The last Pentagon report on civilians killed in US airstrikes against
ISIS since August 2014 is out, and as usual is vastly below the
estimates provided by NGOs using even the limited public domain
information available about the area.
Officially, since August 2014, the US has killed 1,257 civilians in 34,038 airstrikes in Iraq and Syria.
As with most reports, the new one added only a token number of
additional slain civilians, while continuing to lag behind the real
reports on the matter.
In practice, the figure was already many thousand, and since the last
report was offered the US killed several hundred more civilians in
strikes against the ISIS remnant villages in eastern Syria. Those
figures appear not to be included at all in the new report.
The fact that so many large, well-established incidents and operations
have been willfully omitted from the record leaves some wiggle room to
argue that those are still under review, while the Pentagon maintains
they are counting everyone they have information on. Yet they seem to
make little effort to find such information, and if scores are killed in
a strike, it is routine for the Pentagon report to round down to 20% or
so of the real figure, and claim they couldn’t verify the rest.
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