US Central Command said dead and injured civilians were in ‘vicinity’ of drone strike meant for Junaid Hussain on 13 August, which was not disclosed before

This article is more than 4 years old

This article is more than 4 years old

An August airstrike targeting a British hacker for the Islamic State (Isis) instead killed three civilians and wounded five more, the US military has announced.

A US airstrike meant for Junaid Hussain near the militant group’s Syrian capital of Raqqa on 13 August, instead killed noncombatants said to be “in the vicinity” of the strike.

The US Central Command had not previously acknowledged killing civilians instead of Hussain. An account it released Friday simply said the strike was “targeting” Hussain.

The UK military played a “consulting” role in the 24 August strike that actually killed Hussain, Central Command has previously confirmed to the Guardian.



Central Command did not provide any additional detail on the dead and wounded civilians. A spokesman, Lt. Commander Ben Tisdale, told the Guardian that Hussain was present at the site of the 13 August strike and wounded in it.

It is unclear if the UK was involved in the strike, nor is it clear if civilians died in the later strike that killed Hussain.



But in a continuation of recent acknowledgments that its strikes have caused civilian casualties, the command also said that it had injured three other non-combatants and killed two in three airstrikes that took place in Iraq between July and October.

In one of those incidents, Central Command stated that noncombatants died in an operation on 15 October to kill Mullah Maysar, described as a sharia judge, when his vehicle “veered into oncoming traffic”.

Born in Birmingham, Hussain, 21, joined Isis’s “cyber caliphate” after a stint as part of the UK hacker group Team Poison. Known by the handle Trick and later Abu Hussain al-Britani, Hussain served six months in jail in 2012 for publishing details from an illegally obtained address book belonging to former prime minister Tony Blair.

Active on social media, Hussain drew increased US suspicion after tweeting encouragement to the shooters who attacked a May event in Texas where participants were invited to draw the prophet Muhammad. British officials also suspected Hussain as a leading figure in a January 2015 hacking of Central Command’s Twitter and YouTube accounts.

Friday’s civilian casualty announcements leave Central Command with one more active investigation of a credible collateral-damage allegation, according to a briefing for reporters last week. Until recently, Centcom had only acknowledged two of its 9,800 strikes had killed civilians, although independent monitoring groups such as Airwars and the Syrian Network for Human Rights put the number far higher.

Of the 14 strikes that Central Command has recently acknowledged have harmed civilians, four have targeted high-value individuals – military jargon for alleged senior figures.

Previously, the command has said that three civilians probably died in a 4 July attempt to kill an unnamed “Isil high value individual” when “a car and a motorcycle entered the target area after the weapon was released”.

And two civilians on a motorcycle were deemed “likely injured” in a strike targeting Muhsin al-Fadhli, described as leader of the Khorasan Group, on 8 July.