Near the height of the war against the Islamic State group in
Syria, a sudden riot of explosions rocked the country’s largest dam, a
towering, 18-story structure on the Euphrates River that held back a
25-mile-long reservoir above a valley where hundreds of thousands of people
lived.
اضافة اعلان
The Tabqa Dam was a strategic linchpin controlled by the Islamic
State group. The explosions March 26, 2017, knocked dam workers to the ground.
A fire spread and crucial equipment failed. The flow of the Euphrates River
suddenly had no way through, the reservoir began to rise and authorities used
loudspeakers to warn people downstream to flee.
The Islamic State group, the Syrian government and Russia blamed
the United States, but the dam was on the US military’s “no-strike list” of protected
civilian sites, and the commander of the US offensive at the time, then-Lt.
Gen. Stephen J. Townsend, said allegations of US involvement were based on
“crazy reporting.”
In fact, members of a top secret US special operations unit
called Task Force 9 had struck the dam using some of the largest conventional
bombs in the US arsenal, including at least one BLU-109 bunker-buster bomb,
according to two former senior officials. And they had done it despite a
military report warning not to bomb the dam, because the damage could cause a
flood that might kill tens of thousands of civilians.
The decision to strike the dam would normally have been made
high up the chain of command. But the former officials said the task force used
a procedural shortcut reserved for emergencies, allowing it to launch the
attack without clearance.
The two former officials, who spoke on the condition that they
not be named because they were not authorized to discuss the strikes, said some
officers overseeing the air war viewed the task force’s actions as reckless.
Even with careful planning, hitting a dam with such large bombs
would likely have been seen by top leaders as unacceptably dangerous, said
Scott F. Murray, a retired Air Force colonel.
“Using a 2,000-pound bomb against a restricted target like a dam
is extremely difficult and should have never been done on the fly,” he said.
“Worst case, those munitions could have absolutely caused the dam to fail.”
After the strikes, dam workers stumbled on an ominous piece of
good fortune: Five floors deep in the dam’s control tower, a US BLU-109 bunker
buster lay on its side, scorched but intact — a dud. If it had exploded,
experts say, the whole dam might have failed.
In response to questions from The New York Times, US Central
Command, which oversaw the air war in Syria, acknowledged dropping three
2,000-pound bombs but denied targeting the dam or sidestepping procedures. A
spokesperson said that the bombs hit only the towers attached to the dam, not
the dam itself, and while top leaders had not been notified beforehand, limited
strikes on the towers had been preapproved by the command.
“Analysis had confirmed that strikes on the towers attached to
the dam were not considered likely to cause structural damage to the Tabqa Dam itself,”
said Capt. Bill Urban, the chief spokesperson for the command. Noting that the
dam did not collapse, he added, “That analysis has proved accurate.”
But the two former officials, who were directly involved in the
air war at the time, and Syrian witnesses interviewed by the Times, said the
situation was far more dire than the US military publicly said.
Critical equipment lay in ruins and the dam stopped functioning
entirely. The reservoir quickly rose 50 feet and nearly spilled over the dam,
which engineers said would have been catastrophic. The situation grew so
desperate that enemies in the yearslong conflict — the Islamic State group, the
Syrian government, Syrian defense forces and the United States — called an
emergency cease-fire so civilian engineers could race to avert a disaster.
Engineers who worked at the dam, who did not want to be
identified because they feared reprisal, said it was only through quick work
that the dam and the people living downstream of it were saved.
“The destruction would have been unimaginable,” a former
director at the dam said.
The United States went into the war against the Islamic State
group in 2014 with targeting rules intended to protect civilians and spare
critical infrastructure.
But the Islamic State group sought to exploit those rules, using
civilian no-strike sites as weapons depots, command centers and fighting
positions. That included the Tabqa Dam.
The task force’s solution to this problem too often was to set
aside the rules intended to protect civilians, current and former military
personnel said.
Soon, the task force was justifying the majority of its airstrikes
using emergency self-defense procedures intended to save troops in
life-threatening situations, even when no troops were in danger. That allowed
it to quickly hit targets — including no-strike sites — that would have
otherwise been off-limits.
Perhaps no single incident shows the brazen use of self-defense
rules and the potentially devastating costs more than the strike on the Tabqa
Dam.
It is unclear what spurred the task force attack March 26.
Dam workers said they saw no heavy fighting or casualties that
day before the bombs hit.
What is clear is that Task Force 9 operators called in a
self-defense strike, which meant they did not have to seek permission from the
chain of command.
A military report obtained through a Freedom of Information Act
lawsuit shows the operators contacted a B-52 bomber and requested an immediate
airstrike on three targets. But the report makes no mention of enemy forces
firing or heavy casualties. Instead, it says the operators requested the
strikes for “terrain denial.”
A senior Defense Department official disputed that the task
force overstepped its authority by striking without informing top leaders. The
official said the strikes were conducted “within approved guidance” set by
Townsend, the commander of the campaign against the Islamic State group.
First, the B-52 dropped bombs set to explode in the air above
the targets to avoid damaging the structures, the senior military official
said. But when those failed to dislodge the enemy fighters, the task force
called for the bomber to drop three 2,000-pound bombs, including at least one
bunker buster, this time set to explode when they hit the concrete.
Two workers were at the dam that day. One of them, an electrical
engineer, recalled Islamic State fighters positioned in the northern tower as
usual that day, but no fighting underway when they went into the dam to work on
the cooling system.
Hours later, a series of booms knocked them to the floor. The
room filled with smoke. The engineer found his way out through a normally locked
door that had been blown open. He froze when he saw the wings of a US B-52.
The dominoes of a potential disaster were now in motion. Damage
to the control room caused water pumps to seize. Flooding then short-circuited
electrical equipment. With no power to run crucial machinery, water couldn’t
pass through the dam. There was a crane that could raise the emergency
floodgate, but it, too, had been damaged by fighting.
The engineer hid inside until he saw the B-52 fly away and then
found a motorcycle. He sped to the house where the dam manager lived and
explained what had happened.
Engineers in Islamic State territory called their former
colleagues in the Syrian government, who then contacted allies in the Russian
military for help.
A few hours after the strike, a special desk phone reserved for
directed communications between the United States and Russia started ringing in
an operations center in Qatar. When a coalition officer picked up, a Russian
officer warned that US airstrikes had caused serious damage to the dam and
there was no time to waste, according to a coalition official.
Less than 24 hours after the strikes, US-backed forces, Russian
and Syrian officials and the Islamic State group coordinated a pause in
hostilities. A team of 16 workers — some from the Islamic State group, some
from the Syrian government, some from US allies — drove to the site, according
to the engineer, who was with the group.
They succeeded in repairing the crane, which eventually allowed
the floodgates to open, saving the dam.
The US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces dismissed reports of
serious damage as propaganda. A spokesperson said the coalition had struck the
dam with only “light weapons, so as not to cause damage.”
A short time later, Townsend denied the dam was a target and
said, “When strikes occur on military targets, at or near the dam, we use
noncratering munitions to avoid unnecessary damage to the facility.”
No disciplinary action was taken against the task force, the
senior officials said. The secret unit continued to strike targets using the
same types of self-defense justifications it had used on the dam.
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