 60 years ago. You have to know that it was a necessary step. Now, the younger generation feels that if they can raise their emotions, they don’t have to think. If they think, they won’t ask that question.”

When The Intercept asked that question about Cambodia — in a more pointed manner — 13 years earlier, Kissinger offered the same dismissive retorts and flashed the same fury. “Oh, come on!” he exclaimed. “What are you trying to prove?” Pressed on the mass deaths of Cambodians resulting from his policies, the senior statesman long praised for his charm, intellect, and erudition told this reporter to “play with it.”

“The covert justifications for illegally bombing Cambodia became the framework for the justifications of drone strikes and forever war.”

Kissinger’s legacy extends beyond the corpses, trauma, and suffering of the victims he left behind. His policies, Grandin told The Intercept, set the stage for the civilian carnage of the U.S. war on terror from Afghanistan to Iraq, Syria to Somalia, and beyond. “You can trace a line from the bombing of Cambodia to the present,” said Grandin, author of “Kissinger’s Shadow.” “The covert justifications for illegally bombing Cambodia became the framework for the justifications of drone strikes and forever war. It’s a perfect expression of American militarism’s unbroken circle.”

Brody, the war crimes prosecutor, says that even with Kissinger’s death, some measure of justice is still possible.

“It’s too late, of course, to put Kissinger in the dock now, but we can still have a reckoning [with] his role in atrocities abroad,” Brody told The Intercept. “Indeed, his death ought to trigger a full airing of U.S. support for abuses around the world during the Cold War and since, maybe even a truth commission, to establish an historical record, promote a measure of accountability, and if the United States were ready to apologize or acknowledge our misdeeds — as we have done in places like Guatemala and Iran — to foster a kind of reconciliation with the countries whose people suffered the abuses.”

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On Wednesday, the Justice Department announced it had filed charges against a man allegedly working for the Indian government to orchestrate the assassination of a U.S. citizen earlier this year. An Indian government official allegedly instructed Nikhil Gupta, an Indian national, to coordinate the murder of a Sikh separatist living in New York. 

The indictment alleges that Gupta, after being recruited by the Indian government official, hired a hitman and paid him a $15,000 advance to carry out the murder this past summer. The hitman was actually an undercover agent for the Drug Enforcement Administration. According to a report on the indictment in the Washington Post, the intended target of the killing was Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, general counsel for the New York-based Sikh activist group Sikhs for Justice. In the DEA’s press release, Assistant Attorney General Matthew G. Olsen said investigators had “foiled and exposed a dangerous plot to assassinate a U.S. citizen on U.S. soil.”

“India showed a clear disregard for the rule of law when its government orchestrated the killing of an American activist on U.S. soil.”

The alleged assassination plot against Pannun was in the works around the same time as the killing of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Canadian citizen who was also a leader in the Sikh separatist movement. Nijjar was murdered outside Vancouver in June; the Canadian government has alleged the involvement of Indian intelligence in his death. 

The Indian government has come under scrutiny over an alleged transnational assassination program targeting its opponents in foreign countries. In addition to the murder of Nijjar, The Intercept has also reported on alleged FBI warnings to Sikhs in the U.S. as well as alleged plots by India to assassinate Sikh activists in Pakistan. Both the Nijjar killing and the Gupta plot came ahead of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s trip to the U.S. in June. 

“India showed a clear disregard for the rule of law when its government orchestrated the killing of an American activist on U.S. soil, coinciding with Modi’s White House visit,” said Pritpal Singh, a coordinator for the American Sikh Caucus Committee who was among the Sikh American activists who were contacted by the FBI after Nijjar’s killing.

The details in the indictment reveal a murder-for-hire plot gone awry. Gupta, 52, described as being tied to the international weapons and narcotics trade, was alleged to have worked as a co-conspirator to an Indian government official with a background in security and intelligence. Along with others based in India and elsewhere, Gupta helped plan the murder of Pannun over his advocacy for an independent Sikh state and criticisms of the Indian government. In return, the government official indicated he would help secure the dismissal of criminal charges against Gupta in India, including during a meeting in New Delhi to discuss the plot. The Indian government official provided Gupta with details about Pannun, including his address, associated phone numbers, and his daily routine, which Gupta then gave to the DEA agent working undercover as a hitman. 

