The Pentagon and the Massive Civilian Death Toll…Again

Rasa - The destructive impulse by the Pentagon regime to present itself as liberator of Mosul is all too obvious. The impulse to press its case with wily elegance is now gone, obviously. And badly missed.

News ID: 428441

Date: 26 March 2017 - 22:16

RNA - This brings us to the subject and the new report at hand: Massive civilian death toll from US bombing in Mosul – as many as 200 civilians killed in a cluster of homes hit on March 13 and 17. This is while Mosul municipality chief, Abdul Sattar al-Habbo, who is supervising the rescue, says 240 bodies have been pulled from the rubble of collapsed buildings. Also, the Iraqi Observatory for Human Rights says nearly 700 civilians have been killed by US-led air strikes or ISIL actions. The militants use car bombs, snipers and mortar fire to counter the Iraqi armed forces offensive. They have also stationed themselves in homes belonging to Mosul residents to fire at Iraqi troops, often drawing air strikes that have killed civilians.

The Pentagon says it will investigate. It is doubtful that any Pentagon official or military commander will ever be held to account. In the world of Pentagon operation, the military officials will surpass International Law, manage to get at sources denied others, hide out the evidence of widespread moral corruption and civilian casualties, and present it with great opacity.

They might even force Iraqi armed forces to pause the offensive on the ISIL stronghold because of the catastrophic rate of civilian casualties they themselves scored. Simply put, they will say the locations had been previously used as a sniper position by ISIL militants, insist the coalition respects human life, insist the strikes corresponded with International Law, and actually get away with this load of rubbish and more.

International Humanitarian Law is clear though. Parties to the conflict - all parties - are obliged to do everything possible to protect civilians. This means that combatants cannot use people as human shields and cannot imperil lives through indiscriminate use of air-power. This is exactly what the US Army has been doing not just to the people of Mosul, but also to the people of Syria and Yemen.

Nevertheless, the March “incident” marks the single largest incident of civilian deaths in the battle for Mosul, topping the previous “incidents” in Yemen and Syria. This comes only a few months after Western governments and the Western media engaged in a fiery campaign against Russian bombing during the fighting in eastern Aleppo, with allegations of war crimes, together with threats to establish a no-fly zone over the city.

They put the total number of civilians killed in eastern Aleppo during the final stages of its liberation from the Al-Qaeda led terrorists as 465 of whom 62 were children. To be clear this is a death toll from all causes, with many people to have been executed by the terrorists themselves and by no means all the others caused by the bombing. Even the so-called Syrian Observatory for Human Rights agrees. It said 142 civilians, 42 of them children, were killed as a result of terrorist shelling in western Aleppo during the same period. That is something the Western media has barely reported at all.

Notwithstanding appearances, US military involvement in Mosul is a blank check and it is precisely here that corporate media does not want to put at risk this mutual benefit society:

With US officials still hopeful that Iraq’s ongoing offensive in Mosul is the beginning of the end of ISIL’s presence in that country, top Pentagon officials, including Defense Secretary James Mattis, are also eager to point out that it’s not going to mean the end of the US military presence there. Mattis is very clear about the need to keep US troops in Iraq, calling it a “national interest” and insisting US forces need to stabilize Iraq, while downplaying the idea that this would be nation-building.

All this means the indiscriminate killing of civilians in Iraq is not going to be a short process. While Mattis isn’t very specific on how long this post-ISIL US military presence will last, he has made it clear that it would be “years.” Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Joe Dunford says the same thing. He insists that the deployment to Iraq this time is more or less permanent, the timespan is going to be indefinite, and that they intend to stay in an open-ended manner.

In the prevailing environment, expect “fakestream” media in the West to report any new civilian causalities by US bombings in Mosul in the completely different way they reported the result of the bombings in Aleppo. In the case of Aleppo, the coverage, and the denunciations of the Russians were completely over-the-top. By contrast, the deadly US bombing in Mosul is barely being reported at all.

This is not an attempt to draw parallels between the two battles. What the noisy campaign against the bombing in Aleppo and the silence about the indiscriminate bombing in Mosul tell us, is that the artificial outcry about the civilian death toll in Aleppo last year was propaganda. The real concern was not for the civilian population but for the fact that the US-backed terrorists were about to be defeated, with the civilians being cynically used as props and pawns in a propaganda game which colluded in Al-Qaeda’s use of them as human shields.

As long as “fakestream” media in the West allows this immoral pattern to continue, the United States and its lackeys will continue to take advantage of the situation - taunting, acting out, and getting away with murder. They will never launch a single investigation into civilian casualties. They will never put their feet down, nor will they ever make their forces face the international consequences of their war crimes against humanity, particularly in the contested city of Mosul.

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