Destriero lost a bet to a member of broom command for sure. I expect the five, count them five commendations were for doing a good job emptying the General's trash can? We do that with the building porters here, write them a special thank you note around Christmas with a little bonus.
As the DoD is know for it's flagrant mis-reporting, Airwars is at least as credible. Take either with a pinch of salt however Airwars do have a "least biast" and "Highly factual" rating on Media Bias Fact check.
Minimum civilians likely killed in alleged Coalition strikes across Iraq and Syria 2014 - 2018
As this Airwars chart shows, minimum likely deaths from alleged Coalition strikes in Iraq and Syria rose by 82% in 2016. However, in 2017 - under the Trump presidency - we saw an unprecedented leap of 218% in minimum likely deaths with the year marked by the simultaneous assaults on Raqqa and Mosul.
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The Trump Effect
Prior to his election, Donald Trump had lambasted Barack Obama for what he viewed as an
overcautious approach to the war. Once in office, President Trump boasted that he had changed US rules of engagement to make it easier to bomb ISIS – while his officials began publicly referring to a War of Annihilation.
The intensification of fighting under Trump led to significant civilian harm and levels of destruction in urban areas, comparable at times to the Second World War. What is less clear is whether similar levels of destruction would have occurred anyway under a Hillary Clinton presidency, given the war’s focus on urban areas in 2017.
Even today Raqqa is considered “unfit for human habitation” by the UN, having been
70% destroyed. West Mosul experienced similar devastation with 80% of the Old City now in ruins. Reportedly
more civilians than combatants lost their lives during the Battle for Mosul because of Iraqi, Coalition and ISIS actions. To this day, bodies are still being pulled from the rubble, while in Raqqa recovery teams are even now still discovering
mass graves.
So intense were US-led military actions in 2017 that Coalition-linked civilian casualties far outnumbering those attributed to Russia over the year. Two of the worst military failures of the war happened during this period due to American actions. On March 17th 2017 in the Jadida neighbourhood of Mosul, between 105 and 141 civilians were confirmed killed in an American airstrike on a house. The event is the biggest confirmed incident of civilian casualties in the entire war so far.
