RAF says 4,315 Isis fighters were killed or injured in airstrikes and just one civilian

The Ministry of Defence claim that the RAF killed only one civilian in thousands of airstrikes against Isis has been dismissed as ludicrous and “stretching credibility”.

According figures released by the MoD following a freedom of information request by the charity Action on Armed Violence (AOAV), the RAF strikes between 2014 and January this year killed or injured 4,315 of the group’s fighters. It said 90% of those were killed.

The RAF said it had identified only one civilian killed, despite 70% of its raids using powerful 500lb bombs.

The civilian-to-combatant casualty rate claimed by the RAF, at 0.025%, would be the lowest recorded in modern conflict by a vast distance, raising suspicions among campaigners that the MoD has little real interest in reducing the civilian toll.

The MoD said the data it provided came from “the best available post-strike analysis” of video and photos taken from the air, which critics have long claimed does not provide an accurate account.

The RAF’s claims are in stark contrast to figures provided on other recent “precision” campaigns, including the US military’s figures for intelligence-driven drone and other strikes in recent years, which estimate that a civilian is killed in every four to 15 strikes.

AOAV’s executive director, Iain Overton, said: “The RAF’s claim of a ratio of one civilian casualty against 4,315 enemies must be a world record in modern conflict.”

The Labour MP Lloyd Russell-Moyle, who sits on parliament’s international development committee and who has questioned the RAF’s figures before, said the claim of such a low civilian death rate was not credible.

“They have processes and procedures for assessing civilian casualties, but they are insufficient to find the civilians who have been inevitably killed in the RAF’s urban campaign, not least over the densely populated areas of western Mosul,” he said.

“The MoD should simply say it doesn’t know the numbers because this position undermines public trust in the armed forces. More than that it is dangerous because it sells the British public the notion that war is cost-free.”

Chris Woods, the director of the UK-based NGO Airwars, which has been campaigning for a full account of civilian deaths arising from UK action against Isis, described the figures as ludicrous.

“We submitted a report to the defence select committee last year detailing nine major reasons why we believed that the claims of near zero civilian harm lacked credibility. They were mostly systematic but we believe there are also political elements behind why the MoD is denying cases where there is a fair indication of civilian harm,” he said.

“At this stage I believe we need an inquiry to look at what is going going wrong. If the MoD has successively overturned thousands of years of history of warfare to produce a civilian-harm free battlefield, they should be sharing that experience with the world.

“The RAF has dropped over 4,000 munitions, of which over 70% have been 500lb bombs. You cannot release that volume of munitions in primarily urban areas and not expect civilians to be hurt.”

The MoD’s figures were also challenged by Donatella Rovera, a senior crisis response adviser at Amnesty International who has carried out on-the-ground research into civilian casualties from coalition airstrikes in both Mosul and Raqqa.

“It is a black hole. It is frustrating that we don’t seem to able to shift what is a really ridiculous position on civilian casualties from British strikes,” she said. “Because they would refuse to provide any details of [who in the US-led coalition is responsible for which strike] it is effectively being used to shield accountability.

“We know many hundreds of civilians were killed [in coalition raids] in Raqqa and thousands in Mosul. It is a simple principle of moral behaviour. If you are taking any kind of action, in this case airstrikes, you have a duty be transparent and accountable for your actions.

“Not all civilian deaths are the result of unlawful action, but transparency is required for oversight to establish where unlawful actions do take place.”