civilian casualties

Police in Moscow arrested four people on Tuesday for attending a spontaneous memorial to the Ukrainian civilians killed by a Russian missile strike on their apartment building in Dnipro Sunday. 

Residents of the Nigerian village of Daban Masara claim dozens of civilians were killed in a Nigerian Air Force strike on Sunday. Some villagers said the strike deliberately targeted a civilian area because the Nigerian government had ordered the local fishing industry to shut down, on the grounds that Islamic State terrorists were profiting from the fishing trade.

Afghanistan’s Tolo News reported on Thursday morning that most of the 25 people killed during the past ten days in attacks and stampedes around Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul were women and children.

Officials in the Armenian-aligned separatist region of Nagorno-Karabakh said on Wednesday that half of the population has been displaced by fighting with Azerbaijan’s forces over the past week.

The war in Afghanistan killed 3,804 civilians amid peace negotiations between the U.S. and the Taliban in 2018, including an unprecedented number of children, marking the deadliest year for civilians since the United Nations began keeping record a decade ago, the international body reported over the weekend.

In a report published on Tuesday, Amnesty International accused Iraqi government forces and the U.S.-led coalition of “relentless and unlawful attacks” against civilians in the battle to recapture Mosul from the Islamic State. Amnesty declared the battle a “civilian catastrophe.”

Iran’s state-run PressTV interviewed two former U.S. diplomats to promote the narrative that U.S. airstrikes inside Syria are behind the mass migration of Syrians to Europe. “The high civilian death toll from recent US airstrikes on Syrian territories has drawn

WASHINGTON, D.C. — The U.S. military has not “relaxed” the rules of engagement (ROE) put in place to avoid civilian casualties in the ongoing fight against the Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL), commonly known for using the home of innocent people as shelter and the inhabitants as shields, the top American commander in the region told lawmakers.

On Friday, the Pentagon announced it would investigate claims of up to 200 civilian casualties after airstrikes in Mosul, Iraq.

Former Navy SEAL and former Blackwater CEO Erik Prince talked about the United States v. Slatten case currently being argued before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. circuit. Also known as the “Nisour Square case,” it involves the conviction of former Blackwater contractors who were convicted of criminal offenses related to the shooting of Iraqi civilians in 2007. The contractors are seeking to have their convictions overturned on the grounds that they believed themselves to be under attack.

On Thursday, the U.S. military published a report on the death of 33 Afghan civilians, and wounding of 27 others, during a joint U.S. and Afghan special forces raid against the Taliban in November.

A grim milestone in the siege of Aleppo is reported by Sky News, which writes that “bodies are being left to rot on the streets or buried in backyards” because “there is no room left in the cemeteries.”

The Islamic State group is forcibly gathering people in and around Mosul for possible use as human shields against advancing Iraqi forces, residents said Wednesday, confirming UN fears.

Rebel forces have prevented civilians in the embattled Syrian city of Aleppo from fleeing the city through recently opened “humanitarian corridors,” according to a report from Agence France-Presse (AFP).

On Wednesday, Defense Secretary Ashton Carter announced that the Pentagon would investigate claims by human-rights organizations – including the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, Amnesty International, and the National Coalition of Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces – that American airstrikes have killed over 100 civilians since June. Some estimates say the death toll could be closer to double that number.

Shiite militias in Iraq, many of them backed by state sponsor of terror Iran, have been accused of torturing “hundreds” of Sunni civilians captured during the ongoing battle to retake Fallujah from the Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL).

The number of Afghan civilian fatalities and injuries hit 11,002 in 2015, marking the highest number of total civilian casualties since the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) began tracking the data in 2009, officials have announced.

Hurriyet Daily News offers a remarkable tour of the urban battlefield between Turkey and the PKK, as Turkish tanks and infantry roll through the ruins of the southeastern city of Cizre, a majority-Kurdish city that has long been at the center of the conflict between Kurdish separatists and the Turkish government.

The city of Deir Ezzor in eastern Syria, scene of a recent mass abduction by the Islamic State, looks to be a decisive battle between ISIS and the Syrian army in the eastern region of the country—and there are indications ISIS is winning.

A U.S. non-governmental organization called the Syrian Emergency Task Force told Foreign Policy their field office in the Idlib province was hit by a Russian airstrike on Saturday. Other civilian damage in the area has been reported, and the strike is being cited as evidence Russia is not focusing its attention on Islamic State targets, as it frequently claims.

Taliban terrorists committed “widespread and grave” human rights violations while they fought Afghan government forces for control of the key northern city of Kunduz at the beginning of this month, reveals Afghanistan’s Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC).

Ever since the weird non-war against ISIS began, we have heard loud boasts from the Obama Administration about how many fabulously expensive airstrikes coalition forces were conducting. And yet, the Islamic State remains on the march in Iraq and Syria, and is confident enough to launch a new campaign for control of devastated post-Obama, post-Clinton Libya.