US Killed Record Number of Civilians in Past Month of ISIS Strikes

At Least 225 Civilians in the Past Month

The US is eager to brag about their record number of airstrikes in the ISIS war, with the rate of growth in the number of strikes launched limited only by their ability to get enough weapons to drop on people. Officially, the death toll has remained trivial, albeit increasingly non-credible.

NGOs keeping track of the number of civilians the US is killing show a different story, however, with the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights putting the death toll at 225 over the last month, which by their reckoning is the most civilians the US has killed in any one month span of the ISIS war.

That’s a conservative estimate too, even though it’s likely more than 10 times what the Pentagon will admit to. Indeed, Air Wars themselves counted 230 civilians killed in a single US strike in Mosul, and they too recognize that the civilian toll is continuing to rise precipitously.

The Pentagon, of course, noticed that incident where they killed 230 people, and talked about it in several press briefings. When it came time to offer the official report on civilian casualties for the month, however, it was completely absent from their very short list of admitted to incidents, and no explanation was offered.

Author: Jason Ditz

Jason Ditz is Senior Editor for Antiwar.com. He has 20 years of experience in foreign policy research and his work has appeared in The American Conservative, Responsible Statecraft, Forbes, Toronto Star, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Providence Journal, Washington Times, and the Detroit Free Press.