In February 2020, we reported that the U.S. government had conducted two airstrikes in Somalia, killing a member of a militant group. In fact, however, the victims were not militants, but two civilians. It was in April 2020 that the international NGO Amnesty International'ssurveyThis was revealed by the

Although a large number of airstrikes are carried out around the world each year, few of them are actually reported properly. Also, as in the above case, relying solely on announcements by governments may leave other facts hidden. Furthermore, perhaps there is a bias in reporting depending on the country that conducts the airstrikes and the country being bombed. Are the media doing a good job of conveying the fact that many people have been killed because of airstrikes, and that many civilians have been involved? This article will examine from several perspectives whether the media are accurately grasping and reflecting the reality of the airstrikes.

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

The reality of air strikes

First, I would like to explain airstrikes and their reality. There are various types of airstrikes, including those carried out by bombers piloted by pilots and those carried out by unmanned drones from completely remote locations. These drone strikes are the most common type of airstrikes used these days.Percentages are increasing.The types of bombs can also be classified according to size, destructive power, and guidance system. When it comes to guidance systems, there are unguided "barrel bombs," which rely on free-fall to bomb. In addition, there are precision-guided ones that can be sniped at the target.

So who has been bombing where? ACLED, a nongovernmental organization that collects conflict data (Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project), there have been a total of 53,726 airstrikes worldwide from 2010 to 2019, just from what is known. This is only the minimum number of airstrikes known, and the number of bombings can be expected to be even higher. Even the U.S. military, which makes extensive use of drones, is unable to accurately count the number of airstrikes or casualties.graspThe country has not been able to track drone attacks, which are difficult to track in the country.Exceptionand no longer accounted for that data.

For countries that conducted air strikes during this period,Saudi ArabiaandUnited Arab Emirates (UAE)led coalition, a coalition led by the United States and Western European countries, and a coalition led by Russia and Syria account for more than 80% of the total. And the current situation is that four countries, Syria, Yemen, Iraq, and Afghanistan, accounted for 90% of the countries bombed during the same period.

There are several possible purposes for conducting air strikes. Airstrikes are primarily used to destroy or demoralize the forces of a hostile force. Specifically, they can be used to assassinate the leaders of hostile forces or to destroy the infrastructure and society that supports the hostile forces. The murder of Iranian military commander Ghasem Soleimani by the U.S. administration of Donald Trump is one example. Airstrikes may also be carried out in retaliation for attacks on one's own country.

However, airstrikes do not always target only the target, and often accompany many civilian casualties as well. For example, the Syrian government has made extensive use of barrel bombs against rebel forces, resulting in indiscriminate civilian casualties with questionable military effectiveness. In addition, even when precision-guided bombs are used to bomb targets, the destructive power of the bombs often results in the casualties of even those in the vicinity. Furthermore, if the information gathered on the ground about the target is incorrect, even if the bomb can be delivered to the intended target, it will be a misdirected bombing. It is also possible to miss the target due to technical problems.

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

For example, of the bombs dropped by Russia in the conflict with Georgia in 2008,halfmissed its target and the 40% was an unexploded bomb. The conflict also saw an untargeted airstrike misfire on a nearby inhabitant's apartment building. Although bombing accuracy has improved since then, many of the bombs the country dropped on Syria in 2015 were still unguided. Also, the "smart bombs" that Canada used in Iraq, which are considered to have high sniper accuracy, were also used in Iraq, with 17 of the 606 bombs used beingmissed the markHe said. In the U.S. airstrikes against Afghanistan, of those killedApprox. 90%were apparently not the original targets. Still, they are often reported to have killed "extremists" or "members of terrorist organizations.

