President Joe Biden has overseen a 54% drop in US airstrikes during his first year in office, according to the monitoring group Airwars.
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
- The US military carried out 439 aerial attacks in 2021, a 54% drop from 2020 under President Trump.
- The vast majority of airstrikes in 2021 happened in Afghanistan before the US withdrawal.
- Outside of Afghanistan, the US carried out just 67 airstrikes, according to official military data.
President Joe Biden’s decision to end the US war in Afghanistan ended in disaster: a drone strike that killed 10 innocent civilians, including children. But a new report finds that such airstrikes, overall, have dramatically fallen in Biden’s first year.
“The biggest take-home is that Biden has significantly decreased US military action across the globe,” the monitoring group Airwars said in the report released Wednesday. That, in turn, has resulted in “far lower numbers of civilians allegedly killed by the US strikes.”
The US military has, overall, carried out 439 aerial attacks in 2021, a 54% drop from the year before under former President Donald Trump, Airwars data showed.
The group said the biggest drop came in Yemen, where there were no officially declared strikes in 2021, compared to 18 in 2020. Airstrikes also fell by 88% in Somalia, where the US has for years fought an al-Qaeda linked insurgency, as well as 71% in Iraq and Syria, reflecting the military defeat of the Islamic State.
The vast majority of military strikes under Biden happened in Afghanistan before US forces left in August. Excluding those attacks, the US declared just 67 airstrikes, Airwars said, citing official US military data.
The caveat is that this is official data — it does not include, for example, clandestine CIA strikes. But it does reflect what has been reported as a broad reconsideration of US military actions around the world.
A month into Biden’s presidency, Insider reported that there had been no apparent drone strikes or otherwise high-profile military actions, a stark contrast from his predecessor, who began his administration with a botched raid in Yemen that killed an 8-year-old US citizen.
The New York Times later revealed that the White House had curtailed drone strikes as part of a broad policy review.
Drones had been one of the most controversial aspects of former President Barack Obama’s administration, killing scores of civilians in Afghanistan and Pakistan as part of the US war on the Taliban. Before leaving office, Obama imposed new restrictions on when and where such strikes could be carried out. He also signed an executive order requiring civilian deaths to be reported to Congress, a move that Trump reversed.
Have a news tip? Email this reporter: [email protected]
Read the original article on Business Insider 
