The American military has been carrying out a continuous military campaign in Somalia since the 2000s, launching nearly 300 drone strikes and commando raids over the past 17 years.

In one April 2018 air attack, American troops killed three, and possibly five, civilians with a pair of missiles. A woman and child were among the dead, according to a U.S. military investigation, but the same report concluded their identities might never be known.

Last year, my investigation for The Intercept exposed the details of this disastrous attack. The woman and child survived the initial strike but were killed by the second missile. They were 22-year-old Luul Dahir Mohamed and her 4-year-old daughter, Mariam Shilow Muse.

For six years, the family has tried to contact the U.S. government, including through an online civilian casualty reporting portal run by U.S. Africa Command, or AFRICOM, but they have never received a response. “They know innocent people were killed, but they’ve never told us a reason or apologized,” Abdi Dahir Mohamed, one of Luul’s brothers, told me last year. “No one has been held accountable.”

A new report by the Center for Civilians in Conflict, or CIVIC, shared exclusively with The Intercept, underlines what Mohamed told me: Civilian victims and survivors of U.S. drone strikes in Somalia say that attaining justice in the form of official acknowledgment, apologies, and financial compensation would help them move on from the trauma they experienced.

But after almost 20 years of drone strikes, even in cases in which the Pentagon has admitted to killing innocent people, the U.S. has failed to apologize to any Somali survivors, much less offer amends.

“The civilians we interviewed described not only devastating physical harm, like deaths and injuries, but also significant economic burdens and long-lasting psychological........

© The Intercept