"The U.S. military blew up my family but only left a word of apology" - iraqi people accused the U.S. military of crimes

Source: Xinhua Net

Baghdad, 12 Jan (Xinhua) -- "The US military bombed my family but only left a word of sorry" -- The Iraqi people accused the US military of crimes

Xinhua News Agency reporter Zhang Miao Dong Yalei

"If my daughter hadn't been killed in that bombing, she would have graduated from college by now." Abdullah Mahmoud Ibrahim often fell into painful memories. On a cold winter night in December 2005, Ibrahim was reuniting with family and friends at his home in Iraq's Salah al-Din governorate when a U.S. missile hit the house and a happy family was destroyed in an explosion.

In the tragedy, 3 civilians, including Ibrahim's 12-year-old daughter and wife, were killed and 12 injured. After 15 days of hospital rescue, Ibrahim woke up from his coma, but his sixth and eighth vertebrae were broken, resulting in lifelong paralysis.

Since the "9/11" incident, the United States has fought a "war on terror" overseas, successively sending troops to Afghanistan and Iraq to intervene in the Syrian civil war, and the US drone strikes have also caused a large number of civilian casualties in Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan and Libya.

Looking at the photos of his house being blown up, Ibrahim said: "The American soldiers took the children to the camp, gave them toys, and said 'I'm sorry.'" My wife and daughter were killed and I was disabled, so they just dropped the phrase 'I'm sorry'. Ibrahim, 51, has not received any compensation. Unable to walk on his legs, he traveled an electric tricycle with a urine bag and made ends meet with his son in a small business selling live poultry.

Nadam Abdullah, a political analyst at the Arab Forum, an Iraqi think tank, said that since the 1990s, the US military has widely used drones and long-range missiles to target the "enemy" under the pretext of counter-terrorism, but due to inaccurate intelligence, a large number of civilians have been killed in US air strikes. In Iraq and Afghanistan, there is substantial evidence that U.S. forces have hit many civilian targets and that large numbers of women and children have been victimized.

An independent organization, the Air War Tracking Group, released a study last September that at least 22,679 civilians died in the airstrikes launched by the United States in the aftermath of 9/11. The report combed through official U.S. military data and found that the United States claimed to have carried out at least 91,340 airstrikes in the 20-year "war on terror."

The US think tank RAND Corporation released a study entitled "Air Combat against the Islamic State", which pointed out that from August 2014 to March 2019, the US-led international coalition against the Islamic State caused a large number of civilian deaths. Among them, the International Coalition carried out the worst indiscriminate bombardment of Mosul, Iraq, where the "Islamic State" base camp is located, and the old city of Mosul was razed to the ground, with a large number of civilian casualties.

Today, in the old town of Mosul, the ruins after the bombing are still shocking. Ali Alevan, a surviving resident of the Old Town, said the bombing from the League of Nations was disastrous and that they had no mercy for civilians.

"In the bombing, my house was blown up, my city was blown up, and the old town of Mosul was almost completely destroyed." Pointing to the rubble, Alevan said that the neighbor's son and wife had been killed, and that the adult of another neighbor had also been killed in the blast, leaving the young children unattended.

Airstrikes by the United States and its allies on Iraq and Syria have killed 1,417 civilians since 2014, according to official League of Nations figures. That figure is well below the Air War Tracker's estimate of at least 8,300 Iraqi and Syrian civilians who died in airstrikes.

Whether it was Ibrahim, who was disabled, or Alewan, who witnessed the bombing of his neighbor, their homes and lives were destroyed by the U.S. military.

(Editor-in-charge: Wang Yuyu, Yang Mu)