The human cost to Operation Inherent Resolve

It's almost as if we've moved on from the war against ISIS/ISIL before the war was even over. The tens of thousands of victims deserve some accounting, if only a summary number.
For the sake of brevity I'm going to focus on casualties that America is responsible for.

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You would think that 75 dead U.S. soldiers would get some sort of acknowledgement, but it appears that dead soldiers (like 9/11) is about virtue signaling these days.
Of course U.S. casualties were only a tiny fraction of this war.

Raqqa:

The U.S.-led coalition killed more than 1,600 civilians in the northern Syria city of Raqqa during months of bombardment that liberated it from the Islamic State group, hundreds more than the number the U.S.-led coalition claims over the entire four-year campaign against ISIS, Amnesty International and a London-based watchdog group said Thursday.

Amnesty and Airwars said the toll came after the "most comprehensive investigation into civilian deaths in a modern conflict."
...U.S.-backed Syrian fighters captured Raqqa in October 2017 after a four-month campaign.

The U.N estimates that more than 10,000 buildings were destroyed or 80 percent of the city.

It doesn't take a genius to see that when you completely level a city of 300,000 people that a whole lot of civilians will die in the process. Did anyone in America even care?

When it came to urban destruction, no one can hold a candle to what the U.S. coalition did to Mosul, a city of population of 2.5 million.

54,000 houses in and around Mosul were destroyed, and hundreds of thousands of people, almost 64,000 families, were displaced and remain in camps. A total of 62 schools are completely destroyed and 207 damaged.
...The fierce fighting left entire neighbourhoods flattened, and today the Old City remains uninhabitable, with more than 3,000 houses, schools and shops destroyed.

Like with Raqqa, a very large number of civilians died when we "liberated" them.

At least 9,000 civilians were killed in the battle to retake the northern Iraqi city of Mosul from the Islamic State in Iraq & Syria (ISIS), according to a new analysis from The Associated Press.
...The AP said it reached the number after analyzing and compiling information from Airwars, an independent group that documents airstrikes in the region, as well as data from Amnesty International, Iraq Body Count and a United Nations report.

The AP also obtained a list of more than 9,600 people killed during the battle from Mosul's morgue.

How many of those 9,000+ civilian deaths were from our bombs, and how many were from ISIS, is very hard to say, but this study shows that "the U.S.-led battle to remove Daesh (ISIS) from Mosul ultimately killed nearly 12 times the number of civilians than were killed by the infamous terror group."

Before Mosul there was Ramadi, a city of 500,000.

more than 3,000 buildings and nearly 400 roads and bridges were damaged or destroyed between May 2015, when Ramadi fell to ISIS, and Jan. 22, after most of the fighting had ended. Over roughly the same period, nearly 800 civilians were killed in clashes, airstrikes and executions.

There were hundreds of civilians killed even before Ramadi, and who only knows how many civilians have been killed outside of Iraq and Syria.
It may seem pointless to write about this now, but it seems a crime to pretend we didn't kill all of these people.

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mimi's picture

bombing raids in their wars?

Inherent Resolve. What means inherent here? Resolved to do what?
To me that would be inherent lust for power.

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@mimi Which sounds like part of an ad for Schick razors as a guy smoothly pulls one across his face shaving away the hair, or just keeping it trimmed.

Like the phrase by Israeli govt.talking about 'mowing the grass' as they carpet bomb the largest open air prison on earth, Gaza, for 'protection'.

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edg's picture

"It became necessary to destroy the town to save it," unnamed US Army Major regarding Ben Tre, Vietnam. Reported in New York Times on February 8, 1968.

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snoopydawg's picture

into Libya and Syria and to spread freedoms and democracy in Iraq and elsewhere. These images are never shown on the nightly news or in online main stream media websites. People just seem to take the government's word for why we do what we do without bothering to do their own research. As our troops were sent home in body bags and metal caskets people parrot, "thank you for your service and for defending us." I never reply kindly to them. I tell them about the birth defects in Iraq because we used depleted uranium and then left the bombs when we finally left.

Did anyone in America even care?

Obviously not enough!

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QMS's picture

if it is not shown on the news. Or, so we are led to believe. It's marketing. The cost of war is freedom from understanding.

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question everything