The United States military leadership has been hiding data on the large number of civilian casualties, including children, in airstrikes in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan over the past few years, The New York Times has reported
The newspaper obtained more than 1,300 internal documents of the Pentagon, from which it follows that the agency’s leadership did not conduct full investigations into such incidents, and they did not take measures to prevent them in the future.
Official statistics alone show that strikes against Islamic State fighters in Syria and Iraq have killed 1,417 civilians since 2014, with another 188 civilians killed in Afghanistan since 2018.
Journalists at The New York Times analysed the material available to them and concluded that “hundreds of casualties” had been overlooked and the exact number could not now be ascertained.
In response to an enquiry by the NYT, Bill Urban, a spokesman for the U.S. Central Command, said that “even with the world’s best technology, errors occur due to incomplete information or its misinterpretation.” He added that if an airstrike was conducted with the most complete information available and all the objectives were met, civilian casualties are not grounds for disciplinary action.