A Probable Female, A Probable Child: Civilian Casualties, Remote Monitoring, and Recognition Work

“You cannot see through rubble,” said Greg Bagwell, an erstwhile Royal Air Force commander, when asked if the British military was doing everything possible to detect civilian harm in Iraq and Syria (Drone Wars UK 2018). Responding to Bagwell, I question whether the claim “you cannot see through rubble” can be unsettled by local and situated knowledge. Where are you? Who are you ‘looking’ for? The last question hints that what is at stake is perhaps not ‘seeing’ but recognising, that is “mis/seeing” (Sharpe 2016).

This chapter is an inquiry into how the digital record of the war against the so-called Islamic State (IS) in the Middle East has been instrumentalised – cached, catalogued, and annotated – by activists in Europe to counter official counts of no or low civilian harm. What possibilities might these emergent archi-activist practices offer?

My investigation focuses on the activities of the London-based remote conflict monitor Airwars, whose near-real-time casualty data was referenced in news articles, parliamentary hearings, and classified military studies during the American-led war against IS. Its scope is limited to the main territorial conflict that began in Northern Iraq in August 2011 and ended with the siege of Baghouz Fawqani in Syria in March 2018.

The text moves through Airwars’ public and private research documents to map their archival relations, which are also the relations between sensed and sensing bodies: from cold fleshy bodies, to “probable” pixelated bodies, to “hot data subjects” (CENTCOM 2015; Schuppli 2017). I propose Derek McCormack’s modified definition of remote sensing as a set of “modest techniques” as opposed to superior technology and Judith Butler’s call for a “radical equality of the grievable” as conceptual tools with which to unpack the labour, ethics, and efficacy of civic remote sensing (Butler 2018; McCormack 2010). By civic, I mean not military.

The international war against IS in Iraq and Syria is one of the first in history to be extensively documented en masse by civilians, militants, and state militaries alike, all uploading content to the internet in near-real time. The result is a “polyperspectival”, highly distributed, and digital record of the conflict (Weizman 2019). Working with this record, Airwars estimated that at least between 8,000 to 12,000 civilians died as a result of United Stated-led Coalition air and artillery fire. This small non-governmental organisation has been the source for over two-thirds of all Coalition investigations into alleged civilian harm. At the time of writing, the Coalition had conceded the deaths of only 1,302 civilians.

Poles apart, the two accounts cast doubt on each other. At stake is an accurate, historical record of the war and, vitally, how it was experienced on the ground by the “innocent civilians” that the United Stated government claimed “to stand with” (Obama 2011; US Office of Legal Counsel 2014). To begin to understand whose deaths count, we must first understand how they are counted.

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United States Central Command. 2015. ‘Declassified Iraq/Syria CIVCAS Allegation Tracker’. Airwars.
Drone Wars UK. 2018. ‘Interview of Air Marshall Greg Bagwell by Chris Cole, Drone Wars UK’. Drone Wars UK. January 2018.
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Obama, Barak. 2011. ‘Remarks by President Obama in Address to the United Nations General Assembly’. presented at the Speech, United Nations, New York, September 21.
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