The SDF is making a final push today in the four-month Battle of Raqqa.
Victory is in sight.

The ancient mud brick walls circling Raqqa's deserted old city are almost the only structure still intact. Inside, shops and homes spill crumbling concrete onto either side of the narrow roads, block after block.
Fighting between U.S.-backed militias and Islamic State in the jihadist group's former Syria stronghold has peppered mosques and minarets with machine-gun fire while air strikes flattened houses. No building is untouched.

Hurrah?

UN war crimes investigators have denounced a “staggering loss of civilian life” caused by the US-backed campaign to reclaim Raqqa, the de facto capital of Islamic State.

I'm sensing a pattern here.

When Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi arrived in western Mosul to declare its liberation from the Islamic State, he was surrounded by mountains of rubble and shattered stone—all that remains of the majority of the once-great city.

Raqqa received the Mosul Treatment.

The U.S. military has acknowledged that the U.S.-led coalition probably had a role in the March 17 explosion, but said Islamic State also could be to blame.
Local officials and eyewitnesses have said as many as 240 people may have died in the Al-Jadida district when a blast made a building collapse, burying families inside.
...
The Pentagon does not regularly release images or videos from operations. However, it has had to do so once already this month after it denied striking a mosque in Syria, releasing an aerial image to show the mosque was intact. That incident is under investigation.
A spokesman for the U.S-led coalition fighting Islamic State told reporters on Thursday he was working to declassify a video showing militants hiding civilians in a building in west Mosul to "bait the coalition to attack."

Wait. What?
"Hiding civilians in a building" to "bait the coalition to attack."
That can't mean what I think it means.
Can it?

Before Raqqa and Mosul, there was Ramadi.

Destruction in Ramadi is “staggering” and worse than anywhere else in Iraq, a U.N. team concluded this week after making the first assessment visit to the city since its recapture from Islamic State.

In Vietnam we destroyed villages to save them.
In Iraq, we've done this with major cities.