US killed more civilians in Syria and Iraq than Daesh

Four years into America’s supposed assault on the Daesh terrorists in Syria and Iraq, the Pentagon now acknowledges it has no idea how many civilians it has killed during its bombing campaign.

While representatives of the US government communicate their supposed disapproval of civilian casualties, report after report continues to show that the US-led bombing campaigns in Syria and Iraq are responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians, many more than reported by the US government.

The excerpts from investigative journalist Emma Fiala’s findings on MintPress titled: “US Killed More Civilians in Syria and Iraq than Daesh”:

Four years into America’s supposed assault on the Daesh terrorists in Syria and Iraq, the Pentagon now acknowledges it has no idea how many civilians it has killed during its bombing campaign. In fact, the United States military will never know how many civilians it killed, the Pentagon has recently admitted.

The shocking admission comes on the heels of Amnesty International’s new report released last Tuesday. As reported by MintPress, the report concludes that US-led coalition efforts in the city of Raqqa in northern Syria in 2017 included indiscriminate attacks that showed little to no regard for civilian life. Those attacks, in which thousands of Syrians were killed, constitute potential war crimes, according to Amnesty.

Earlier this year, ‘Airwars’ reported that as many as 6,000 civilians were killed by the US-led coalition in Iraq and Syria in 2017. The New York Times Magazine revealed in November 2017 that what was reportedly an attack on a car-bomb production facility in Iraq actually destroyed two civilian homes filled with people.

Recently, during a Department of Defense press briefing at the Pentagon with US Army Col. Thomas Veale, a spokesman for the US-led coalition in Iraq and Syria, Veale spoke via videolink from Baghdad, Iraq. He began with a brief update about the current status of the Daesh, stressing that “Daesh morale is low,” and presented a video showing off “Iraqi Air Force F-16 fighters in action in Syria.”

Speaking of Amnesty’s report, Veale claimed that the organization was only able to visit Raqqa last year.” He also claimed that the organization was judging the US military as guilty until proven innocent. He called the move “bold.” This despite a history of the US judging foreign governments as guilty until proven innocent — resulting in military action, not simply a report like Amnesty’s.

Barbara Starr from CNN, was one of only two reporters to reference the Amnesty report during the briefing. Starr asked three questions of Veale, her last inquired about civilian casualties: And my very quick third question is, separate from Amnesty International’s report, how can you ever really know how many civilians were killed by US and coalition strikes, given the fact the US wasn’t really ever on the ground? Can you ever really know?”

Col. Veale replied: Now, as far as how do we know how many civilians were killed. No one will ever know. Anyone who claims they will know is lying, and there’s no possible way.”

Despite Col. Veale’s statement, the Pentagon said on June 2 that the US military killed approximately 500 civilians in 2017. During that same year, the US and its allies conducted more than 10,000 airstrikes.

Carla Babb with Voice of America followed up on Starr’s line of questioning, saying: I’m just curious — are those strikes that were pointed out in the Amnesty report, were they also compatible and parallel with the civilian casualty reports that you guys have put out?  Are these strikes that you had already admitted to having civilian casualties, or were these strikes that you were unaware of?”

Col. Veale provided few details. He simply said: They did cite specifically from our strike report and our civ-cas report. As I speak, people are looking at that article and trying to correlate those claims to the strike log.”

While Veale described the indefensible number of civilian deaths as “extremely unfortunate,” Syrians are left questioning why their families had to be killed and their cities destroyed.

Jim Mattis, US War Secretary, had bragged to reporters in March of 2017 that “there is no military force in the world that has proven more sensitive to civilian casualties” than America’s, when in fact the US “ultimately killed nearly 12 times the number of civilians than were killed by” Daesh, according to a study published in the journal PLOS Medicine and reported on by MintPress.

While on the campaign trail, then-candidate Donald Trump had bragged that he would bomb the daylights out of Daesh, a phrase not indicative of care towards civilians and local infrastructure.

Human rights groups continue to question the accuracy of the data provided by the Pentagon, and the White House isn’t doing anything to quell those critiques. In fact, in early May the Trump administration missed two major deadlines for revealing the number of civilians killed by the US military and, in a December 2017 quarterly report of the number of troops serving overseas, the Pentagon omitted the numbers entirely, having only blank spaces where the Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria figures used to be.

AS/EA