Tag Archives: Mosul

Covering Up the Massacre of Mosul, by Nicolas J.S. Davies

Posted on August 22, 2017 | 1 comment

The US military has trouble counting how many people it kills, especially civilians. From Nicolas J.S. Davies at antiwar.com:

Iraqi Kurdish military intelligence reports have estimated that the nine-month-long U.S.-Iraqi siege and bombardment of Mosul to oust Islamic State forces killed 40,000 civilians. This is the most realistic estimate so far of the civilian death toll in Mosul.

But even this is likely to be an underestimate of the true number of civilians killed. No serious, objective study has been conducted to count the dead in Mosul, and studies in other war zones have invariably found numbers of dead that exceeded previous estimates by as much as 20 to one, as a United Nations-backed Truth Commission did in Guatemala after the end of its civil war. In Iraq, epidemiological studies in 2004 and 2006 revealed a post-invasion death toll that was about 12 times higher than previous estimates.

The bombardment of Mosul included tens of thousands of bombs and missiles dropped by U.S. and “coalition” warplanes, thousands of 220-pound HiMARS rockets fired by US Marines from their “Rocket City” base at Quayara, and tens or hundreds of thousands of 155-mm and 122-mm howitzer shells fired by US, French and Iraqi artillery.

This nine-month bombardment left much of Mosul in ruins (as seen here), so the scale of slaughter among the civilian population should not be a surprise to anybody. But the revelation of the Kurdish intelligence reports by former Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari in an interview with Patrick Cockburn of the U.K.’s Independent newspaper makes it clear that allied intelligence agencies were well aware of the scale of civilian casualties throughout this brutal campaign.

The Kurdish intelligence reports raise serious questions about the US military’s own statements regarding civilian deaths in its bombing of Iraq and Syria since 2014. As recently as April 30, 2017, the US military publicly estimated the total number of civilian deaths caused by all of the 79,992 bombs and missiles it had dropped on Iraq and Syria since 2014 only as “at least 352.” On June 2, it only slightly revised its absurd estimate to “at least 484.”

To continue reading: Covering Up the Massacre of Mosul

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Posted in Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Government, Horseshit, Investigations, Military, War

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Is This What ‘Liberation’ Looks Like? US Airstrikes Have Devastated Mosul, by Phyllis Bennis

Posted on July 29, 2017 | 1 comment

Destroying cities, towns, and villages (in foreign countries) is a treasured American pastime, and the government is at it again. From Phyllis Bennis at antiwar.com:

ISIS’ occupation of Mosul, once Iraq’s second largest city, has virtually come to an end. Though small-scale fighting continues, and U.S. military strikes continued through at least July 17, ISIS control over the city has largely collapsed. Many among the ISIS forces were killed, many fled and many have probably melted back into local communities. US, Iraqi, and some other governments and media are celebrating the defeat of ISIS as the liberation of the city.

Certainly there is a great relief for the hundreds of thousands of residents who were driven out of their homes or who survived years of ISIS brutality, extremism, and destitution. Certainly the end of ISIS control of its largest Iraqi population center is important in the struggle to reduce and eventually end the financing, military power and global appeal of the terrorist organization. The same is true of the likely military defeat of ISIS in Raqqa, its Syrian center and “capital” of its so-called caliphate.

But, as the New York Times vastly understated in a recent editorial, “the celebration should be brief.”

Who Pays the Price?

The price paid by the people of Mosul is incomprehensibly high.

Thousands of civilians have been killed – no one knows exactly how many people have died, how many bodies remain crushed under the rubble of the once-vibrant city, how many whole families have been lost, how many children have been orphaned. A million or so were displaced from their homes; hundreds of thousands of weakened, malnourished Moslawis, many of them psychologically devastated from years under ISIS rule, are still languishing in ill-equipped camps in the desert outside the city, where temperatures routinely soar to 120 degrees.

No one can be sure yet of which military forces fighting in and around Mosul were responsible for exactly which civilian deaths. Certainly ISIS killed many people – directly and indirectly. There is little question, however, that the United States caused a major share of the carnage. On May 19 the Trump administration announced that its new tactic in both Mosul and Raqqa would be to surround and “annihilate” ISIS; this translated, as expected, into a cascading escalation of violence against the trapped civilian populations.

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Media Downplays America’s Bombing of Civilians in Mosul, by Ben Norton

Posted on April 3, 2017 | Leave a comment

The media arm of the military-industrial-intelligence obfuscates American destruction and killing and amplifies that of our adversaries. There’s probably nothing new about that, but readers should be alert to it. From Ben Norton at theantimedia.com:

If you read the headlines of major corporate media outlets, you’d think hundreds of Iraqi civilians in Mosul coincidentally died in the same location that just so happened to be hit by a US airstrike.

A March 17 US attack in the city of Mosul resulted in a massacre of civilians. The monitoring group Airwars estimated that between 130 and 230 Iraqis were killed in the incident. Iraqi media reported similar figures.

Civilian victims of the US-led bombing campaign to oust ISIS from the major northern Iraqi city, which has been terrorized by the extremist group for three years, have received little media coverage.

The Washington Post (3/28/17) noted, nevertheless, that the recent airstrike “was potentially one of the worst US-led civilian bombings in 25 years.”

Yet just a few days before the Post published this stark fact, leading news networks went out of their way to craft some of the most euphemistic headlines imaginable.

ABC News (3/25/17) took the cake, giving its report the disjointed title “US Reviewing Airstrike That Corresponds to Site Where 200 Iraqi Civilians Allegedly Died.” (This story was also syndicated by Yahoo News—3/25/17.)

Note that the Iraqis simply died; they weren’t killed. The airstrike was a mere temporal and geographic coincidence.

The Los Angeles Times (3/25/17‎) used similarly obfuscatory language, with the headline “US Acknowledges Airstrike in Mosul, Where More Than 200 Iraqi Civilians Died.” This article, which was republished by the Chicago Tribune (3/25/17), made it sound like 200 Iraqis have been killed in all of Mosul.

To continue reading: Media Downplays America’s Bombing of Civilians in Mosul

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