The NY Times reports US forces ‘killed dozens in Syria.’ The reality is far worse.

By Eva Bartlett — a Canadian independent journalist and activist. She has spent years on the ground covering conflict zones in the Middle East, especially in Syria and Palestine (where she lived for nearly four years). Follow her on Twitter @EvaKBartlett

Two recent reports by the New York Times highlight some of the US' manifold crimes in Syria, murdering untold numbers of Syrian civilians over the years, under the pretext of fighting the Islamic State.

They exposed a 2019 US bombing in Baghuz, eastern Syria, which killed 70 civilians, and that this was but one of numerous instances, with the Delta Force routinely launching “reckless airstrikes” while purportedly fighting ISIS. 

Stating the obvious: had the wanton and repeated mass murder of civilians been committed by Syria or Russia, it would have been in headlines, ad nauseum...because the legacy media genuinely cares about the Syrian people. But, since the crimes were committed by the US, we'll neither see outrage nor crocodile tears. In fact, it's pretty shocking that the New York Times, a noted apologist for American Imperialism which has promoted outright fabrications about Syria over the years, has deigned to report honestly on actual war crimes in the country. 

Former Pentagon and State Department adviser Larry Lewis said Talon Anvil's toll of innocents was ten times that of other units. "It was much higher than I would have expected from a US unit, The fact that it increased dramatically and steadily over a period of years shocked me."

— ASB News / MILITARY(@ASBMilitary) December 12, 2021

In April 2019, Airwars (and Amnesty International) reported that, “at least 1,600 civilians died in Coalition strikes on the city of Raqqa in 2017 during the battle to evict so-called Islamic State – ten times the number of fatalities so far conceded by the US-led alliance, which had admitted 159 deaths to April 24th.”

It noted that, “most of the destruction during the battle for Raqqa was caused by incoming Coalition air and artillery strikes – with at least 21,000 munitions fired into the city over a four-month period. The United Nations would later declare it the most destroyed city in Syria, with an estimated 70% laid waste.” 

Along with reporting from Syria since 2014, I've keenly followed news on the subject and, unless my memory betrays me, I don't recall overwhelming media outrage following this report. 

In November, former United Nations Weapons Inspector and former Marine Corps Intelligence Officer, Scott Ritter, wrote: “The Battle of Raqqa became a template for all future anti-ISIS operations involving the SDF and the US going forward. By the time the mopping up operations around Baghuz were conducted, in March 2019, there was in place a seamless killing machine which allowed the US to justify any action so long as it was conducted in support of an SDF unit claiming to be in contact with ISIS.” 

in March 2017, aircraft directed by the team dropped a 500-pound bomb on a building in the village of Karama, where more than 50 people were taking cover.

— ASB News / MILITARY (@ASBMilitary) December 12, 2021

The US strikes were apparently meant to be portrayed as “self-defense” protecting US proxies on the ground, a feeble excuse for the slaughter that occurred. Yet, what Syria, with the aid of allies, has been doing the past ten years has literally been self-defense: defending the country against the death squads supported and funded by the West, the Gulf, Turkey and Israel in their war on Syria. 

Were such death squads to descend on Western cities, they would almost immediately be eviscerated. This scenario is highly unlikely given that the terrorists are tools of the West, but this illustrates the hypocrisy of the situation: Syria has been doing its utmost to restore security to the nation, via strategic warfare against terrorist factions, as well as reconciliation deals enabling Syrian armed men among the foreign terror groups to lay down their weapons and return to civilian life. Simultaneously, the US, their allies, and the terrorists they support, have wantonly murdered Syrian civilians and wreaked destruction on the country.

Referring to the New York Times reports, RT reported recently that former Pentagon and State Department adviser Larry Lewis, who co-authored a 2018 DoD report on civilian harm based on classified casualty data, said the rate was “10 times that of similar operations he tracked in Afghanistan.' … and that, when interviewed by the New York Times, Gen. Townsend blamed any civilian casualties on “the misfortunes of war.” 

Funny how that works. When Syria is actually fighting terrorism, they are condemned. When the US is fake fighting terrorism and slaughtering civilians, it's just a “misfortune of war.” 

It should be no surprise to any thinking person that the US has committed untold war crimes in Syria (and many other countries) during its illegal presence in the country. Still, even with ample documentation of these crimes, the US is not held accountable. Completing this unjust scenario, the US and allies have repeatedly hurled unfounded accusations of chemical weapons attacks and Russian war crimes, providing no evidence and generally relying on unnamed sources or the al-Qaeda-affiliated White Helmets.

I wrote about this last year, noting, “A UN-mandated report, which accuses Russia of war crimes in Syria, heavily relies on anonymous sources and lacks evidence, but also smacks of deliberate disinformation that is halting the eradication of terrorism in Idlib.” 

