While Pentagon statements on them insisted everyone killed was an ISIS fighters, mounting evidence suggests US airstrikes against the city of Mosul have killed nearly 300 civilians, with attacks just last week burying over 150 people under the rubble of residential buildings in the city’s west.
The Pentagon is promising an investigation, but their track record of such inquiries does not favor them ever admitting culpability. Incredibly, however, they have admitted to the airstrikes that leveled those buildings full of civilians late last week, without admitting to the deaths of the civilians.
That narrative is going to be a difficult one to maintain this time, with reporters on the scene verifying civilians being pulled from the wreckage. The Pentagon is clearly already looking for a scapegoat too, reporting that the strikes on the buildings full of civilians came at the request of the Iraqi government.
Of course, as US officials have confirmed in the past, being asked to attack civilians isn’t an excuse for having done so, and while trying to shift the blame to the Iraqi government may be of some use in the near term, the calamitously large death toll in Mosul is something the Pentagon isn’t going to be able to readily brush aside.
Most Pentagon investigations end with them deciding the death toll is “not credible” and dropping the matter entirely. This is the reason that the official US civilian toll in Iraq and Syria during the current war is less than 10% of the toll reported by independent NGOs like Airwars.
So long as the individual incidents were small, the Pentagon was able to mostly sweep them under the rug. That’s going to be much harder to do with hundreds of people, many of them women and children, being killed in such a high-profile incident.
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The DAESH don’t always draw strong lines between their families and combatants, or for that matter think twice about using noncombatants as human shields.
Its possible families of DAESH fighters were hit but tacitly considered legit targets especially by the Iraqi Shia government, or that there were targets in the building considered worth blasting through a few human shields.
This doesn’t excuse bombing women and children, but its important to recognize that other perspectives exist on the value of human life and the risks associated with allowing such alternative values to become socially and politically dominant.
One of the core postulates of imperialist studies is, what happens at the periphery of empire returns to the imperial core.
Curious how you would feel if one of your family members were killed in such an attack. Never mind that Iraqi officials urged civilians not to flee, leaving them sitting ducks. Or how about collective punishment, that is, since you are aledgedly associated with ISIS, you’re a legitimate target?
Few of them could have fled anyway without a high risk of getting gunned down by the Jihadists not to mention that it would be a death sentence on any friends or family members who wouldn’t or couldn’t leave.
The sad fact is these tragedies are an almost inevitable part of combat in a populated area, and even more so when fighting Jihadist groups, the only alternative is to either never try to drive them out or to spend 20 years killing them off one by one with sniper drones or undercover assassins.
I’m not sure how I would feel, nor why my feelings should matter, but being associated with DAESH would certainly arouse curiosity.
My feelings would probably be very bad, but tempered by the understanding of how wars are really fought, and why they are terrible things that, if cannot be avoided, be finished quickly.
Empathy is important, but so is recognizing when something is outside one’s capacity to understand and presumption to experience virtually.
Just the fact that the Iraqi government allows the USA to operate in Iraq is a crime in itself! At this point in time the USA should be a MORTAL enemy of Iraq because of all the death and destruction the USA has wrought on the people of Iraq! The USA is not looking to save anyone from any tyranny because war is the END, not the MEANS, for war profiteering monsters that control the US government. It’s OK for the USA to bomb a city indiscriminately in Iraq but it’s wrong for Syria and Russia to do the same thing in Syria? A mistake in Mosul the media will say? Mistake? Yea right! How many “terrorists” will emerge from this catastrophe?
It’s only gratuitous premeditated murder when the other side does it…
Preferably as few as possible.
There may no longer be a ‘people of Iraq’; pan-Iraqi sentiment would have bled out within the first ten years of sectarian strife as those capable of great tolerance and bridge-building burned with their bridges.
It was done on purpose to break a unified Iraqi resistance. An unfortunate loss because it was a social thread of unity; hating American invaders isn’t prosocial and the habit of hating on things seems to linger beyond any usefulness as a motivator to solve the original problem.
Different perspectives exist on the value of human life however the habit of dehumanization needs to be curbed sharply by as many as possible.
Hating generally on any particular person or people plays to and empowers a wrong system of thought, a mindless tribalism. This includes Trump and the USA, for example.
Hating on things solves nothing for the better, as can be proven; it just makes it easier for those of ill will to manipulate emotions and create terrorists to play with.
We’re so appalled by the use of human shields yet we will still bomb if “there were targets in the building considered worth blasting through a few human shields”. Imagine if we start doing that domestically with our militarized police departments.
Police are armed only as light infantry, but police violence is already an issue.
The best solution seems to be to demand cops be self-insured as any other professionals. The worst examples price themselves out of coverage while sidestepping expensive fights between police unions, victims, and the city.
Insurethepolice is a .org worth looking at.
Interesting! I suggested the same thing a couple of years ago without knowing that that .org was already pursuing it:
http://thegarrisoncenter.org/archives/2286
Be prepared to keep pursuing for a long time. For some reason the smart ideas take forever to catch on.
US Airstrikes Killed Nearly 300 Civilians in Mosul
Pentagon Confirms Hitting Site, Says Iraq Asked Them To…
At the risk of ‘bad mouthing’ the USG and its latest atrocity,
this is a lame excuse. It sounds more like a ‘rapist’ blaming
the ‘victim’ who is molested.
The Pentagon could also blame ‘Curve ball’, the Iraqi mole who
supplied Powell with his bogus info that Saddam ‘had’ WMDs.
And after all the screaming about ‘war crimes’ in Alleppo, the word ‘war crimes’ doesn’t get mentioned at all in terms of Mosul. As you can see above, even the ‘alternative’ press won’t use the word ‘war crimes’. I suppose that’s another magical effect of the old Sykes-Picot line. What are ‘war crimes’ on one side of the line become ‘incidents’ and ‘strikes’ on the other site of the line.
I guess the Iragis need to pick a color for their own version of ‘white helmets’ and create fake blogs from fake children living in Mosul. I suppose if the Iraqis have some money, the same pr firm that did the fake incubators in Kuwait might be available. Pump more of that oil and maybe next year there’s an Oscar in it for them.
Jason Ditz, it’s time:
” Trump ordered Airstrikes Killed Nearly 300 Civilians in Mosul”
Will we ever again have a president that is NOT a WAR CRIMINAL?