The Pentagon continues to offer “official” civilian death tolls from the US air war in Iraq and Syria that is only a tiny fraction of the killings documented by private NGOs, but even this deliberate undercount is rising at a growing rate, reflecting what is in reality a precipitous spike in civilian deaths.
The last report, from early May, only confirmed 23 civilians killed in the entire first quarter of 2017. That’s been revised upward to 128, as the Pentagon finally admitted to killing 105 civilians n a March 17 incident in Mosul. All indications from independent sources are that the Mosul incident actually killed around 220 people.
The Pentagon added another 27 civilian deaths in their new report, which includes April, with almost all of these deaths also happening in Mosul. This once again is far below the many hundreds reported killed everywhere else, but dramatically more than the single-digit monthly tolls they usually admit to.
This increase thus really isn’t so much them getting closer to being honest about the toll, since they were virtually obliged to finally include the Mosul death toll after publicly admitting to it, but the fact that even their fake numbers are spiking suggests they are at least aware of the trend.
May figures will be particularly important as there were multiple huge incidents of civilian deaths in both Iraq and Syria attributed to US strikes, with hundreds being killed on a weekly basis in the air war. It will be increasingly difficult for the Pentagon to keep its false figures low enough to brag about how “careful” the are about civilian deaths.
Preaching to the choir here, but, it’s insane that this is our status quo in Middle East foreign policy. The idea that the country responsible for this unabashedly labels Iran and North Korea as destabilising forces would be hilarious if it weren’t so destructively ironic.
Well, yeah, and bears do it in the woods too. What, someone expected a candid count? The US does not even want to know, cognitive dissonance, much less to have everyone else know. It is wrong, but also foolish even to consider the American count.
There is always a sense among those aware of the US’s massive war criminality that body counts of civilians directly killed by US forces — even as compiled from credible sources–grossly understates the destruction the US is responsible for. I know I always say to myself, “That’s all?” But that is because the body count in no way measures what we are aware of–the enormous human loss resulting from the US-Zionist-Wahabi Project to shatter all non-client states and or state regimes throughout Islam–the Project for a New American Century and its mutations. It is not only those killed by US ordnance. The “count” includes all those killed by all the ordnance; by disease, starvation, disruption of health, safety and other social supports, civil unrest, the spread of lawlessness, substance abuse. You’d also have to count not just the dead, but all those survivors now suffering in the breakdown of civil order, the massive human dislocation, the refugees, the rape, and on and on. And in the end all the “numbers” cannot capture the loss of possibilities and opportunities for improvement in the quality of civilization for all the living and future generations–as few as they now may be.