2015 Hawija bombing

 2015 Hawija bombing(Bombing,  mass murder?)

Date	03 June 2015
Location	Hawija,  Kirkuk province,  Iraq
Perpetrators	The Netherlands, CENTCOM
Deaths	70+"+" can not be assigned to a declared number type with value 70.
Injured (non-fatal)	100
Description	A bombing of an IED plant that was ordered under suspicious circumstances went awry. Dutch Cabinet denied involvement, then denied any knowledge of the casualties until Dutch FOIA requests showed otherwise.

The 2015 Hawija Bombing on the 3rd June 2015 was a bombing of an IED-factory in the town of Hawija in Iraq by the Netherlands during the war on terror against IS. US CENTCOM requested the Dutch MOD to strike an IED-factory. The precision-strike triggered secondary explosions of the factory that killed at least 70 people, with multiple sources reporting up to 170.

Official narrative

Reuters and Al Jazeera reported an air strike killed 70 people "including tens of civilians" on the 3rd and 4th of June 2015. US Lt. Gen. John Hesterman told a group of journalists in the Pentagon over a mobile connection on the 5th of June that "after a very disciplined targeting process, we dropped a fairly small weapon on a known IED building in an industrial area. The secondary explosion, which was caused from a massive amount of Daesh high explosives, was very large, and it destroyed much of that industrial area". And "no evidence of civilian casualties".

Official Response

A press release by the Pentagon revealed the strike had "inconclusive results". Three Dutch ministries, including the Dutch Ministry of Defence reported "No proof of Dutch involvement of civilian deaths in Iraq" on the 24th of June.

Cover-up

After interviewing military and civilian sources in the US, Iraq and The Hague and a joint Dutch and US FOIA request, newspaper NRC and public broadcaster NOS released an article on the 18th of October 2019 revealing the communication between the Pentagon, the Dutch operational air force base in Jordan, CENTCOM HQ in Qatar and The Hague. NRC revealed that The Pentagon released a document showing CENTCOM had provided the Dutch MOD with a summary on the 15th of June 2015, assessing it "credible" that at least 70 people were dead, mentioning 22 women and 26 children.

Dutch officers in Jordan and monitoring MOD officers in The Hague already informed the Secretary of Defense following the strike on the 3th and 4th of June "with the report of plausible civilian casualties", and continued to confirm it on 4 different occasions. Airwars and the Red Cross reported in August 2015 that the strike killed 70 to 170 people. Defence Secretary Jeanine Hennis informed Foreign Affairs minister Bert Koenders and Prime-Minister Mark Rutte in June, but both had no memory of the conversation taking place in 2018.

Colonel Sean Ryan of CENTCOM in Bagdad clarified to Dutch media that their information regarding the number of casualties in this strike was not based on media-reports, but an intensive network of informants and data, and that the US already acknowledged the civilian casualties starting in 2017. NRC was additionally informed by American weapon-experts that the wording of Hesterman indicated the used bomb: The Boeing GBU-39 in 2018. This model was in fact only availble to two countries in the coaltion at that time: The US and the Netherlands, meaning the Dutch cabinet could've known in multiple ways from 2017 they were responsible. Airwars filed their own FOIA request and revealed another ally had "refused the same strike", noting the factory to be "the biggest known in IS history". The NOS quoted the director of the Hawija Hospital in 2019 who estimated "at least 200 deaths" remarking a lot of refugees were never salvaged.

The Dutch are already confirmed champion of causing civilian casualties over 2015. So what are they hiding here?

Secret investigation

NRC revealed the Public Prosecution Service met some unusual behaviour in their initial investigation citing "not one response from US personnel about the event", with the US Department of Defense remarking "nobody is being prosecuted, so there is no treaty requiring us to", "waiting 15 months before questioning military personnel (a violation of EU Law for which European Court of Human Rights already had sentenced the Dutch guilty before in the War in Iraq, a partly classified "discussion over the juridical consequences for future operations", as the Department of Defense had seemingly violated International humanitarian law, and their own legal guidelines. The results were not released until 2018 in a small section of a progress report by the 3 Dutch Ministries regarding foreign counter-terrorism noting civilian casualties to be "very likely" on the 13th of April 2018. The Director of Plans of the Dutch Air Force Andre Steur denies the contents of the report on commercially-controlled media saying "All our deaths were IS-figthers."

Deception?

In an interview with the NRC new Secretary of Defence Ank Bijleveld denied the officers had accepted civilian casualties with the remark "We always calculate them. The Americans do that differenly".. She informed the Dutch House of Commons that they could not "differentiate between IS and civilians in multiple instances that were under investigation by the Public Prosecution Service" in a letter to Dutch Parliament the 4th of November 2019, the same letter also explained the Dutch "didn't have their own intel" and blamed "wrong US intelligence and software" telling Dutch officers "no civilans lived in the neighborhood" even though US and Iraq had a combination of surveillance in and above the city - with drones and local informants - of which at least one reported "refugees living around the facility in the neighborhood.

Memory hole

The three former secretaries of the departments that stated no involvement in 2015 all denied any knowledge of information about the attack on the 6 and 7th of November 2019. Rutte may have been "judicially aware in 2016 of possible causalties" but lacked any memory whatsoever about a conversation regarding casualties. The Dutch PM cited "military protocol and protection of pilots and families" for his lack of knowledge up until that point. NOS and NRC proved that protocol requiring informing the PM. In November 2019 sources within the Dutch MOD told media they "lost the definitive CENTCOM report".

The NRC released an editorial commentary in 2020 after a new Dutch FOIA request led to release of declassified files that the Dutch commanding officers were actually aware of the "increased risk of civilian casualties" but proceded.. Meanwhile, all the numerous US FOIA requests have been denied.

 

Related Quotations

Page	Quote	Author	Date
Mark Rutte	“I can't fake a memory I don't have”	Mark Rutte	2019
André Steur	“All victims of Dutch air strikes were IS-fighters”	André Steur

Rating

3 April 2020 Jun  A bombing of an "ISIS" factory killed 200 non-ISIS people.
A "War on Terror" bombing in Iraq killed over 200 refugees. But they were stateless, so they can't claim anything anyway. And Mark Rutte has "kept forgetting" he was told this even happened. Another war crime the ICC doesn't care about. This article serves a good reminder that the War on Terror has terrorized more people than it actually “freed”.

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