RNA - On July 19, US warplanes dropped bombs on a crowd of civilians in the Syrian village of Tokhar. When the dust cleared, a minimum of 95 people were killed, and some reports suggest that as the wounded began dying, the toll rose to nearly 200.
Strange enough, throughout the war on Syria on the pretext of fighting ISIL, CENTCOM has dramatically undercounted the number of civilians killed on so many occasions that it’s become a cliche. More than half of the time, CENTCOM won’t even investigate the incident, insisting there isn’t enough “sufficient verifiable information.”
Amnesty International officials say that this is almost always the case as far as CENTCOM is concerned, and that they routinely mass terrorise and destroy societies into defenseless dependency and then reject information they bring them that includes the names of slain civilians and pictures of the aftermath of the strike. The Pentagon won’t even provide them with criteria on what they actually would want.
This disregard for civilian lives on the pretext of ‘collateral damage’, ‘illegal enemy combatants’ or other license of impunity is appalling and systematic, particularly in Syria. Here, the regime changers have killed or helped kill some 400,000 civilians in five years, while millions more have been forced to flee their homes - purportedly aimed at exporting Western democracy and liberal values to the Muslim world!
International right groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch say they have also uncovered yet more evidence of unlawful airstrikes carried out by the US-led coalition, which amounts to war crimes. In their words, "The repeated targeting of civilian homes are telling examples revealing the coalition forces' flagrant failure to take sufficient precautions to avoid civilian loss of life as required by International Humanitarian Law."
More so, the US government has been party to these crimes by supporting dictatorial and tyrannical regimes and/or weaponising “moderate” terrorist groups, yet along with all nations responsible is violating international requirements to investigate their crimes as well. The horrifying fact is that such attitudes or attacks are not isolated cases, but rather, reflect the overall strategy in which the regime changers indiscriminately drop bombs on populated areas in order to help gain ground for their terror proxies and ultimately affect regime change in Damascus.
To add insult to injury, the UN Security Council is yet to launch an independent investigation into these human rights violations and war crimes. Quite the opposite, the War Party and its proxy forces have successfully lobbied Council to abandon any proposal for an inquiry. Little wonder, except for a handful of nations, no country is demanding an end to such impunity at the UN.
Tragically, such international inattention to civilian deaths in America’s wars isn’t unique to Syria. There is little evidence that the world community gives much thought to the people who live in the nations where US military interventions take place. The major wars the US has fought or backed since 2001 have produced colossal carnage, particularly in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen, where the War Party’s lack of accountability and acknowledgment is less oversight than habit. The US response to so many dead and millions displaced in these devastated countries is woefully dismissive too.
That said, the civilian cost of the US-led War on Terror - by far the greatest and most systematic terrorisation of civilians – has been mostly ignored by the mainstream media and the politicians in the West. Here, the War Party conceives itself as above International Law along with ally Israel, but this reality is taboo to report and so too all the killing and terrorisation of civilians.
Regardless, such attitudes and policies have consequences. International complicity and indifference provides blowback with deadly consequences. Indifference also provides permission to the War Party to pursue more interventions with unforeseen consequences. That's exactly what they are doing right now in Syria.
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