Message From Children In Syria and Iraq to US Pilots Dropping Munitions On Them: "Please, Can You Stop Killing Us?" - Pentagon's Facetious Civilian Death Count - The Silent Slaughter of the US Air War - Shock, Awe … and Silence - May 11th- May 12th 2017: 34 New Airstrikes

May 13, 2017

"Please, can you stop killing us?"

Because propaganda works both ways.

Russia's alleged killing of Syrians in bombings. It is highly suggested readers go to the sources to verify reported civilian deaths by Russian bombings before these reports are taken at face value. One such spurious source are the White Helmets:

A Reckless Disregard for Civilian Lives
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Source: Global Research

The Silent Slaughter of the US Air War

By Nicolas J. S. Davies
May 11, 2017

April 2017 was another month of mass slaughter and unimaginable terror for the people of Mosul in Iraq and the areas around Raqqa and Tabqa in Syria, as the heaviest, most sustained U.S.-led bombing campaign since the American War in Vietnam entered its 33rd month.

The Airwars monitoring group has compiled reports of 1,280 to 1,744 civilians killed by at least 2,237 bombs and missiles that rained down from U.S. and allied warplanes in April (1,609 on Iraq and 628 on Syria). The heaviest casualties were in and around Old Mosul and West Mosul, where 784 to 1,074 civilians were reported killed, but the area around Tabqa in Syria also suffered heavy civilian casualties.

In other war zones, as I have explained in previous articles (here and here), the kind of "passive" reports of civilian deaths compiled by Airwars have only ever captured between 5 percent and 20 percent of the actual civilian war deaths revealed by comprehensive mortality studies. Iraqbodycount, which used a similar methodology to Airwars, had only counted 8 percent of the deaths discovered by a mortality study in occupied Iraq in 2006.

Airwars appears to be collecting reports of civilian deaths more thoroughly than Iraqbodycount 11 years ago, but it classifies large numbers of them as "contested" or "weakly reported," and is deliberately conservative in its counting. For instance, in some cases, it has counted local media reports of "many deaths" as a minimum of one death, with no maximum figure. This is not to fault Airwars' methods, but to recognize its limitations in contributing to an actual estimate of civilian deaths.

 

Marine Corps Gen. Joe Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, meets with members of the coalition at a forward operating base near Qayyarah West, Iraq, April 4, 2017. (DoD Photo by Navy Petty Officer 2nd Class Dominique A. Pineiro)

Allowing for various interpretations of Airwars' data, and assuming that, like such efforts in the past, it is capturing between 5 percent and 20 percent of actual deaths, a serious estimate of the number of civilians killed by the U.S.-led bombing campaign since 2014 would by now have to be somewhere between 25,000 and 190,000.

The Pentagon recently revised its own facetious estimate of the number of civilians it has killed in Iraq and Syria since 2014 to 352. That is less than a quarter of the 1,446 victims whom Airwars has positively identified by name.

Airwars has also collected reports of civilians killed by Russian bombing in Syria, which outnumbered its reports of civilians killed by U.S.-led bombing for most of 2016. However, since the U.S.-led bombing escalated to over 10,918 bombs and missiles dropped in the first three months of 2017, the heaviest bombardment since the campaign began in 2014, Airwars' reports of civilians killed by U.S.-led bombing have surpassed reports of deaths from Russian bombing.

Because of the fragmentary nature of all Airwars' reports, this pattern may or may not accurately reflect whether the U.S. or Russia has really killed more civilians in each of these periods. There are many factors that could affect that.

For example, Western governments and NGOs have funded and supported the White Helmets and other groups who report civilian casualties caused by Russian bombing, but there is no equivalent Western support for the reporting of civilian casualties from the Islamic State-held areas that the U.S. and its allies are bombing. If Airwars' reporting is capturing a greater proportion of actual deaths in one area than another due to factors like this, it could lead to differences in the numbers of reported deaths that do not reflect differences in actual deaths.

Please go to Global Research to read more about this unseen carnage.
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Related reading:

Warplanes of the U.S.-led Coalition have committed a terrible massacre, killing and injuring over 60 civilians in Thelthanh, Aleppo