Damage from Airstrikes

I would like to give a more granular example of the damage caused by airstrikes. For example, since 2015, airstrikes in Yemen by a coalition led by Saudi Arabia have caused, as far as can be ascertainedMore than 18,000The number of civilians killed and wounded in the In a situation that could be described as indiscriminate bombing, manyHospitals, schools, etc.have also been bombed. These airstrikes are the largest in the world.humanitarian crisiscausing the

In addition, in the United States, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has failed to assassinate 41 targets in its drone assassination programs in Yemen and Pakistan. In addition to that,1,147 personsThe incident involved civilians in the Airstrikes using drones have alreadyheavy use (of)and that U.S. drone strikes are now "terrorism".criticismThe United States has been a major player in the global war against the Islamic State. In addition, airstrikes against the Islamic State (IS) in Iraq and Syria have resulted in manyCivilians killedThe U.S. military has been doing this for years. However, the U.S. military also set foot in the bombed areas to conduct proper inspections and survey civilian casualties.rareThe company says that this is the case. It should be noted that the number of confirmed casualties is estimated to be lower than the actual number of casualties because it is difficult to see the damage from the air.

Furthermore, as mentioned earlier, some Syrian governmentsunguided bombThe Syrian government used these bombs with great destructive power when bombing the country. The Syrian government's use of these highly destructive bombs when bombing the country did not even distinguish between civilians and military personnel, resulting in significant civilian casualties. It is not hard to imagine that many innocent civilians were indiscriminately killed.

The Gaza Strip in Palestine after Israeli bombing (Photo: Oxfam International/Flickr [ CC BY-NC-ND 2.0])

Gap in media coverage of airstrikes

Now, the question arises as to whether the Japanese press has been able to grasp and report the reality of the airstrikes as described above. In order to investigate media coverage of the airstrikes, we used the Yomiuri Shimbun database to extract articles from the 10-year period from 2010 to 2019 that contained the keyword "airstrike" in the headline, and analyzed 518 articles (*1).

The graph below compares the number of airstrikes worldwide over a 10-year period (*2) with the number of articles about airstrikes in the Yomiuri Shimbun. What is clear from this is that the number of airstrikes is not proportional to the amount of coverage. the number of airstrikes increased significantly from 2015 to 2017 and has been maintained since then, while coverage has shown a counterbalancing decline. in 2015, the US-led coalition conducted attacks against IS in Iraq and Syria. attacks, while Saudi Arabia's coalition intervened heavily in Yemen, leading to an increase in the number of airstrikes. This period has seen an increase in the amount of media coverage than other periods, in part because of the comparative attention given to the rise of IS. In particular, 2014 shows a peak as Japanese nationals were detained by IS, a factor that stirred attention to airstrikes. Since then, dreadful airstrikes continued in Yemen, Syria, and Iraq, tragically accompanied by civilian casualties in the Iraqi city of Mosul and the Syrian city of Raqqa, which was an IS stronghold. Since 2017, however, the amount of media coverage has declined significantly without regard to the number of airstrikes.

The following chart compares the number of airstrikes by country and coalition with the amount of media coverage of each. Various coalitions led by the U.S., Western Europe, and others have repeatedly bombed Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Libya, and other countries, while the U.S. has bombed Pakistan, Somalia, and other countries on its own. Syria and Russia have conducted many airstrikes mainly in Syria. To be sure, airstrikes by these countries are reflected to some extent in news reports. However, the number of airstrikes is not proportional to the reporting in some areas. For example, it can be read from the graph on the right that the actions of Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and their allies in Yemen, which had the largest number of airstrikes, are hardly reported. Although they account for 34% of the world's airstrikes, they account for only about 5% of the media coverage.

The following graph compares the percentage of countries bombed with the percentage of media coverage of those countries. Proportionally to the data on countries bombed, there is also a large amount of coverage on Syria and Iraq, which have been bombed more frequently. However, there is almost no coverage of airstrikes on Yemen by the coalition led by Saudi Arabia. On the other hand, Israel's airstrikes on Palestine (Gaza Strip), although relatively few in number themselves, received significant attention in the Yomiuri Shimbun. They account for about 1% of the total number of airstrikes, but about 16% of the coverage. Palestine has received 461 airstrikes, while Yemen has received 40 times as many, 18,250. However, Yemen's media coverage is less than half that of Palestine. Differences can also be seen among conflicts in which the U.S. is involved. Afghanistan, for example, has received many airstrikes but relatively little coverage.

