U.S. air power has been central in the country’s wars in Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq and elsewhere, with officials promising that drones and other sophisticated weapons allow the U.S. military to carry out precision airstrikes that spare civilians caught in war zones. But a groundbreaking investigation by The New York Times reveals the U.S. military’s air wars have been plagued by bad intelligence, imprecise targeting and a lack of accountability for thousands of civilian deaths, many of them children.
extensive reporting on the ground in Iraq and Syria, as well as 1,300 confidential Pentagon reports on civilian casualties resulting from U.S. drones and other airstrikes.
Ali Fathi Zeidan and his family had moved from a town, a village called Wana, which was just south of the Mosul Dam. They left it because there was fighting between ISIS and Peshmerga forces, and they were really looking for anywhere where they could be safe. And that often meant, for many families who were fleeing displacement in 2015, in 2016 — it often meant moving to places where you already had family. And Ali Fathi Zeidan’s daughter was married to a young man whose brother lived in West Mosul, and that’s where they wound up living.
— source democracynow.org | Dec 22, 2021