Emphasizing that this report was based on testimonies taken in Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon or by phone, I noted, “I scoured the 24 pages of the report, but even in the annexes I could find no transparent and credible sources, only the following vague terms repeatedly referred-to: Witnesses, civilians, NGO rescuers, medical teams, first responders, flight spotters, and early warning observers.”

In the relentless propaganda against Syria, and Russia, that report got a lot of traction in regime-change media. The recent reports on US crimes in Syria? Not so much.

Some days ago, the Twitter account @USEmbassySyria tweeted about the US standing firm in its commitment to human rights and the rights of women. A ludicrous tweet given the US' support for terrorists who quash human rights and imprison and rape women. 

...which is why the US backed terrorism in Syria. ...because: women's rights https://t.co/1LhIL23khR

— Eva Karene Bartlett (@EvaKBartlett) December 10, 2021

It is also worth mentioning that Twitter account represents a non-existent entity: in their push for human rights for Syrians (as they bomb and murder Syrians or starve them with sanctions), the US Embassy in Syria long ceased to exist, as did most embassies involved in the plan to put extremist terrorists in power. 

In a world where Israel can daily imprison and slaughter children and other Palestinians, and Saudi Arabia can wage war on Yemen while beheading its own civilians, the crimes of the US (and allies) in Syria are sadly not surprising.  Nor are they new. The US has a decades-long history of attempting regime-change in Syria. 

But seriously? Syria and Russia are to blame in this upside-down world...? 

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/op-ed/543206-us-syria-air-strikes/

MEANWHILE THE CONSPIRACY TO KEEP ASSANGE IN PRISON IS IN FULL SWING...

The promise was a war waged by all-seeing drones and precision bombs. The documents show flawed intelligence, faulty targeting, years of civilian deaths — and scant accountability.

This is the first part of a series. Part 2 will examine the air war’s human toll.

Shortly before 3 a.m. on July 19, 2016, American Special Operations forces bombed what they believed were three ISIS “staging areas” on the outskirts of Tokhar, a riverside hamlet in northern Syria. They reported 85 fighters killed. In fact, they hit houses far from the front line, where farmers, their families and other local people sought nighttime sanctuary from bombing and gunfire. More than 120 villagers were killed.

In early 2017 in Iraq, an American war plane struck a dark-colored vehicle, believed to be a car bomb, stopped at an intersection in the Wadi Hajar neighborhood of West Mosul. Actually, the car had been bearing not a bomb but a man named Majid Mahmoud Ahmed, his wife and their two children, who were fleeing the fighting nearby. They and three other civilians were killed.

In November 2015, after observing a man dragging an “unknown heavy object” into an ISIS “defensive fighting position,” American forces struck a building in Ramadi, Iraq. A military review found that the object was actually “a person of small stature” — a child — who died in the strike.

None of these deadly failures resulted in a finding of wrongdoing.

These cases are drawn from a hidden Pentagon archive of the American air war in the Middle East since 2014.

The trove of documents — the military’s own confidential assessments of more than 1,300 reports of civilian casualties, obtained by The New York Times — lays bare how the air war has been marked by deeply flawed intelligence, rushed and often imprecise targeting, and the deaths of thousands of civilians, many of them children, a sharp contrast to the American government’s image of war waged by all-seeing drones and precision bombs.

The documents show, too, that despite the Pentagon’s highly codified system for examining civilian casualties, pledges of transparency and accountability have given way to opacity and impunity. In only a handful of cases were the assessments made public. Not a single record provided includes a finding of wrongdoing or disciplinary action. Fewer than a dozen condolence payments were made, even though many survivors were left with disabilities requiring expensive medical care. Documented efforts to identify root causes or lessons learned are rare.

The air campaign represents a fundamental transformation of warfare that took shape in the final years of the Obama administration, amid the deepening unpopularity of the forever wars that had claimed more than 6,000 American service members. The United States traded many of its boots on the ground for an arsenal of aircraft directed by controllers sitting at computers, often thousands of miles away. President Barack Obama called it “the most precise air campaign in history.”

This was the promise: America’s “extraordinary technology” would allow the military to kill the right people while taking the greatest possible care not to harm the wrong ones.

The ISIS caliphate ultimately crumbled under the weight of American bombing. For years, American air power was crucial to the beleaguered Afghan government’s survival. And as U.S. combat deaths dwindled, the faraway wars, and their civilian tolls, receded from most Americans’ sights and minds.

On occasion, stunning revelations have pierced the silence. A Times investigation found that a Kabul drone strike in August, which American officials said had destroyed a vehicle laden with bombs, had instead killed 10 members of one Afghan family. The Times recently reported that dozens of civilians had been killed in a 2019 bombing in Syria that the military had hidden from public view. That strike was ordered by a top-secret strike cell called Talon Anvil that, according to people who worked with it, frequently sidestepped procedures meant to protect civilians. Talon Anvil executed a significant portion of the air war against ISIS in Syria.