There are many possible reasons for the coverage of both countries that bomb and those that are bombed. Japan's foreign policy is closely linked to that of the U.S., and media attention follows this relationship. In addition, in international reporting, the Japanese media is often perceived by the U.S. media asaffectIt can also be said that the U.S. is taking advantage of the situation. Thus, they would focus on U.S. airstrikes and U.S. interest in Israel/Palestine. There could also be an access problem. Saudi Arabia has strict entry restrictions both in its own country and in Yemen, and there are significant barriers to coverage.

Gap between Airstrike Damage and Media Reports

Is the media reporting the current situation regarding the damage caused by the airstrikes? We extracted those that mentioned casualties in the Yomiuri Shimbun regarding the damage caused by the airstrikes, and analyzed the percentage of casualties by country and coalition, as well as the attributes of the victims (*3). There were 132 mentions of casualties. Of these, those in which the countries involved in the airstrikes were specified were listed in descending order of percentage by country: 24.21 TP3T involved Syria, 21.21 TP3T involved the U.S., 21.21 TP3T by Israel, and 9.81 TP3T by Russia, 5.31 TP3T by Saudi Arabia. A large difference can also be seen in the number of headlines in which airstrikes by the Syrian government are the topic, with 671 TP3T mentioning casualties, 381 TP3T for Saudi Arabia, and 171 TP3T for the United States. Compared to the graph above, Syria, which is ranked third in terms of the number of airstrikes, has the highest percentage of casualty mentions, while Saudi Arabia (and its coalition), which is supposed to have the highest number of airstrikes, has the lowest percentage of casualty mentions, which is highly questionable.

Analysis of the information available on the attributes of the casualties shows that 20.51 TP3T were commanders and executives, 20.61 TP3T were military-related (soldiers, armed forces, weapons facilities, etc.), 18.91 TP3T were civilians (including refugees and hospitals), 9.81 TP3T were children, and 40.21 TP3T were unspecified. were. In headlines where the topic was U.S. airstrikes, approximately 70% of the casualty information was military or militant leaders, while in articles where the topic was Syrian airstrikes, over 80% of the casualty information was civilians or unidentified. This indicates that U.S. airstrikes often report successful assassinations of their targets. This is reminiscent of the Somalia case at the beginning of this article, where the media relied on official information from the US government. As for casualties in Syria, many of the articles in the Daily Yomiuri are not official government information.Syrian Observatory for Human RightsIt is also important to keep in mind that we are relying on data from a human rights organization called

Bombs used in air strikes (Photo: Amber Grimm/Pacific Air Forces[public domain])

Thus, it can be said that the media coverage regarding airstrikes does not accurately convey the reality of the situation. In addition to the lack of reporting on airstrikes themselves, there are cases where there is little reporting on airstrikes where there are many, and cases where there is much reporting on airstrikes where there are few. In addition to the number of airstrikes, coverage from the perspective of those who carry out airstrikes also makes it difficult for readers to understand the tragedy of the situation. As mentioned at the beginning of this report, governments often hide the reality of airstrikes. Given the situation where the transparency of airstrikes is becoming increasingly dubious due to the widespread use of drones, the mediaRole as a watchdogwill become increasingly important. With regard to less transparent information, such as air strikes, it may be necessary to more carefully assess the information and its basis for accurate reporting.

1 The "International" section of the National (and Tokyo) editions contains 1,883 articles with "airstrike" in the headline, and 518 articles with "airstrike" in the headline only.

2 Based on the database of ACLED (Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project), a non-governmental organization that collects data on violent incidents and armed conflicts worldwide on an incident basis.

3 Judgments are based on headlines only; therefore, those in which there was a reference to casualties in the body of the article are not counted.

Writer: Mina Kosaka

Data: Virgil Hawkins

Graphics: Saki Takeuchi, Yuka Ikeda