You know, what was striking about this case is it's not only did they never find out who the captive was or what his name was, they never even acknow… - David Philipps

The story starts March 18, 2019, in a big Air Force combat operations center in Al Udeid in Qatar. And there we have, it almost looks like mission command for NASA. You have banks of computers, big screens, all of them watching the air war against the Islamic State... on this day, a lot of people in the command center are watching a drone that was flying up overhead. Now, what they saw was a field that was just littered with a tangle of cars and makeshift tents of debris of the leftovers from weeks of combat. But also within there was a lot of people. And the drone hovered over and focused in on a group of women and children who had found refuge down by the river against a steep sand bank. The drone, it lingered for several minutes, slowly circling with its cameras focused on these folks, either sleeping or just laying down low to take cover from whatever combat might be coming. And the people in the operation center were calmly watching this when, suddenly... an American F-15 attack jet came right through and dropped a large bomb dead center into this group of women and children]]... killing nearly all of them.

I think that there are people in the military that really want there to be accountability and have worked hard to try and ensure that there’s accountability. But the system that they’ve created is still so flawed that it doesn’t really tell us anything meaningful about how many civilians were actually killed. I mean, think about it. Here was a case where 70 people were killed. And they were killed in front of a high definition color drone camera that lots of military people saw. It was immediately reported, and then it was reported again and again. And the system was unable to respond in any logical way. I mean, if the system can’t handle something as obvious as that, what can it handle?

Dille quickly learned that his chief had no interest in taking the time to establish who was who. The first morning the snipers arrived at the Towers, the chief climbed up the curving stairway to the top floor of the north building and set up a tripod and a small folding chair in the middle of a room with a blown-out wall. He almost immediately started shooting one round after another. Boom. Boom. Boom. Dille scrambled to his own rifle and checked the chief ’s angle to try to line up his scope so he could see what Eddie was shooting at. He spotted a sandbank along the river where a narrow alley came down to the water. About fifty people had gathered to wash in the water. Dille saw the crowd scatter amid the shooting and sprint back into the city. Dille’s angle didn’t give him a full view of ground level on the riverbank, so he wasn’t sure if Eddie had hit anyone, but about one thing he had no doubt: These people weren’t legit targets.