Despite heavy documentation for the incident, the Pentagon’s assessment March 16 US airstrike against a mosque in the Aleppo Province of Syria is dramatically revising what they are claiming happened, with officials now insisting that the attack was perfectly legal and that at most there was a single civilian casualty.
Back on March 16, the Pentagon denied that the attack took place at all, a story which quickly fell apart because of the destroyed mosque, the number of bodies inside, and the fragments off US-labeled bombs littered about. Human Rights Watch reported 38 civilians killed, while the Syrian Observatory putting it at 49.
This would’ve been a huge incident, but for the fact that the Pentagon ended up killing 220 civilians the following day in Mosul, and the attention turned to covering that up. Still, officials have eventually found time to try to whitewash the killings in Aleppo, eventually.
The Pentagon now says that there were a bunch of al-Qaeda fighters in the building. This is a revision of the previous claim, that they bombed the building next door to the mosque, which was secretly an al-Qaeda base. That version of the story fell apart with the pictures of the destroyed mosque, but they’re trying to keep the claims of al-Qaeda deaths.
Their official narrative is now that one civilian got hit in the course of the strike, but that for all they know he survived. They made no indication how they came up with this, They did however claim they were “not aware” of any reports of large civilian tolls.
And if this story gets pursued at all and the Pentagon admits to civilian casualties, the next stage will be to claim that Al Qaeda was using the civilians as ‘human shields’. The compliant U.S. MSM will buy into it.
The ironic thing about the progression of this story is that the Pentagon is doing everything that they claim the Russians do, deny, obfuscate, and overload.