The Lawfare Podcast: Anatomy of a Somali Drone Strike with Nick Turse

In August, the U.S. Africa Command, aka AFRICOM, reported that it had killed 13 al-Shabaab fighters in southern Somalia. Though the U.S. government said that it did not kill any civilians this time around, several past airstrikes have claimed innocent lives. In one notable example from March 2018, U.S. drone operators killed a 22-year-old mother, Lul Dahir Mohamed, and her 4-year-old daughter, Mariam, as they hitched a ride in a pickup truck with suspected militants.  

In a recently published article for The Intercept, Nick Turse offers an unprecedented account of the March 2018 strike, thanks to his reporting in Mogadishu and a secret Pentagon investigation he obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request. As Nick writes, “This is a story about misconnections, flawed intelligence, and fatal blindness. It started with bad cell service and ended with an American missile obliterating civilians the U.S. didn't intend to kill, but didn't care enough to save.”  

Lawfare Managing Editor Tyler McBrien sat down with Nick, contributing writer at The Intercept, to discuss his piece, a post mortem of that fatal drone strike, and the wider context of AFRICOM's drone war across the region from the Obama administration through the present day. They also discussed why this special operations strike cell “seemed like they did everything wrong,” according to one American drone pilot who worked in Somalia.

Please note that this episode contains content that some people may find disturbing, including graphic depictions of deadly drone strikes. Listener discretion is advised.