Civilian Causalities

SANA’A, YEMEN — “I struggled for 30 years to build a house and an airplane comes and destroys it in seconds,” 55-year-old Ahmed al-Sulmi al-Hubeishi told MintPress. Ahmed lost four of his children last week — Seham, Abdul Rahman, Khalid, and Waseem — when Saudi airstrikes targeted a residential neighborhood in Sana`a’s al-Ruguss district. “Now, there is nothing left — even the games that remind me of my children have been destroyed.”

KABUL, AFGHANISTAN — For the first time in recorded history, the U.S. and the Afghan government, whose forces are trained by Americans, killed more civilians than did the Taliban in the first quarter of 2019, according to a United Nations report. Increased bombing campaigns by the U.S. and increasingly reckless search operations by pro-government forces have fueled the trend reversal.

Back in 2016, The Guardian published a piece about The Chilcott Report and how Britain should be more careful over civilian deaths in the battlegrounds of the Mid-East.

In 2007, when making a speech during his bid for the presidency of the United States, the late Senator John McCain spoke about Iran’s supposed nuclear weapons’ programme and when questioned as to whether there might be U.S. reaction to such allegations responded by singing:

That old Beach Boys song, Bomb Iran… bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb.”

WASHINGTON – On Thursday, the U.S.-led coalition targeting Daesh (ISIS) published a casualty report that has drawn criticism and consternation from independent watchdogs and human-rights groups for severely underestimating the number of civilians killed by coalition airstrikes in Syria and Iraq since operations began in 2014.

Sadaa,Yemen — The U.S. backed Saudi-led coalition’s bloody campaign of airstrikes in Yemen continues to claim civilian victims. Yemen`s northern province as Sadaa, declared a military zone by the Saudi-led Coalition in the early days of its war on Yemen, is amongst the hardest-hit.
On Wednesday, a Saudi airstrike targeted a home serving as a de facto shelter for the internally displaced in the residential neighborhood of al-Seifi in Yemen’s northwestern province of Saada, killing nine civilians and injuring five, mostly women and children.

In the first two parts of this report, I have estimated that about 2.4 million people have been killed as a result of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, while about 1.2 million have been killed in Afghanistan and Pakistan as a result of the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan.

News stories are full of quotes painting the situation as nearly unprecedented in its horror: “hell on earth,” “never seen anything like this,” “one of the worst attacks in Syrian history,” and “flagrant war crime” on an “epic scale.”

During the 2016 election, Donald Trump – quite successfully – managed to convince a sizable portion of the electorate that he would take a much more anti-interventionist stance, in terms of U.S. military entanglements abroad, than would his contender Hillary Clinton. Yet, throughout his first year as president, such differences have been few and far between.

The Pentagon made a decision that “beggars belief,” human rights groups said Friday, when it tossed out its plan to ban certain cluster bombs that leave a large percentage of lethal, unexploded munitions, which pose a significant risk to civilians.