The Iraqi soldier looks out from his tiny three-walled room, across a wasteland of rubble that crumbles steeply down to the banks of the Tigris, and contemplates his final, brutal, days of fighting Islamic State. “We killed them all,” he says quietly. “Daesh, men, women and children. We killed everyone.” What remains of this part of…
“One knowledgeable official estimates that the CIA-backed fighters may have killed or wounded 100,000 Syrian soldiers and their allies,” writes columnist David Ignatius. Given that Syria’s prewar population was not 10 percent of ours, this is the equivalent of a million dead and wounded Americans. What justifies America’s participation in this slaughter? Columnist Eric Margolis…
The catastrophic number of civilian casualties in Mosul is receiving little attention internationally from politicians and journalists. This is in sharp contrast to the outrage expressed worldwide over the bombardment of east Aleppo by Syrian government and Russian forces at the end of 2016. Hoshyar Zebari, the Kurdish leader and former Iraqi finance and foreign…
More than 40,000 civilians were killed in the devastating battle to retake Mosul from ISIS, according to intelligence reports revealed exclusively to The Independent – a death toll far higher than previous estimates. Residents of the besieged city were killed by Iraqi ground forces attempting to force out militants, as well as by air strikes…
You remember. It was supposed to be twenty-first-century war, American-style: precise beyond imagining; smart bombs; drones capable of taking out a carefully identified and tracked human being just about anywhere on Earth; special operations raids so pinpoint-accurate that they would represent a triumph of modern military science. Everything “networked.” It was to be a glorious…
Iran calls the US a terrorist sponsoring state and the US strikes back with sanctions. The United States has just levelled new sanctions on Iran. The stated justification for the sanctions is Iran’s procurement of “military hardware, such as fast attack boats and unmanned aerial vehicles”. But while the US admits that Iran has not…
