In February 2020, the U.S. government reported that it had carried out two airstrikes in Somalia, killing a member of an extremist group. However, those actually killed were not members of an extremist group but two civilians. This was revealed in April 2020 by an investigation by the international NGO Amnesty International.

Every year, a vast number of airstrikes are carried out worldwide, yet in fact they are seldom reported thoroughly. As in the case above, relying solely on government announcements can leave other facts unseen. Furthermore, there may be bias in coverage depending on which country conducts the airstrikes and which country is targeted. Are the media able to convey that many people have fallen victim to airstrikes, with large numbers of civilians caught up in them? This article examines from multiple angles whether the media accurately grasp and reflect the reality of airstrikes.

Airstrikes conducted in Iraq in 2004 (Photo: Thomas D. Hudzinski/Wikimedia Commons [ Public Domain ])

The reality of airstrikes

First, an explanation of airstrikes and what they entail. “Airstrikes” come in many forms: some are carried out by bombers piloted by humans, while others are conducted by remotely operating unmanned drones from far away. The share of airstrikes using drones has been rising in recent years. Bombs can also be classified by size, destructive power, and guidance systems. In terms of guidance, there are unguided munitions known as “barrel bombs” that rely on free fall, and there are precision-guided munitions that can strike a designated target.

So who has carried out airstrikes, and where? According to ACLED (the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project), which collects conflict data, there were at least 53,726 recorded airstrikes worldwide between 2010 and 2019. This is only the minimum number of known airstrikes, and the true number is likely higher. Even the U.S. military, which makes extensive use of drones, has been unable to accurately track the number of airstrikes and casualties; in the U.S., hard-to-track drone attacks were designated as an “exception” and no longer counted.

As for the countries that carried out airstrikes during this period, coalitions led by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), those led by the United States and Western nations, and those led by Russia and Syria account for more than 80%. And during the same period, four countries—Syria, Yemen, Iraq, and Afghanistan—account for 90% of the places targeted by airstrikes.

There are several objectives for conducting airstrikes. They are primarily used to destroy an adversary’s capabilities or to sap its will to fight. Specifically, this can include assassinating leaders of adversary groups or destroying the infrastructure and society that sustain them. The killing of Iranian military commander Qassem Soleimani by the U.S. administration of Donald Trump is one example. Airstrikes are also sometimes carried out as retaliation for attacks on one’s own country.

However, airstrikes do not necessarily hit only their intended targets, and civilian casualties often accompany them. For example, the Syrian government has extensively used barrel bombs against rebel forces, resulting in indiscriminate civilian deaths with questionable military effect. Even when precision-guided bombs are used to strike specific targets, their destructive power often harms people nearby. Furthermore, if intelligence gathered on the ground is wrong, even a bomb that reaches its intended location can end up hitting the wrong target. Technical errors that cause a miss can also occur.

A U.S. military fighter aircraft (Photo: TSGT Michael Ammons, USAF/Wikimedia Commons [ Public Domain ])

For example, in the conflict with Georgia in 2008, half of the bombs Russia dropped missed their targets, and 40% were duds. In that conflict, a missed airstrike also mistakenly hit a nearby apartment building. Although accuracy has improved since then, many of the bombs Russia dropped on Syria in 2015 were still unguided. In Iraq, Canada used so-called “smart bombs,” which are regarded as highly accurate, yet 17 of the 606 munitions used missed their targets. In U.S. airstrikes on Afghanistan, about 90% of those killed were reportedly not the intended targets. Even so, reports often state that “extremists” or “members of terrorist organizations” were killed.

The toll of airstrikes

Let us look more closely at the damage airstrikes cause. Since 2015, airstrikes in Yemen by the Saudi-led coalition have, on confirmed figures alone, killed or injured more than 18,000 civilians. Amid what can be described as indiscriminate bombing, many hospitals and schools have also been hit. Such airstrikes have triggered the world’s largest humanitarian crisis.

In addition, in the CIA’s drone assassination program in Yemen and Pakistan, the United States failed to kill 41 designated targets and, on top of that, killed 1,147 civilians as bystanders. Drone strikes are already widely used, and U.S. drone attacks have been criticized as “terrorism by joystick.” Furthermore, airstrikes against IS (Islamic State) in Iraq and Syria have killed many civilians. Yet it is rare for the U.S. military to set foot in strike locations to conduct proper on-the-ground assessments of civilian casualties. Because harm from attacks conducted from the air is hard to see, confirmed casualty counts are likely underestimated compared with the actual figures.

Furthermore, as noted earlier, the Syrian government has relied heavily on unguided bombs. Using these highly destructive munitions in domestic airstrikes, the government made no distinction between civilians and combatants, inflicting extensive harm on the civilian population. It is not hard to imagine that many innocent civilians were indiscriminately killed.

Scene from the Gaza Strip in Palestine after Israeli bombardment (Photo: Oxfam International/Flickr [ CC BY-NC-ND 2.0])

The gap between airstrikes and their coverage

This raises the question of whether Japanese media recognize and report the reality of airstrikes described above. To examine coverage of airstrikes, we used Yomiuri Shimbun’s database to extract articles from the 10 years between 2010 and 2019 whose headlines contained the keyword “airstrike,” and analyzed 518 articles (※1).

