Airwars and Amnesty: War in Raqqa, rhetoric versus reality
“I challenge anyone to find a more precise air campaign in the history of warfare […] The Coalition’s goal is always for zero human casualties.” Former Coalition commander Lt Gen Townsend (Sep. 2017) Airwars
“Every minute of every hour we were putting some kind of fire on ISIS in Raqqa, whether it was mortars, artillery, rockets, [High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems], Hellfires, armed drones, you name it.” Army Sergeant Major John Wayne Troxell (Nov. 2017) Marine Corps Times
The joint investigation by Amnesty and Airwars that found at minimum 1,600 civilians died as a direct result of thousands of US, UK and French airstrikes and tens of thousands of US artillery strikes during the Coalition’s assault on the Islamic State-held city between June to October 2017. The interactive report, which combined field research with open and crowd sourced data, is the most comprehensive civic inquiry into civilian deaths in modern warfare. At the timing of publishing the Coalition had conceded only 10% of civilian deaths documented.