Religion and Politics

The Uncounted

For The New York Times Magazine, Azmat Khan and Anand Gopal report on the multitude of uncounted civilian deaths in Iraq and Syria, the result of poorly planned airstrikes by the American-led coalition fighting the Islamic State in both countries. After visiting the sites of nearly 150 airstrikes, Khan and Gopal explain, “We found that one in five of the coalition strikes we identified resulted in civilian death, a rate more than 31 times that acknowledged by the coalition. It is at such a distance from official claims that, in terms of civilian deaths, this may be the least transparent war in recent American history.” They add, “Intelligence failures suggest that not all civilian casualties are unavoidable tragedies; some deaths could be prevented if the coalition recognizes its past failures and changes its operating assumptions accordingly. But in the course of our investigation, we found that it seldom did either.”

Read at The New York Times Magazine

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