The London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism monitored reports of covert and clandestine US drone strikes and other actions in Yemen, Pakistan and Somalia between 2010 and 2019, in one of the longest running media investigations in modern history. The Bureau also tracked local claims of civilian harm - challenging US assertions that no few or no civilians were being harmed.

The Bureau also conducted many critical investigations into these secretive US wars. It revealed for example that the CIA had begun a policy of ‘double tap’’ strikes in Pakistan which were killing rescuers attending the scene of earlier attacks. It showed that the CIA’s claims of zero civilian harm were false. The TBIJ revealed that an Iranian news agency was fabricating claims of US drone strikes in Somalia. And it investigated high civilian casualties from US covert actions on the ground in Yemen. The team won several awards and accolades, including the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism.

In 2019 Airwars took over from the Bureau its monitoring of US actions in Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan. Since this involved transitioning the Bureau’s original assessments to our own methodology, this archive page preserves all key Bureau web pages, graphics and datasets, enabling researchers to review the TBIJ’s earlier work.