Nato air strike 'kills 14 civilians' in Afghanistan
A Nato air strike on Saturday in the eastern Afghan province of Kunar has killed 15 people including nine civilians, Afghan officials say.
But a Nato spokeswoman told the BBC that a precision attack had killed 10 insurgents and that she had no reports of civilians dying.
The
BBC reported the above this morning and it left me imagining the headlines we may be about to read regarding Syria. When the bombs and missiles begin to rain down upon Syria, the battle won't just be there. It'll be on the pages of the paper and pixels on the screen. War propaganda will go into full swing.
With skepticism running rampant, it will be difficult to decipher what's true from what's false with regard to just how many civilians will die as a result of our attempt to "send Assad a message." But if your reason to advance the idea of striking Syria is to protect the civilian population from more mass death, you must accept that among the certain consequences will be the deaths of at least hundreds of Syrian innocents from our missiles and bombs. Syria is not like Afghanistan. Syria is one of the most densely populated countries in the Middle East. In Damascus, there are about 1,700 per square kilometer. That's more dense than Atlanta or Dallas (both about 1,300/square km). It's about equal to Portland, OR in density per square kilometer, but Damascus is about 2.5 times the size.
Assad has had time to relocate military assets among the dense population of his cities, making targeting these resources without significant civilian deaths impossible.
Syria’s military is preparing for a U.S. strike by dispersing its forces into apartment buildings, schools and mosques,...
We can expect the press releases our of the Pentagon to cover up the details of civilian deaths, just as they try to do in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen, just as we know it did in Iraq. Whose numbers will we believe?
Oh, one more thing below that deserves its own diary. It's the other half of the quoted excerpt from above...
and may be hiding its most valuable assets inside a Russian naval base, betting that U.S. missiles will avoid it.
“There is some evidence that the Syrian military is treating the Russian base at Tartus as a safe zone,” said Christopher Harmer, a senior naval analyst at the Institute for the Study of War.
Digest the full implications of that!