U.S. Drastically Undercounted Civilian Deaths Due To Airstrike, Finds Investigation

The U.S. military drastically undercounted civilian deaths caused by airstrikes in the Middle East since 2014, according to a New York Times investigation published Saturday.

The New York Times reviewed a hidden Pentagon archive comprised of the military’s confidential assessments of over 1,300 reports of civilian casualties in airstrikes, and found, “since 2014, the American air war has been plagued by deeply flawed intelligence, rushed and imprecise targeting and the deaths of thousands of civilians, many of them children. There was and a lack of accountability for wrongdoing.

While the official military count says 1,417 civilians have been killed in Iraq and Syria, the investigation found many more civilian deaths, citing multiple examples, though it did not provide an exact count.