According to the indictment, the Indian government official told Gupta that he was targeting multiple people in the U.S. In communications, the Indian official told Gupta that he had a “target in New York” as well as another target in California. Gupta replied: ”We will hit our all Targets.” The indictment also indicated that Pannun was surveilled in New York using a cellphone application that tracks GPS coordinates and enables the user to take photographs. The Indian official allegedly agreed to pay $100,000 for the murder of Pannun, with a $15,000 advance paid to the undercover agent around June 9, according to the indictment. Nijjar was fatally shot less than 10 days later outside a Sikh temple in the Vancouver suburbs. 

According to the indictment, Gupta instructed the DEA hitman to kill Pannun “as soon as possible,” but not when high-level meetings were expected to take place between U.S. and Indian officials. Modi was scheduled to visit the U.S. on an official trip between June 21 and 23. On June 18, the day of Nijjar’s murder, the Indian government official sent Gupta a video of the Sikh leader slumped dead in his car. The next day, Gupta allegedly contacted the undercover DEA agent to tell them that Nijjar, like Pannun, had also been targeted for his opposition to the Indian government, telling the agent, “We have so many targets.”

Gupta also allegedly promised “more jobs, more jobs” to the hitman, referring to more assassinations that would be carried out in the future. In a video call with the DEA agent, roughly a week before the killing of Nijjar, Gupta and a group of men dressed in business attire and seated in a conference room allegedly told the agent, “We are all counting on you.” 

There is mounting evidence that India is running a transnational targeted killing program against dissidents. Documents reported by The Intercept last week alleged that India’s Research and Analysis Wing was coordinating the murders of individuals in Pakistan, using local criminal networks and assets based in the United Arab Emirates and Afghanistan. A slew of Sikh and Kashmiri separatists in Pakistan have been killed over the past few years, the pace of which has picked up in recent months. Such killings may be taking place in the West as well. In addition to Nijjar, in recent years a number of Sikh activists have died in mysterious circumstances in the United Kingdom and Canada, prompting accusations from family members and others of Indian government involvement.

According to the indictment, Gupta was arrested in the Czech Republic in late June. He is charged with murder-for-hire and conspiracy to commit murder-for-hire. Gupta is currently “in jail waiting to answer to these charges,” according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office press release.

The accusations against Gupta expand the scope of what is publicly known about India’s alleged assassination campaign in Western countries. 

“These revelations are deeply unsettling and have shocked our community,” said Singh. “The Indian rogue regime must be held accountable, and the perpetrators must face justice.”

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U.S. military outposts in Iraq and Syria are plagued by thefts of weapons and equipment, according to exclusive documents obtained by The Intercept that show militias and criminal gangs are systematically targeting U.S. forces.

Military investigations launched earlier this year found that “multiple sensitive weapons and equipment” — including guided missile launch systems as well as drones — have been stolen in Iraq. This follows hundreds of thousands of dollars in military gear that were purloined from U.S. troops in Iraq and Syria between 2020 and 2022, as reported earlier this year by The Intercept.

America’s bases in Iraq and Syria ostensibly exist to conduct “counter-ISIS missions,” but experts say they are used primarily as a check against Iran. Since the October outbreak of the conflict between Israel and Hamas, these bases have come under regular rocket and drone attacks as part of an undeclared war between the U.S. and Iran and its surrogate militias.

The U.S. has increasingly responded to those attacks. In Syria, the U.S. launched “precision strikes” on a “training facility and a safe house” allegedly used by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The U.S. has since employed an AC-130 gunship against an “Iranian-backed militia vehicle and a number of Iranian-backed militia personnel” at an undisclosed location, following a ballistic missile attack on Al Asad Air Base in Western Iraq. “The President has no higher priority than the safety of U.S. personnel,” said Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, justifying U.S. strikes.

But the criminal investigation documents obtained by The Intercept demonstrate that the U.S. cannot even secure its equipment, much less protect its troops.

“We don’t tend to think nearly critically enough about the ripple effects of such an expansive U.S. military footprint,” Stephanie Savell, co-director of Brown University’s Costs of War Project, told The Intercept. “The so-called war on terror isn’t over — it’s just morphed. And we can understand these weapons thefts as just one of the many political costs of that ongoing campaign.”

Details about the thefts in Iraq, which were never made public by the military, are found in criminal investigations files obtained via the Freedom of Information Act.

In February, military investigators were notified that 13 commercial drones, valued at about $162,500, were stolen from a U.S. facility in Erbil, Iraq, sometime last year. The agents identified no suspects, and no leads are mentioned in the file.

