The US Division of Protection, which has for years been accused of vastly under-investigating and under-reporting civilian casualties, has launched a congressionally mandated annual report on civilians killed by the US army worldwide in 2021, itemizing simply 12 civilian killings it decided to be “credible”.

The report late on Tuesday renewed perennial scepticism about official US army counts of civilian casualties.

“As soon as once more the confirmed civilian casualty depend is under what communities on the bottom are reporting,” Emily Tripp, the director of the Airwars battle monitor, informed Al Jazeera on Wednesday. She added that “dozens of distinctive incidents” involving potential civilian casualties recognized by the group in Syria in 2021 “seem unaccounted for within the report”.

The Pentagon’s launch mentioned the entire civilian killings in 2012 occurred in Afghanistan. A beforehand acknowledged US drone assault that killed 10 members of the family, together with seven youngsters, in Kabul on August 29, 2021, accounted for almost all of civilian deaths confirmed by the Pentagon for the entire of the 12 months. US officers have publicly known as the assault a “mistake”, however mentioned no personnel can be punished for the incident.

A US assault in Herat in January 2021 and a raid in Kandahar in August of 2021 accounted for the opposite two civilian killings confirmed within the report, which listed “solely civilian casualties attributed to the usage of US-operated weapons”. 5 different civilians had been confirmed as wounded by the US army in 2021 – two in Afghanistan and three in Somalia.

The depend within the annual report, which is remitted beneath the 2018 Nationwide Protection Authorization Act, represented a decline from 2020, when the Pentagon admitted to killing 23 civilians and wounding 10 in assaults in Afghanistan, Somalia and Iraq. That quantity was itself a steep drop from the three earlier years of reporting within the wake of the passage of the 2018 legislation, which created greater requirements for the Division of Protection’s notoriously advert hoc and opaque reporting course of.

In its preliminary report in 2017, the Pentagon confirmed 499 civilians killed by US forces. In 2018, it confirmed 120 civilians had been killed and in 2019, it confirmed 132 killings. Subsequent reviews have added to the official tally for previous years, with final 12 months’s report including 32 civilian deaths to the 2017 to 2019 interval. Tuesday’s report additionally added 10 extra civilian deaths to the interval between 2018 and 2020.

Impartial screens have mentioned the downward development broadly displays a dramatic decline in US air raids worldwide as Washington has sought to section out its so-called “battle on terror” launched within the wake of the September 11, 2001, assaults, which has included the US withdrawal from Afghanistan and the finish of the US fight mission in Iraq.

Nonetheless, rights teams have frequently accused the Pentagon of severely undercounting civilian casualties, with impartial counts typically many occasions greater.

Writing for Simply Safety in 2021, Annie Shiel of the Middle for Civilians in Battle (CIVIC) and Airwars co-founder Chris Woods decried that 12 months’s report from the Pentagon as persevering with the “legacy of unrecognised hurt” amid the “vital undercounting of civilian casualties”, whereas noting that conservative tallies of civilian killed by US forces in 2020 had been virtually 5 occasions the depend of the 23 civilian killings acknowledged by the division that 12 months.

An Airwars evaluation on civilian casualties in 2021 famous “US-led Coalition actions” in Syria alone had been estimated to have killed between 15 and 27 civilians.

Within the newest report, the Pentagon mentioned it had obtained six reviews of potential civilian casualty incidents in Iraq and Syria in 2021, which got here from army models, social media, information reviews and battle screens. It mentioned three of these reviews had been deemed to be not credible, whereas three remained beneath evaluation.

The division additionally mentioned it had obtained a complete of 10 reviews of potential civilian casualty incidents in Afghanistan in 2021, six of which had been deemed not credible.

The Division of Protection maintains it evaluations all reviews of civilian casualties, no matter their supply.

The Pentagon report added that the 2021 tally solely accounted for casualties reported in “a declared theatre of energetic armed battle”, which it mentioned included Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Somalia in 2021.

In 2019, former US President Donald Trump revoked an government order by his predecessor, Barack Obama, which required the pinnacle of the US intelligence to report civilian deaths from controversial US drone assaults carried out outdoors of warzones, often by the Central Intelligence Company (CIA) which isn’t a part of the Division of Protection.

Tuesday’s launch comes simply weeks after US Secretary of Protection Lloyd Austin launched an motion plan aimed toward mitigating civilian hurt in army operations whereas standardising how the army assesses and investigates civilian casualties – processes beforehand left as much as particular person branches of the armed forces.

He known as the safety of civilians “a strategic precedence in addition to an ethical crucial”.

The plan got here within the wake of a December 2021 New York Instances newspaper report that detailed 10 years of US air wars within the Center East wrought with “deeply flawed intelligence” and “defective concentrating on” that reportedly killed greater than 1,300 civilians. Repeated pledges of transparency and accountability, the investigation discovered, had frequently fallen quick.

The brand new plan has been broadly welcomed by rights screens however has been criticised for not containing clear measures for accountability. It’s meant to be absolutely carried out by 2025.