Civilian Casualty Files Reveal U.S. Hid Thousands of Deaths in Middle East Air War

U.S. air power has been central in the country's wars in Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq and elsewhere, with officials promising that drones and other sophisticated weapons allow the U.S. military to carry out precision airstrikes that spare civilians caught in war zones. But a groundbreaking investigation by The New York Times reveals the U.S. military's air wars have been plagued by bad intelligence, imprecise targeting and a lack of accountability for thousands of civilian deaths, many of them children. The two-part series by reporter Azmat Khan is based on a trove of internal Pentagon documents, as well as on-the-ground reporting from dozens of airstrike sites and interviews with scores of survivors. "What you have is a scale of civilian death and injury that is vastly different than what they claim," says Khan, who spent five years on the investigation.

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