RAF has launched no attacks in Syria or Iraq since September, but controversy continues over civilian casuality numbers

Britain’s five-year air war against Isis has quietly come to an end, with official figures revealing no bombs have been dropped since September – yet the MoD still acknowledges only one civilian casualty in the entire conflict.

The data shows that over a period longer than the first world war, 4,215 bombs and missiles were launched from Reaper drones or RAF jets in Syria and Iraq, and a wide discrepancy has emerged between UK and US estimates of the number of civilians killed.

The US-led coalition against Isis estimates that all air raids caused 1,370 civilian casualties, and a fresh analysis by Airwars, an NGO, of “problem strikes”, in which it believed noncombatants were killed, has highlighted three involving the RAF.

Fifteen civilians were killed by the RAF in the strikes in 2017 and 2018, based on evidence from local reports. In the worst incident, 12 civilians were killed as a result of a blast at a building housing Isis fighters in Raqqa in Syria in August 2017.

Chris Woods, director of Airwars, said the UK was “one of several of the US’s key European allies in the war against so-called Islamic State to routinely deny civilian harm from their own actions”, listing France and Belgium as other nations that refused to acknowledge the deaths of noncombatants.

Airwars also puts the true figure for civilian casualties far higher, at between 8,269 and 13,176, because coalition forces could not make a proper assessment on the ground.

The RAF conducted on average more than two strikes a day over the five-year period, on 8,400 missions, and killed, it is believed, 3,964 Isis fighters, often using heavy, 200kg-plus munitions. The missiles and bombs cost an estimated £312m.

Chris Coles, director of Drone Wars, which also collects data about RAF operations, accused the MoD of engaging in “obfuscation, secrecy and – as these revelations show – a kind of internal structural self-denial, where it has become seemingly impossible for the MoD even to accept that civilian casualties have occurred”.

The UK says it wants “hard proof” that civilians have been killed, while the US-led coalition uses a different “balance of probabilities” approach. An MoD spokesperson added: “The MoD examines all the evidence available to us, including a comprehensive assessment of all available mission data, and have seen nothing that indicates civilian casualties were caused.”

But critics say the UK’s methodology is is not credible. Martin Docherty-Hughes, an SNP member of the House of Commons defence select committee, said he would be asking in parliament for the MoD to explain the “obvious discrepancy” in the figures. “It is essential for public trust that we are given an accurate picture of the consequences of these operations,” he added.

Justin Bronk, an air power analyst with defence thinktank Rusi, said that while the war against Isis was arguably “a success on the terms laid out, to defeat the caliphate as a state”, the single acknowledged civilian casualty “encourages the myth that war can be clean”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State terror group, was killed in this strike on a building in Syria in October 2019. Photograph: Ghaith Alsayed/AP

Remotely piloted Reaper drones fired a quarter of all missiles – twice as many as in Afghanistan – and accounted for nearly half of the mission hours flown, highlighting, Coles said, “the stress and workload on Reaper aircrews” based at sites such as RAF Waddington in Lincolnshire.

Bombings peaked in January 2016, when RAF pilots released seven weapons a day, largely to suppress the spread of Isis in Iraq, but continued at the rate of two or three a day through 2018 almost to the terror group’s last stand in Baghouz last March. By the time Isis leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi died following a US special forces raid in October, they had stopped.

The last mission took place on 25 September, when Typhoon jets flying from the Akrotiri airbase in Cyprus bombed two deserted buildings housing Isis fighters who had been fighting Iraqi security forces in the north of the country.

Six months later, the figure dropped to zero, and the MoD now acknowledges that the air campaign appears over. An MOD spokesperson said: “The RAF continues to provide capabilities including intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance flights, as well as the continued availability of strike and air defence assets.”

No British personnel were killed in operations.

The UK joined the war against Isis after two successive votes in the Commons. Parliament was recalled in September 2014 a fortnight after Isis released a video showing the beheading of the British aid worker David Haines. A majority of 481 approved the strikes in Iraq.

The second vote, in December 2015, approving strikes in Syria, was more fraught. It split the Labour party as it was carried by 397 votes to 223 – with all three of the current crop of leadership candidates, Keir Starmer, Rebecca Long-Bailey and Lisa Nandy, voting against.

Hilary Benn defied the party whip and voted with David Cameron’s Conservatives in favour of intervention, arguing in a passionate speech that “we are here faced by fascists. Not just their calculated brutality, but their belief that they are superior to every single one of us in this chamber tonight and all of the people we represent. They hold us in contempt.”