The relatives of civilian casualties talk about compensation, but they talk about recognition as well.“The silence from the U.S. is another punishment for us.”
According to the press statement the U.S. military released at the time, Lul and Mariam were killed on the afternoon of April 1, 2018 in an airstrike that also killed five terrorists and destroyed one vehicle. Dahir said the mother and daughter had hitched a ride with three of his neighbors and though he claimed they were also non-combatants, AFRICOM maintains that the three men in the car were not civilians.Lul and her daughter were killed after the Trump administration relaxed the rules meant to protect civilians in airstrikes. Until those regulations changed, civilian casualties were treated as the “highest priority,” said Hussein Sheikh Ali, a former counterterrorism and national security advisor to the President of Somalia, who had a working relationship with AFRICOM.The way bodies were strewn on the ground, Dahir said, it looked like his sister and niece had been killed while running from the truck.
“Of course the government should be advocating for all civilians killed, but you have a huge number of civilians killed by al Shabaab, others by crime elements, others by government forces. The government is stretched thin.”
Mohamed Osman Abdi also lost relatives in airstrikes that were later confirmed to be civilian casualties by the U.S. military. On February 2, 2020, his 18-year-old niece, Nurto Kusow Omar Abukar was killed in an airstrike. His other nieces, Fatuma Kusow Omar and Adey Kusow Omarand, and his mother in law Khadija Mohamed Gedow, were all injured. Abdi thought he was part of some elaborate joke when a friend sent him a text with a link to the AFRICOM press release saying it had killed one terrorist in Jilib, a Somali town held by al Shabaab. He and his wife had spent the past few hours in Mogadishu frantically fielding phone calls. Abdi is a journalist with the Somali National News Agency and the day after the strike, in what must have been a surreal situation, he attended a two-day conference with the U.S. military on counterterrorism communications. In a room of approximately 20 people Abdi said he brought up the attack on his family the night before.“It made me feel human,” he said. “And that my daughter was not forgotten.”
Frustrated after the meeting, Abdi took to Facebook and Twitter. In one post, he shared a picture of his hurt mother-in-law, laying prostrate after the attack. In the same post he added an image of himself with his family, including his two nieces, when they came up to visit Liido beach in Mogadishu. The girls are wearing life-jackets. In the post, Abdi wishes a “quick recovery” to the injured and said to AFRICOM, “sorry 4 U ignorance!”Abdi claimed, however, that he wasn’t just ignored, but was harassed by an official in the Somali government for speaking about the situation.Abdi claimed, however, that he wasn’t just ignored, but was harassed by an official in the Somali government for speaking about the situation.
Beyond state harassment, helping his family recover has been expensive and difficult. Abdi tried to get his injured mother-in-law up to Mogadishu for better treatment, but it was too costly. Since the strike, his two wounded nieces have come to stay with him; Fatuma, who is 14, had serious injuries on her chest. Before moving to Mogadishu, Fatuma had a botched operation which caused even further pain. Now, Abdi said that while Fatuma has improved, she still struggles to put on her clothes, and has serious “psychological problems.” Fatuma still needs more physical rehabilitation and mental-support, but there’s no money. “Everything depends on money,” Abdi said. The family sends her to a Quaranic center where people pray over her and try to make her feel safe. Abdi added that the other reason that Fatuma came to Mogadishu was because the family was concerned that al Shabaab would try to marry her off, since she was of age. Abdi said that if Fatuma’s father refused al Shabaab and tried to protect his daughter from early marriage, he would be arrested.“I felt the heat through my room’s wall. I was terrified.”
On top of Dahir’s letter, another community leader also sent a letter directly to the U.S. embassy, which did not respond to requests for comment about the attack. A representative from AFRICOM told VICE World News in an email, “The appropriateness and feasibility of contacting families of confirmed civilian casualties is assessed on a case-by-case basis, in coordination with the State Department and U.S. Embassy Mogadishu.” The guidance released in 2020 states that if payment is to be made, the recipient must be “friendly to the United States,” and that the commander must ensure the payment will not get channelled into insurgent activities, even through the form of taxation. It is possible then, experts told VICE World News, that the reason AFRICOM has not issued payments in Somalia is that the money could ostensibly end up with al Shabaab. "Al Shabaab is fully embedded in Somali society, especially in areas under their control, where local populations have little choice but to engage the group,” said Omar Mahmood, the senior Somalia analyst with the International Crisis Group. “This ultimately blurs the line between civilian and combatant, making targeting a complex activity."Others have said the same: In 2018, the United Nations Security Council stated that al Shabaab runs “a shadow government in areas it no longer directly controls.” The hazy situation on the ground complicates the airstrikes themselves, as well as condolence payments. If Somalis across the country have connections to al Shabaab—especially through taxation—the killings become, essentially, indiscriminate. It also means that payments will almost never get issued.The lack of reparations is not unique to Somalia. In 2020, Congress gave the Department of Defense a budget of $3 million to issue as payments for killing civilians on foreign soil in the name of global security, but the Pentagon did not issue a single condolence remittance, according to Annie Shiel, the Senior Advisor for U.S. Policy and Advocacy at the Center for Civilians in Conflict. “The DoD’s record on ex gratia to date does not suggest a good faith commitment to making amends for civilian harm,” Shiel told Vice World News. “They have the capacity: Congress gives DoD $3 million annually for ex gratia payments—of which they did not use a single cent in 2020—and there exist a large number of cases where DoD has confirmed civilian casualties and has the information it needs to contact survivors. What they don’t appear to have is the will.”When President Joe Biden took office, the New York Times reported that the new administration put a hold on airstrikes and ground raids in places like Somalia and Yemen where there are few troops stationed in the country while it reviewed the Trump-era rules. After over six months of apparent silence, the U.S. carried out the first airstrike of the Biden administration on July 20.If Somalis across the country have connections to al Shabaab—especially through taxation—the killings become, essentially, indiscriminate. It also means that payments will almost never get issued.
Though he is soft spoken in person, Abdi, the journalist, makes it clear that he wants compensation for his niece’s death and the injuries his other nieces and mother-in-law have suffered. His mother-in-law still has trouble going to the bathroom because her hip was hurt so badly in the attack. “There are human laws here,” he told VICE World News. “Who takes responsibility for civilian casualties? ” Referring to the U.S. military, he asked, “Are they animals? Dogs? There must be a cost of life.”Reparations, to Abdi, mean more than money. Reparations are an actionable acknowledgement of sustained harm and wrongdoing. “If you break someone’s computer, and you know you broke it, even if it was a mistake, you have to apologize for the accident,” he said. “You need to pay for what you broke.”“Are they animals? Dogs? There must be a cost of life.”