The New York Times disclosed a major scandal in the Pentagon on the 18th local time.
Combining news from The New York Times, Agence France-Presse and Russia Today (RT), the Pentagon has severely downplayed the civilian death toll from its so-called "precision" strikes in places like Syria and Iraq.
Screenshot of the New York Times report
According to a confidential assessment of more than 1,300 civilian casualty reports within the U.S. military obtained by The New York Times, U.S. airstrikes in multiple countries in the Middle East were labeled as "serious intelligence lapses" that resulted in the hasty and imprecise targeting of targets that killed thousands of civilians, including many children. This stands in stark contrast to the U.S. government's portrayal of a war waged by omnivision drones and precision missiles.
The militant U.S. military tends to rely on "incorrect or incomplete" intelligence to fight "terrorist" targets, sometimes killing dozens of civilians, RT said. For example, on July 19, 2016, an airstrike in the United States killed about 120 Syrian villagers. The Pentagon believes that about 85 militants were killed in the bombing, even though the incident occurred "far from the front line." In a 2017 attack, a U.S. warplane mistakenly used a civilian car carrying two children as a car bomb, killing a family fleeing western Mosul, a city in northern Iraq.
After reviewing documents and visiting nearly a hundred sites of incident in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, The New York Times said that although the U.S. military did not visit these places or talk to witnesses, it often denied reports of civilian casualties, calling them untrustworthy.
Moreover, even if the United States acknowledges civilian casualties, it is not eager to pay compensation to the victims, the New York Times reported that "less than a dozen condolence payments were paid."
The Pentagon claims that U.S. bombing operations in Syria and Iraq have killed a total of 1,417 civilians, and 188 civilians have been killed in Afghanistan since 2018, though the New York Times said that while the death toll could not be determined yet, one thing was certain: The exact number of deaths was much higher than the number the Pentagon had acknowledged.
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Source: China Search