• It is often difficult for civilians to leave combat areas.

• How do you know that they do not have elderly relatives or sick children that cannot be moved? What if they are too frightened to move?

• Civilians are not to be ‘blamed’ for being where the fighting is – they are to be protected from the affects of that fighting as much as is possible.

• In counterinsurgency operations especially, winning the support of the civilian population is key to success. Therefore you must consider the impact on civilians that a combat operation will have.

 ‘…in irregular wars, where lines of combat are not clearly defined, civilians often have little opportunity to remove themselves from the battle space and thus they can easily be trapped in dangerous situations when combat begins…winning the support of the local population actually is the military objective in a counterinsurgency campaign. If this is the case, then in terms of the success of the overall campaign, it may be more important to reduce, or even eliminate, civilian casualties among the local population that it is to kill or capture insurgents.’

Stephen Coleman, Military Ethics: an Introduction with Case Studies, (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2013), p180-181, 183.