Thread by @wesleysmorgan

This morning @USAfricaCommand's director of operations, MajGen Gregg Olson, did a call with reporters explaining how AFRICOM learned it killed a woman and child in a 2018 drone strike. These are the first civilians AFRICOM has admitted its strikes have killed in Somalia.

After @amnesty released a report last month alleging civilian casualties in 5 US strikes in Somalia (this wasn't one of the 5), AFRICOM publicly pushed back, saying Amnesty was falling for Shabab propaganda & couldn't get to the scene of the strikes (which AFRICOM also couldn't).

But on March 22, three days after @amnesty released its Somalia report, AFRICOM commander Gen. Waldhauser initiated an internal review of potential civilian casualties in Somalia, according to Olson.

The @amnesty report "was only one trigger" for the review Waldhauser initiated, according to Olson, who said another reason was the increased pace of Somalia strikes. AFRICOM says it has done 28 strikes so far this year, vs 47 in all of 2018 and 35 in 2017.

Last weekend, according to Olson, a US military unit that does counterterrorism strikes in Somalia came forward to AFRICOM and said that they had had an internal assessment since "early last summer" that an April 1, 2018 strike had "likely" killed civilians.

This unit had used a drone to strike a vehicle, hoping to kill a Shabab leader whom Olson wouldn't identify. In the immediate aftermath of the strike, the unit's assessment was that it had just killed 4 militants, and AFRICOM put out a press release saying that.

At the time, al-Shabab said the strike had killed civilians, but the only one it identified was a poet -- who, I am told, turned out to be a Shabab propaganda poet, so maybe a combatant or maybe not depending on who you ask, but not just some bystander. voanews.com/a/africom-airs…

Olson described the bare bones of what happened next and said AFRICOM is investigating it: a week after the April 2018 strike, the CT unit received new information, launched its own review, and concluded by early summer that it had likely killed civilians—but never told AFRICOM.

AFRICOM doesn't know yet who within the unit knew civilians had been killed or why they didn't come forward as AFRICOM repeated its "zero civilian casualties" mantra" to the press and Congress, Olson said. He said he doesn't know whether the unit commander knew, for instance.

Olson wouldn't identify the counterterrorism unit responsible for the strike and the internal CIVCAS assessment. But I'm told by SOF personnel with recent Africa experience that the CT unit that works for AFRICOM is Task Force 111, a JSOC task force that is led by SEAL Team 6.

This SEAL-led JSOC task force is responsible for running manhunting portions of AFRICOM's Somalia & Libya air campaigns, using a fleet of air assets including drones & manned planes.

Background from @theintercept here, from when it was known as TF 48-4: theintercept.com/drone-papers/t…

We don't know much about relationships between commands like AFRICOM & their JSOC task forces except that org charts usually show an "operational control" relationship.

But it sure sounds like there are problems with information-sharing between AFRICOM and its JSOC task force.

According to this document about JSOC strikes in East Africa and Yemen published by @theintercept, as of 2013, proposed targets were passed for approval up through two or more levels of JSOC task force, AFRICOM, the Joint Staff, SECDEF, the NSC, and Obama.

We don't know what level HVT strikes in Somalia are approved at now, but the Trump administration's moved early on to get the White House out of that process, delegate back down to the military, and exempt Somalia from some Obama-era strike restrictions. nytimes.com/2017/03/30/wor…