The Pentagon regularly publishes bare-bones summaries of civilian casualty incidents, and it recently ordered a new, high-level investigation of the 2019 Syria airstrike. But in the rare cases where failings are publicly acknowledged, they tend to be characterized as unfortunate, unavoidable and uncommon.

In response to questions from The Times, Capt. Bill Urban, the spokesman for the U.S. Central Command, said that “even with the best technology in the world, mistakes do happen, whether based on incomplete information or misinterpretation of the information available. And we try to learn from those mistakes.” He added: “We work diligently to avoid such harm. We investigate each credible instance. And we regret each loss of innocent life.”

Read the military’s full responses to questions from The Times.

He described minimizing the risk of harm to civilians as “a strategic necessity as well as a legal and moral imperative,” driven by the way these casualties are used “to feed the ideological hatred espoused by our enemies in the post 9/11 conflicts and supercharge the recruiting of the next generation of violent extremists.”

Yet what the hidden documents show is that civilians have become the regular collateral casualties of a way of war gone badly wrong.

To understand how this happened, The Times did what military officials admit they have not done: analyzed the casualty assessments in aggregate to discern patterns of failed intelligence, decision-making and execution. It also visited more than 100 casualty sites and interviewed scores of surviving residents and current and former American officials. In the coming days, the second part of this series will trace those journeys through the war zones of Iraq and Syria.

Taken together, the reporting offers the most sweeping, and also the most granular, portrait of how the air war was prosecuted and investigated — and of its civilian toll.

There is no way to determine that full toll, but one thing is certain: It is far higher than the Pentagon has acknowledged. According to the military’s count, 1,417 civilians have died in airstrikes in the campaign against ISIS in Iraq and Syria; since 2018 in Afghanistan, U.S. air operations have killed at least 188 civilians. But The Times’s analysis of the documents found that many allegations of civilian casualties had been summarily discounted, with scant evaluation. And the on-the-ground reporting — involving a sampling of cases dismissed, cases deemed “credible” and, in Afghanistan, cases not included in the trove of Pentagon documents — found hundreds of deaths uncounted.

The war of precision did not promise that civilians would not die. But before a strike is approved, the military must undertake elaborate protocols to estimate and avoid civilian harm; any expected civilian casualties must be proportional to the military advantage gained. And America’s precision bombs are indeed precise: They hit their targets with near-unerring accuracy.

Read more:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/12/18/us/airstrikes-pentagon-records-civilian-deaths.html

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MEANWHILE THE CONSPIRACY TO KEEP ASSANGE IN PRISON IS IN FULL SWING...

WASHINGTON — Newly declassified surveillance footage provides additional insights about the final minutes and aftermath of a botched U.S. drone strike last year in Kabul, Afghanistan, showing how the military made a life-or-death decision based on imagery that was fuzzy, hard to interpret in real time and prone to confirmation bias.

The strike on Aug. 29 killed 10 innocent people — including seven children — in a tragic blunder that punctuated the end of the 20-year war in Afghanistan.

The disclosure of the videos was a rare step by the U.S. military in any case of an airstrike that caused civilian casualties, and is the first time any footage from the Kabul strike has been seen publicly. The videos encompass about 25 minutes of silent footage from two drones — a military official said both were MQ-9 Reapers — showing the minutes before, during and after the strike.

The at-times blurry footage that operators were watching will continue to be scrutinized for new details about how the episode unfolded, while demonstrating the heightened risk of error that accompanies any decision to fire a missile in a densely populated neighborhood.

The military had been working that day under extreme pressure to head off another attack on troops and civilians in the middle of the chaotic withdrawal. It has said it believed it was tracking an ISIS-K terrorist who might imminently detonate a bomb near the Kabul airport. Three days earlier, a suicide bombing at the airport had killed at least 182 people, including 13 American troops.

The New York Times obtained the footage of the strike through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against United States Central Command, which oversaw military operations in Afghanistan. The disclosure is likely to add fuel to a debate about the rules for airstrikes and protections for civilians in the era of drone warfare.

The videos — one of which is in grainy imagery, apparently from a camera designed to detect heat — show a car arriving at and backing into a courtyard on a residential street blocked by walls. Blurry figures are seen moving around the courtyard, and children are walking on the street outside the walls in the moments before a fireball from a Hellfire missile engulfs the interior. Neighbors can then be seen desperately dumping water onto the courtyard from rooftops.

Read more:

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/19/us/politics/afghanistan-drone-strike-video.html

READ FROM TOP.

"The military had been working that day under extreme pressure"... WOW!!!! Imagine the crap that the US military could do, under real war conditions... Press the nuke button?

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