Pentagon somehow kills three times as many ISIS militants than ever existed
Buried deep in a recent L.A. Times news article was this gem.
Coalition warplanes have carried out 20,205 strikes in Iraq and Syria since 2014, according to the latest published numbers, which the Pentagon says have aided in the killing of more than 70,000 militants. Yet Pentagon officials also claim to have killed just 229 civilians over that time.
Forget the dearth of civilian deaths claim for a moment. We'll circle back to that later.
Let's stick with the 70,000 dead militants claim for now.
As recently as February it was 60,000 dead militants, and in December it was "only" 50,000 dead ISIS militants.
So our airstrikes have killed 20,000 jihadists in just four months, leaving just 15,000 left.
Pretty impressive.
Except for one thing: There were never that many jihadists to begin with.
A CIA assessment puts the number of ISIS fighters at possibly more than three times the previous estimates.
The terror group that calls itself the Islamic State "can muster between 20,000 and 31,500 fighters across Iraq and Syria," a CIA spokesman told CNN on Thursday.
Analysts and U.S. officials initially estimated there were as many as 10,000 fighters, including those who were freed from prisons by ISIS, and Sunni loyalists who have joined the fight as the group advanced across Iraq.
So we've "aided" in the killing of 2.5 to 3 times the number of ISIS militants that existed at the peak of the caliphate (i.e. September 2014), with 15,000 militants still left over.
This does not include all the ISIS militants killed by Iranian-backed forces, the Syrian army, rival Syrian rebels, and Russian bombing (aka the bulk of the anti-ISIS ground troops).
That's pretty darn amazing, doncha think?
How do you think something like that is even possible?
Well, for starters the Pentagon has had a very loose definition of "militant" since before ISIS.
Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties that did little to box him in. It in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.
What this translated into is: 3,111
That's the minimum number of innocent civilians that we've killed so far in this war.
What is likely is that the Pentagon has indeed killed tens of thousands of "militants" in Iraq and Syria since 2014. It's just that they weren't militants until we killed them.
Comments
I remember Cronkite had nothing to report
about the Viet Nam war except kills.
That turned that conflict around.
Where is our Cronkite now?
"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." ---- William Casey, CIA Director, 1981
That was the era of the Fairness Doctrine
And independent news departments that were accepted as money losers but morally necessary by the parent corporations.
Beware the bullshit factories.
I look at it this way:
In the US, protesters are increasingly regarded as "enemy combatants" by the militarized police. Especially if some of them are POC.
It's part of the deal America made with the devil.
Shades of Vietnam!
Does the Pentagon still worship body count? I thought that was just Robert Strange McNamara.
I've seen lots of changes. What doesn't change is people. Same old hairless apes.
Proof of the Resurrection!
Then those erstwhile militants arose from the Undead and began fighting in earnest, so we had to kill them again...and again...and again.
MIC makes out very well on our thoroughness.
I think I've seen this zombie movie
If not I see a low-budget SyFy movie coming soon.
Shut up and swallow.
Heh.
Neither Russia nor China is our enemy.
Neither Iran nor Venezuela are threatening America.
Cuba is a dead horse, stop beating it.
even if there had been 70,000 enemy casualties,
it would be a piss poor return on 20,000 sorties.
The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.
Well, that's not part of the financial
calculation though as that's only the cost to our government, not the contractors who make bank. So the government wastes some money, the MIC gets that all back for US GDP! USA, USA, USA!!!!
Only a fool lets someone else tell him who his enemy is. Assata Shakur
Turkey bombs both Iraq and Syria
our allies
What the idiot shit posters on the tubes conveniently forget...
Especially when they whine about radical Islam and ISIS, is that our military and intel racket have been meddling in that region for decades. In fact, the CIA radicalized them for the sake of protecting American (and British) corporate interests.
These morons also can't figure out that we've been arming and funding them.
Modern education is little more than toeing the line for the capitalist pigs.
Guerrilla Liberalism won't liberate the US or the world from the iron fist of capital.
@The Aspie Corner
Just to mention, they've actually been propagandized by teams of professionals - where they aren't part of the army of internet trolls paid to 'influence' and 'correct' the public's perceptions.
The carefully disinformed commenters are not really our enemies - the pathological self-interests abusing and using them (along with the rest of us) are.
Psychopathy is not a political position, whether labeled 'conservatism', 'centrism' or 'left'.
A tin labeled 'coffee' may be a can of worms or pathology identified by a lack of empathy/willingness to harm others to achieve personal desires.
Since GWB's war on Iraw the US govt has been trying to
suppress body count reporting for various reasons. With "embedded" reporters, it was easy.
Among those reasons was prevention of accurate reporting on civilian kills, which we've outrageously under-reported all along.
Then, the Obama definitin resurrected an old vietnam war trick, "if we killed it it's VC". That redefinition was made publlic and there was nary a peep from the public.
That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --