New York Times: Thousands of Civilians Killed in US Drone Strikes

False intelligence, imminent collateral damage and thousands of civilians killed: The New York Times has published a shocking investigation into the US military's drone strikes in its war against jihadist groups in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria.

The investigation is based on 1,300 Pentagon reports of civilian casualties obtained by the American newspaper under the Government Transparency Act.

"The American air war has been marked by misinformation, hasty and inaccurate rocket fire and the deaths of thousands of civilians, including many children," the paper concluded. "No report leads to the conclusion of a mistake or a disciplinary sanction."

Promises of transparency from the time of Barack Obama, the first US president to prefer remote-controlled drones to avoid killing US troops in conflict zones, have been replaced by "opacity and impunity," the New York Times reported. .

In five years, the US military has carried out more than 50,000 air strikes in Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq. They admit that they have mistakenly killed 1,417 civilians in Syria and Iraq since 2014. Since 2018, 188 civilians have been killed in Afghanistan.

For this material, prepared for several months, the newspaper analyzed the documents received and conducted field investigations, checking the official information for more than 100 bombed sites.

Many of the cases mentioned are already known, but the investigation shows that the number of victims the Pentagon acknowledges is "significantly underestimated."

/BTA

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