civilian casualties

Thick smoke and flames erupt from an airstrike by the U.S.-led coalition in Kobani, Syria, as seen from a hilltop on the outskirts of Suruc, at the Turkey-Syria border.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights has issued a report today covering the civilian death toll of US-led coalition airstrikes in Syria over the past month, from May 23 to June 23, reporting at least 472 civilians, the largest in any 30-day period since the US started bombing Syria in 2014.

A Yemeni soldier looks at the graffiti of U.S. drone strike painted on a wall as a protest against the drone strikes, in Sanaa, Yemen, on Dec. 21, 2013. (Photo: Mohammed Mohammed/Xinhua)
A new report compiled by the Columbia Law School Human Rights Clinic and the Sanaa Center for Strategic Studies has found that the United States only admits officially to about one-fifth of their drone strikes which end up killing someone, saying this hurts accountability.

(ANTIWAR.COM) The Pentagon continues to offer “official” civilian death tolls from the US air war in Iraq and Syria that is only a tiny fraction of the killings documented by private NGOs, but even this deliberate undercount is rising at a growing rate, reflecting what is in reality a precipitous spike in civilian deaths.

A volunteer carries the body of civilians killed in a US air strike in Mosul, Iraq on March 24, 2017. (AP/Felipe Dana)

A Kurdish boy, center background, walks between buildings that were destroyed during the U.S. bombing campaign in Kobani, north Syria.
When we think about terrorism we most often think about the horrors of a Manchester-like attack, where a radicalized suicide bomber went into a concert hall and killed dozens of innocent civilians. It was an inexcusable act of savagery and it certainly did terrorize the population.

Security forces inspect near the site of a suicide attack in Kabul, Afghanistan, May 31, 2017. A massive explosion rocked a highly secure diplomatic area of Kabul on Wednesday morning, causing casualties and sending a huge plume of smoke over the Afghan capital. (AP/Rahmat Gul)
KABUL, Afghanistan — A massive suicide truck bombing rocked a highly secure diplomatic area of Kabul on Wednesday morning, killing 80 people and wounding as many as 350, an attack that left a scene of mayhem and destruction and sent a huge plume of smoke over the Afghan capital.

A Yemeni soldier looks at the graffiti of U.S. drone strike painted on a wall as a protest against the drone strikes, in Sanaa, Yemen, on Dec. 21, 2013. (Photo: Mohammed Mohammed/Xinhua)
The Pentagon said last week that there were “no credible indications of civilian casualties” from the latest U.S. Navy SEALs raid on a village in Yemen.

Residents walk through damaged streets at the mountain resort town of Zabadani in the Damascus countryside, Syria, Thursday, May 18, 2017. (AP/Hassan Ammar)
Exemplified by the hundred and some odd people they’ve killed in the last 48 hours, the US is struggling mightily with the narrative that they are taking extraordinary care to limit the number of civilian casualties in the air war in Syria, and are rapidly losing any pretense of a moral high ground.

With a mosque’s minaret in the foreground, a United States Air Force cargo plane takes off from the Incirlik Air Base in southern Turkey, where coalition forces launch attacks inside of Syria, July 30, 2015.
The number of civilians killed in air strikes by the US-led coalition in Syria over the past month was the highest monthly toll since it began its campaign against the Islamic State (IS) group in 2014, a monitoring organization said on Tuesday.

Residents walk through damaged streets at the mountain resort town of Zabadani in the Damascus countryside, Syria, Thursday, May 18, 2017. A U.S. airstrike struck pro-Syrian government forces hitting a convoy in the desert near the border with Jordan, (AP/Hassan Ammar)
Russia has condemned a US coalition attack on Wednesday that it claims had hit civilians, Russian news agencies reported.