https://socialistaction.org/2017/06/08/shifting-the-blame-the-cover-up-of-u-s-war-crimes-in-mosul/
Shifting the blame: The cover-up of U.S. war crimes in Mosul
/ 18 hours ago
June 2017 Mosul, Wash. PostBy RALPH SCHOENMAN
The scope of the murderous assault by U.S. imperialism on the Iraqi city
of Mosul—with its genocide-scale war crimes—was beginning to filter into
the mainstream media. And then—just as Trump, the Democratic Party, the
Joint-Chiefs of staff, and the U.S. intelligence apparatus were about to
be indicted for these war crimes before world public opinion—came the
April 4 chemical attack on the town of Khan Sheikhoun in Idlib province
in northwestern Syria.
Responsibility for launching this attack was immediately placed on
Bashar al-Assad, though no evidence was provided to back this claim. No
matter. The U.S. government seized upon this tragedy to shift the blame
from its war crimes in Mosul to the Syrian government for its alleged
sarin-gas assault in Khan Sheikhoun.
Amnesty International published a devastating report on March 28
charging U.S. rulers with war crimes, specifying “disproportionate and
indiscriminate” saturation bombing of residential areas of Mosul that
slaughtered hundreds of civilian men, women, and children on March 17.
Over the course of the following week, the Iraqi Civil Defense
Department announced that 531 further bodies were dug out, with more to
come.
By March 28, Lt. General Stephen Townsend, U.S. Commander in Iraq and
Syria, admitted to Pentagon reporters: “We probably had a role in those
casualties.”
Townsend later attempted to blame the victims, claiming that there was
no reason for civilians to congregate inside buildings targeted by U.S.
war planes, and going on to blame ISIS for using civilians as “human
shields.” Independent media outlets, however, told another story, based
on interviews with survivors: Entire families had congregated in the
basement of neighborhood homes to escape the relentless bombing by
U.S.-trained forces. Their personal accounts are devastating.
So horrendous was the carnage that even Iraqi Vice President Osama
al-Nujafi, who is from Mosul and serves as the most senior Sunni
official in Iraq, responded to Townsend by designating the U.S.
targeting and bombing of Mosul as “a humanitarian catastrophe” resulting
“in the martyrdom of hundreds of civilians.” He called for an emergency
session of the Iraqi parliament and an official investigation of the
slaughter.
Al-Nujafi charged that these ongoing mass civilian casualties were the
result of new and “changed rules of engagement” by the U.S.-led
coalition that minimized any attempt to protect the lives of unarmed,
men, women, and children trapped in Mosul. Iraqi officers cited by the
New York Times on March 28 noted that, “the American-led coalition has
been quicker to strike urban targets from the air with less time to
weigh the risks for civilians, a change reflecting a renewed push by the
U.S. military under the Trump administration to speed up the battle for
Mosul.”
Reporting from the scene of the devastation, The New York Times account
assumed ominous proportions for the Trump administration and U.S.
rulers. It described: “A panorama of destruction in the neighborhood of
Jadida so vast one resident compared the destruction to that of
Hiroshima, Japan, where the United States dropped an atomic bomb in
World War II. There was a charred arm, wrapped in a piece of red fabric,
poking from the rubble; rescue workers in red jumpsuits who wore face
masks to avoid the stench, some with rifles slung over their shoulders,
searched the wreckage for bodies.”
The Amnesty International report confirms that the war crimes in Jadida
are only the bloodiest in a series of attacks carried out by U.S.-led
forces.
“‘Evidence gathered on the ground in East Mosul points to an alarming
pattern of U.S.-led coalition airstrikes which have destroyed whole
houses with entire families inside,” reports Amnesty’s senior crisis
response adviser Donatella Rovera following field investigations in the
war-ravaged city. The high civilian toll suggests that coalition forces
leading the offensive in Mosul have failed to take adequate precautions
to prevent civilian deaths, in flagrant violation of international
humanitarian law.”
By March 21, the monitoring group Airwars recorded over 1000 “civilian
casualty events” resulting from airstrikes by the United States and its
allies in Iraq and Syria.
Not surprisingly, the changed “rules of engagement” enacted by the
Pentagon under the Trump administration have not elicited any protests
from the leadership of the Democratic Party. This is because the war
escalation in Iraq and Syria enjoys full bipartisan support. In fact, as
the Amnesty International report documents, the carnage in Mosul was
already well under way before Barack Obama left the White House.
Jadida, of course, never became a household word in the United States.
Reports were only beginning to make their way into the corporate media
about the extent of the U.S.-sponsored carnage in Mosul. The sarin
attack in Syria came just at the right moment to enable Trump and his
Democratic Party allies to shift the blame for their war crimes in Mosul
to the Assad regime, all the better to justify the U.S. missile attacks
against the sovereign nation of Syria.
This article appeared originally in the April 2017 issue of The
Organizer newspaper and is reprinted with the author’s permission.
Photo: Residents search for victims after U.S. bombing in Mosul. Alice
Martins / Washington Post
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June 8, 2017 in Anti-War, Middle East. Tags: Iraq
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