Seven civilians killed in Dutch airstrike on Mosul in 2016: Report

The Dutch armed forces killed seven civilians when bombing a building in Mosul in 2016, according to research by NOS, Nieuwsuur, and NRC. The soldiers believed the university complex to be an ISIS headquarters, but the only people in it were two university lecturers and their families.

The Dutch F-16s dropped bombs on the building around noon on 22 March 2016. The pilots thought they were attacking an ISIS headquarters. But the building, a residential complex of the University of Mosul, was almost empty. Only two families, who hadn’t managed to flee the city, were staying there.

The bombing killed all seven civilians in the building, their relatives told the Dutch media. The victims were university math lecturer Fadia Muwaffaq, her 3-year-old daughter, mother, brother, and sister in one apartment. Her husband survived because he wasn’t home at the time. In the other occupied apartment, the victims were IT professor Thafer al-Badrani and his wife. Their five minor children weren’t home during the attack.

In 2017, the United States headquarters of Centecom reviewed a report of the incident in Mosul and incorrectly concluded that no civilians were killed. For years, the Dutch government has been telling the Tweede Kamer, the lower house of the Dutch parliament, that Centecom was seriously investigating every report of civilian deaths. In practice, that didn’t happen quite as promised, NOS wrote.

The Dutch media presented their findings to the Ministry of Defense. Minister Kajsa Ollongren announced a Dutch investigation into the incident in Mosul. This is the third known Dutch bombing in which civilians died. Over 70 civilians were killed in a bombing of an ammunition factory in Hawija. And four civilians died in another Dutch air raid in Mosul.

The Dutch Ministry of Defense also published the times and locations of all Dutch bombings performed as part of the anti-ISIS coalition between 2014 and 2018. According to NOS, the Netherlands is the first country in that coalition to provide this openness.

Between 2014 and 2018, Dutch pilots dropped over 2,000 bombs on more than 600 locations in Syria and Iraq as part of the fight against the terrorist organization ISIS. The agreement was that attacks would only happen if calculations showed that no civilians would be killed. In the “unlikely event” that things did go wrong, those incidents would be “seriously investigated,” the Cabinet promised. The Public Prosecution Service would be informed if there were suspicions of civilian deaths. None of that happened in this bombing in Mosul, NOS wrote.