US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin ordered a four-star general to look into a 2019 strike in Syria that caused civilian casualties, the Pentagon announced on Monday.

Pentagon Spokesperson John Kirby revealed to reporters that General Michael Garrett, the head of US Army Forces Command, must complete his review on the civilians killed, within 90 days, in compliance with the law of war and record keeping.

Hidden US airstrike 

During the final days of the battle against ISIS in Syria, a US military drone circled high overhead, hunting for military targets, but it saw only a large crowd of women and children grouped against a riverbank.

An American F-15E attack jet streaked across the drone’s high-definition field of vision and dropped a 500-pound bomb on the crowd, swallowing it in a blast. Then a jet tracking them dropped one 2,000-pound bomb, then another, killing most of the survivors who had fled from the first strike. 

“Who dropped that?” an analyst wrote on the chat system being used by those monitoring the drone. Another responded, “We just dropped on 50 women and children.”

A battle damage assessment found that the number of dead was around 70.

The strike was flagged by a legal officer as a possible crime of war that required an investigation. But at nearly every step, the military made moves that concealed the catastrophic strike.

To conceal the damages and the strike, the death toll was downplayed, reports were delayed, sanitized, and classified, and the United States-led coalition forces bulldozed the blast site.