civilian casualties

Friends and family pray during a funeral procession for victims of a U.S. airstrike in the Nangarhar Province, Afghanistan, Aug. 8, 2017. (Photo: Twitter @Qadir Sediqi‏)
Afghan officials today confirmed that US airstrikes targeted and killed at least 16 civilians, mostly women, and children, in the eastern Nangarhar Province, targeting the civilians as they tried to flee out of an ISIS-held district where heavy fighting has been ongoing.

Black smoke rises from Raqqa where U.S.-forces are battling ISIS militants, in, northeast Syria, Thursday, July 27, 2017. (AP/Hussein Malla)
24 hours of US airstrikes against the ISIS capital city of Raqqa, in northern Syria, have killed at least 29 civilians and wounded a large number of others, many of them seriously.
The slain include nine women and 14 children.

A US Air Force plane takes off as a Turkish Air Force fighter jet taxis at the Incirlik airbase, southern Turkey, Sunday, Sept. 1, 2013. (Photo: AP/Vadim Ghirda)
New reports out of the ISIS capital city of Raqqa say US airstrikes hit a number of residential districts in the city over the course of Saturday, killing at least 43 civilians and wounding an unknown, but a substantial number of others.

An Iraqi traffic policeman inspecting a car destroyed by a Blackwater security detail in al-Nisoor Square in Baghdad, Iraq.
A federal appeals court on Friday threw out lengthy prison sentences of three former operatives for private mercenary firm Blackwater Worldwide—and ordered a retrial for a fourth operative who had received a life sentence—for their roles in the notorious 2007 Nisour Square massacre in Baghdad, which left 14 unarmed Iraqis dead and another 17 wounded.

Men pray at a cemetery for Shia volunteer fighters killed fighting with ISIS militants in the Wadi al-Salam, or “Valley of Peace” cemetery in Najaf, 100 miles (160 kilometers) south of Baghdad, Iraq. (AP/Anmar Khalil)

One of the hoariest methods of modern war propaganda remains the official body count. Government or military officials decisively touting large numbers of enemies killed has long been a surefire way to get credulous or friendly press coverage, despite the fact that the figures cited are routinely presented with no evidence to back them up or context about how they are counting this “enemy.”

An employee of Doctors Without Borders, MSF, walks inside the charred remains of the organization’s hospital after it was hit by a U.S. airstrike in Kunduz, Afghanistan. (AP/Najim Rahim)
The civilian death toll in Afghanistan, some 16 years into the US-led invasion and occupation, continues to rise precipitously, with the most recent figures out of the United Nations showing 1,662 civilians killed in the first half of 2017, the highest civilian toll of the entire war.

ABC’s source alleges Khan Mohammed’s death was covered up by Australian soldiers.
Adding to evidence of the humanitarian nightmare the Afghan War has become, Australia is now investigating soldiers from their special forces related to evidence that at least twice in raids in Kandahar Province, those troops killed children in rural areas, then tried to cover up their deaths.

Residents carry the body of several civilians killed in a US air strike in Mosul, Iraq on March 24, 2017. (AP/Felipe Dana)
The US-led coalition attacking the Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria killed as many as 744 civilians in June, an independent monitor said Wednesday.
Airwars – a London-based collective of journalists and researchers that uses social media, eyewitness reports and other sources to compile its data – said the concurrent assaults on Raqqa in Syria and Mosul in Iraq were often “devastating.”

A British soldier looks through the scope of a machine gun to observe an area as he waits for the arrival of Britain’s Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson during his visit to Camp Qargha in Kabul, Afghanistan, Nov. 26, 2016. (Mohammad Ismail/AP)
The British Special Air Service is facing accusations of war crimes following the exposure of an internal investigation into murderous rampages conducted across Afghanistan that were subsequently covered up.