Airwars

Airwars is a London-based not-for-profit investigative organisation that monitors, archives, and assesses civilian casualties from international airstrikes and ground operations across active conflict theatres, and that since 2026 has produced the first documented investigation of civilian harm from AI-assisted military targeting. Founded in the fall of 2014 by investigative journalist Chris Woods — formerly a senior producer for the BBC's Newsnight and Panorama and the founder of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism's Drones Project — it has become the leading civil-society accountability infrastructure for verifying the human cost of aerial warfare, with an annual income of approximately £820,000 GBP (FY 2024/25), a corpus of more than 60,000 archived open-source casualty claims, and a record of 200 civilian harm incidents cited in legal, policy, and media contexts in a single year.

Origins and methodology

Airwars was established during the opening phase of the international anti-Islamic State air campaign in Iraq and Syria, at a moment when Western military coalitions were publicly claiming near-zero civilian casualties from operations that community sources, local news, and NGO monitors were documenting as producing mass civilian harm. Registered in England and Wales as a private company limited by guarantee in August 2016, Airwars built a systematic methodology for cross-referencing official military strike reports against a mosaic of open-source evidence — social media, satellite imagery, local news, UN mission records, NGO monitoring — to produce per-incident civilian harm assessments with graduated confidence ratings. That adversarial verification method has been extended across twelve conflict theatres including Yemen, Gaza, Somalia, Ukraine, and ongoing Iran operations.

AI-assisted targeting investigations

Airwars' most significant recent programmatic expansion is a dedicated team investigating how AI-assisted and autonomous targeting systems create civilian harm risks that existing military accountability frameworks were not designed to catch.

In March 2026, an Airwars investigation with The Independent documented what appears to be the first instance in which a military force officially acknowledged killing a civilian in an operation publicly described as using AI-assisted targeting. Abdul-Rahman al-Rawi, a 20-year-old college student, was killed in a February 2024 US airstrike near Kirkuk, Iraq. The strike had been publicly associated with Project Maven targeting systems deployed in the theatre. The US military subsequently acknowledged the civilian casualty while simultaneously stating it had "no way of knowing" whether machine-learning tools were used in the specific strike — a formulation Airwars reported as a structural accountability gap: a military deploying AI targeting in a theatre while claiming the evidentiary incapacity to determine whether AI contributed to any given civilian casualty.

In July 2026, Airwars and the AI Now Institute published "Anatomy of an AI Kill Chain", a joint investigation examining how militaries are delegating life-and-death decisions to "flawed technologies" — mapping the chain of AI-mediated decisions involved in strike authorisation and the accountability gaps at each link.

For 2025–26, Airwars is establishing a dedicated autonomous weapons documentation team, including a partnership with King's College London on machine-learning integration into casualty investigation methodology, extending its established evidentiary approach to AI-driven conflict environments where targeting decisions are compressed or automated.

Gaza civilian harm documentation

Since October 2023, Airwars has produced a series of in-depth investigations into Israeli military operations in Gaza in collaboration with international news outlets:

• "Did Israel bomb a civilian evacuation route in Gaza?" (October 2023, with the Financial Times) — documenting strikes on a route the military had publicly designated as a civilian safe corridor.
• "No safe place – tracking civilian harm in southern Gaza" (November 2023, reported by NPR) — tracking casualties among civilians who had relocated to Israeli-designated safe zones.
• "Three generations killed within days" (April 2024, with The Times) — documenting more than 150 families who lost three or more members in the same offensive operations.
• "One Name, Two Lists" (July 2024, covered by the New York Times) — cross-referencing open-source evidence with Gaza Health Ministry casualty data to assess data reliability.
• "The Killings They Tweeted" (October 2024, with Sky News) — analysis of 400 civilian deaths across 17 Israeli strikes in which the military had published its own strike footage to social media, revealing the civilian cost of operations the military framed as precision targeting.

Role in the movement

Airwars' civilian harm record functions as movement infrastructure: the evidentiary database and investigative methodology underpin advocacy campaigns by Stop Killer Robots and aligned organisations working to establish accountability frameworks for autonomous weapons before such systems become fully autonomous. The AI kill chain investigations contribute directly to the movement-wide campaign for civilian-harm accountability in AI-assisted military targeting — establishing that the evidentiary gap the military's own statements reveal is a structural and deliberate feature of how AI targeting is being deployed, not an incidental oversight.