For the past months, Washington has faced the urgent need to distract the world’s attention from its devastating failure in Mosul in order to hide the huge number of casualties among the local population. Perhaps, this became one of the main reasons for carrying out a new full-scale campaign to topple and discredit Bashar Assad.
However, every effort that is made by the U.S. to hide its failures, in fact, is futile. The ‘counter-terrorist’ operation in the Iraqi Mosul has been going on for more than 6 months. According to the Pentagon, the number of losses among the coalition forces has already reached at least 9,000 military personnel and 1,600 units of military equipment. Of course, we must admit that the overwhelming majority of casualties are among the Iraqi military. But we should not forget that the Iraqi soldiers are led by generals of the international coalition. Thus, all the losses during the assault of Mosul are the result of U.S. direct command.
It’s not a secret that the U.S. indiscriminant air strikes lead to a daily increasing number of civilian casualties. Considering the fact that all this is happening under the patronage of the United States, the natural question arises – how effective is Washington in fighting terrorism, if it can’t minimize the losses among civilians?
An example of such a destructive activity of the coalition led by the United States is the air strike blown at Mosul western regions last week. This was stated by the Iraqi Observatory for Human Rights on Sunday. The human rights organization reported the deaths of dozens of civilians. Subsequently, it called the coalition on to “plan strikes more precisely to avoid civilian casualties.”
In addition, according to the Associated Press, the coordinator of the UN humanitarian mission Liz Grande said that the destruction in the western part of Mosul is two and a half times more than there is in the eastern part of the city. This indicates that the coalition forces do not take into consideration the fact that Mosul still has civilians and the coalition does not want to minimize losses and scale of destruction.
Obviously, Washington is ready to use any means to mislead the general public. This can be attributed to the recent completely fabricated incident in the Syrian village of Khan Sheikhun, and the subsequent Syrian government air base Shayrat attack by the US Air Force. Such actions allow the White House to get away from undesirable questions concerning their failures in Mosul.
Anna Jaunger is a freelance journalist from Inside Syria Media Center.
