The Hawija airstrike resulted in at least 85 civilian deaths. The report by the Committee Sorgdrager draws strong conclusions, confirming the recommendations we have made over the years. We therefore call on the Dutch government to adopt the report recommendations, to apologize to the affected civilians, and to compensate them for the harm they suffered.
The committee concludes that senior Dutch government officials withheld important information from Parliament or shared incomplete information, even years after the airstrike. In collaboration with other civil society partners, we have been advising the Ministry of Defence on its civilian harm policies and practices since 2020 and have shared our concerns, criticisms, and recommendations over the years. The report now confirms our previous statements.
The committee finds, among other things, that Parliament has been insufficiently and incorrectly informed, and that the Netherlands has postponed the responsibility for reporting civilian casualties for years. The committee characterises the compensation eventually offered by the Netherlands as “too little, too late”. We recognise many of criticism and concerns, in particular regarding the lack of transparency and compensation for the victims. Together with Utrecht University and the Iraqi organisation Al-Ghad, we interviewed more than 100 survivors of the airstrike in 2021 to map the impact of the Dutch airstrike.
Erin Bijl, Project Lead at PAX: ‘Hopefully the Committee Sorgdrager’s report will finally lead to the long-awaited recognition, apologies and individual compensation for which the survivors have been asking the Netherlands for years, in vain. Or, as the current mayor of Hawija, Saadoon Jabouri, put it: If you make a mistake, you have to come back and apologize.’
Limited information access and -sharing
The report draws some strong conclusions: The Netherlands should and could have known that the area in which the ISIS bomb factory was located was a populated area, where many displaced persons also lived. Combined with inadequate information about the amount of explosives stored in the factory, the Netherlands took a major risk with this operation.
The Committee also concludes that the Netherlands had too little access to the intelligence from its Coalition partners, based on which the decision was taken to pursue the operation. As a result, the Netherlands had to rely entirely on its American ally. Also after the operation, the Netherlands appears to have had little access to US information, including the full and uncensored version of the investigation into possible civilian casualties from the Hawija airstrike.
Compensation: ‘too little, too late’
Perhaps most poignant is the limited attention the Netherlands has paid to the needs and wishes of the direct and indirect victims of the airstrike and/or their relatives, as previously criticized by PAX. The Committee, which also interviewed several survivors, describes how the reconstruction projects initiated by the Netherlands (announced in 2020 and completed in 2023) have been a ‘drop in the ocean’. The director of the Iraqi organisation Ashuor, Mohammed Abdulkareem, says in an initial response: The report confirms the civilian casualties, but does not sufficiently explore efforts to engage with or compensate affected communities.’
Erin Bijl: ‘Between the airstrike and the report’s publication today, the Ministry of Defence has taken important steps to improve its civilian casualty policies, in part in consultation with PAX and other civil society partners. However, we must be careful to not limit ourselves to considering what needs to be improved in the future, but to also address the current wishes and needs of the victims in Hawija. We therefore urge Defence, once again, to issue apologies and individual compensation payments to those affected.’
Further reading:
- The PAX 2022 report on Hawija: After the Strike