The following graph compares the global trend in the number of airstrikes over the 10 years (※2) with the number of Yomiuri articles about airstrikes. What is clear is that the volume of coverage does not correspond to the frequency of airstrikes. The number of airstrikes increased sharply from 2015 to 2017 and remained high thereafter, but coverage declined in the opposite direction. In 2015, airstrikes increased due to U.S.-led coalition operations against IS in Iraq and Syria and the Saudi-led coalition’s deep intervention in Yemen. During this period, IS’s rise drew relatively strong attention, and coverage increased compared with other times. Particularly in 2014, Japanese nationals were taken hostage by IS, which heightened attention to airstrikes and produced a peak. Even after that, relentless airstrikes continued in Yemen, Syria, and Iraq, with devastating civilian casualties in Mosul, Iraq, and in Raqqa, Syria, then an IS stronghold. Yet from 2017 onward, coverage fell sharply regardless of the high number of airstrikes.

The next figure compares the number of airstrikes conducted by each country or coalition with the corresponding amount of coverage. Various coalitions led by the United States and Western countries repeatedly carried out airstrikes in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Libya, and elsewhere, and the United States also conducted strikes on its own in Pakistan and Somalia. Syria and Russia conducted many strikes, mainly in Syria. To be sure, airstrikes by these countries are reflected to some extent in coverage. However, the number of strikes does not always correlate with reporting. For example, as the chart on the right shows, the actions in Yemen by the Saudi Arabia–UAE–led coalition, which carried out the most airstrikes, are barely covered. Although they account for 34% of airstrikes worldwide, they make up only about 5% of the coverage.

The next graph compares the share of countries that were bombed with the share of coverage they received. This corresponds to the data on the countries conducting airstrikes: Syria and Iraq, which were struck frequently, were also widely covered. However, airstrikes on Yemen by the Saudi-led coalition were scarcely reported. By contrast, Israeli airstrikes on Palestine (the Gaza Strip), although relatively few in number, received major attention in Yomiuri. They account for about 1% of all airstrikes but about 16% of coverage. While Palestine was struck 461 times, Yemen was struck 18,250 times—40 times as many. Yet coverage of Yemen was less than half that of Palestine. Differences are also seen among conflicts involving the United States. For example, although Afghanistan was hit by many airstrikes, coverage was relatively limited.

There are various possible reasons why some countries that conduct airstrikes and some that receive them are covered more than others. Japan’s foreign policy is closely tied to that of the United States, and media interests tend to follow that relationship. In international reporting, Japanese media can also be said to be influenced by U.S. media. Accordingly, they pay attention to U.S. airstrikes and to Israel–Palestine, which draws strong U.S. interest. Access is another factor: Saudi Arabia imposes strict entry restrictions on both its own country and Yemen, creating major barriers to reporting.

The gap between airstrike casualties and media coverage

Are the media fully reporting the human toll of airstrikes? We extracted Yomiuri headlines that included references to casualties from articles about airstrikes and analyzed the shares by country or coalition and the attributes of the victims among them (※3). There were 132 items that mentioned casualties. Of those whose participants in the airstrike were specified, ranked by share, 24.2% involved Syria, 21.2% involved the United States, 21.2% were by Israel, 9.8% involved Russia, and 5.3% were by Saudi Arabia. In addition, among headlines where airstrikes by the Syrian government were the topic, 67% mentioned casualties; for Saudi Arabia it was 38%, and for the United States 17%—a striking disparity. Comparing this with the graphs above, Syria ranks third in number of airstrikes but tops the list in casualty mentions, while Saudi Arabia (and its coalition), which carried out the most airstrikes, had a low rate of casualty mentions—an outcome that raises serious questions.

Analyzing items that included information on the attributes of casualties, 20.5% were commanders/leaders, 20.6% were military-related (soldiers, armed groups, weapons facilities, etc.), 18.9% were civilians (including refugees and hospitals), 9.8% were children, and 40.2% were unspecified. In headlines about U.S. airstrikes, roughly 70% of the casualty information concerned the military or leaders of extremist groups, whereas in articles about Syrian airstrikes, more than 80% of the casualty information concerned civilians or was unspecified. This suggests that reports on U.S. airstrikes often highlight successful assassinations of targets. It calls to mind the opening Somalia case, in which the media took official U.S. government information at face value. It should also be noted that, for casualty figures in Syria, many Yomiuri articles relied not on official government sources but on data from the human rights group the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

A variety of bombs used in airstrikes (Photo: Amber Grimm/Pacific Air Forces[public domain])

As seen above, media coverage has not accurately conveyed the reality of airstrikes. Not only is there little reporting on airstrikes, but in some cases areas with many airstrikes receive little coverage, while areas with fewer airstrikes receive extensive coverage. Moreover, when reporting looks at airstrikes chiefly from the perspective of those conducting them, their horrors are harder for readers to grasp. As noted at the outset, governments often conceal the realities of airstrikes. Given that the spread of drones is making airstrikes even less transparent, the media’s watchdog role is becoming ever more important. On information as opaque as that surrounding airstrikes, it is all the more necessary to scrutinize claims and their sources carefully and to translate that into accurate reporting.

※1 In the nationwide (and Tokyo) editions’ “International” section, 1,883 articles contained the term “airstrike,” and 518 articles containing “airstrike” only in the headline were analyzed.

※2 Created based on the database of ACLED (Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project), a nongovernmental organization that compiles event-based data on violent incidents and armed conflicts around the world.

※3 Because the determination was based on headlines only, cases in which casualties were mentioned only in the article body were not counted.

Writer: Mina Kosaka

Data: Virgil Hawkins

Graphics: Saki Takeuchi, Yuka Ikeda