In February, military investigators were notified that 13 commercial drones were stolen from a U.S. facility in Erbil, Iraq.

A separate investigation discovered that “multiple sensitive weapons and equipment” including targeting sight and launcher units for Javelin missiles — a shoulder-fired guided missile that locks on its targets — were stolen at or en route to Forward Operating Base Union III in Baghdad, Iraq. The loss to the U.S. government was estimated at almost $480,000.

Investigators did not believe the thefts were an inside job. “No known U.S. personnel were involved,” according to a criminal investigations file. The investigators instead refer to locals as the likely suspects. “Iraqi criminal organizations and militia groups target convoys and containers for weapons and equipment,” the document stated. “Further there have been systemic issues with U.S. containers being pilfered by these groups and local nationals outside of Union III, due to the lack of security.”

Earlier this year, The Intercept revealed at least four significant thefts and one loss of U.S. weapons and equipment in Iraq and Syria from 2020 to 2022, including 40mm high-explosive grenades, armor-piercing rounds, specialized field artillery tools and equipment, and unspecified “weapons systems.” Two of the incidents took place at bases in Syria, and three were in Iraq. None of those thefts occurred at Forward Operating Base Union III.

Just how many thefts have occurred is unknown — perhaps even to the Pentagon. After more than two months, both Combined Joint Task Force–Operation Inherent Resolve, which oversees America’s war in Iraq and Syria, and its parent organization, U.S. Central Command, failed to respond to any of The Intercept’s questions about weapons thefts in Iraq and Syria.

Earlier this year, the task force admitted that it does not know the extent of the problem: A spokesperson said the task force has no record of any thefts from U.S. forces. “[W]e do not have the requested information,” Capt. Kevin T. Livingston, then CJTF-OIR’s director of public affairs, told The Intercept when asked if any weapons, ammunition, or equipment were stolen in the last five years.

The thefts and losses uncovered by The Intercept are just the latest weapons accountability woes to afflict the U.S. military in Iraq and Syria. A 2017 investigation by the Pentagon’s inspector general found $20 million of weapons in Kuwait and Iraq were “vulnerable to loss or theft.” A 2020 audit discovered that Special Operations Joint Task Force–Operation Inherent Resolve, the main unit that works with America’s Syrian allies, did not properly account for $715.8 million of equipment purchased for those local surrogates.

Groups like Amnesty International and Conflict Armament Research also found that a substantial portion of the Islamic State group’s arsenal was composed of U.S.-made or U.S.-purchased weapons and ammunition captured, stolen, or otherwise obtained from the Iraqi Army and Syrian fighters. 

Losses of weapons and ammunition are significant — and the military has taken pains to prevent them in the past. When the U.S. withdrew forces from an outpost near Kobani, Syria, in 2019, it conducted airstrikes on ammunition that was left behind. The military also destroyed equipment and ammunition during the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021. Still, within weeks of the U.S. defeat, American-made pistols, rifles, grenades, binoculars, and night-vision goggles flooded weapons shops there. Others were exported to Pakistan.

Since the outbreak of Israel’s war on Gaza, it’s become ever more apparent that U.S. bases in the Middle East serve as magnets for attack, although far-flung outposts have been periodically targeted in other conflict zones. In 2019, for example, the terrorist group al-Shabab assaulted a U.S. base in Baledogle, Somalia. The next year, the same group raided a longtime American outpost in Kenya, killing three Americans and wounding two others.

In recent weeks, America’s bases in Iraq and Syria have sometimes come under persistent attack, including as many as four strikes by drones and rockets in a 24-hour period. U.S. forces have been attacked more than 70 times — 36 times in Iraq, 37 in Syria — since October 17. More than 60 U.S. personnel have been wounded, according to Deputy Pentagon Press Secretary Sabrina Singh.

The investigation files obtained by The Intercept offer evidence that U.S. military bases also provide tempting targets for criminals. Earlier this year, The Intercept reported on a daring daylight armed robbery of military contractors less than a mile from the entrance of Air Base 201, a large U.S. drone outpost in Niger. In 2013, a U.S. Special Operations compound in Libya was looted of hundreds of weapons along with armored vehicles. And a 2021 Associated Press investigation found that at least 1,900 military weapons were lost or stolen during the 2010s — from bases stretching from Afghanistan to North Carolina — and that some were then used in violent crimes.

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