The Civilian Casualties of America’s Air Wars

The Daily

The New York Times

Daily News, News

4.4 • 102.8K Ratings

🗓️ 18 January 2022

⏱️ 37 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Four years ago, Azmat Khan, an investigative reporter for The Times Magazine, told us the story of Basim Razzo, whose entire family was killed in a U.S.-led airstrike in Iraq. His story helped reveal how American air wars were resulting in a staggering number of civilian deaths. Analyzing thousands of pages of U.S. military reports and investigating in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, Azmat was able to gain a better understanding of why this was happening.

Transcript

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0:00.0	From New York Times, I'm Michael Borrow.
0:03.4	This is the Daily.
0:07.9	I woke up.
0:09.4	I looked and I can see this guy above me.
0:12.4	The ceiling has fell off my room.
0:16.4	Four years ago.
0:17.9	Then I started calling my wife.
0:20.4	And my daughter.
0:24.0	No answer.
0:25.5	My colleague, Osmart Khan, told us the story of Basam Razo, an Iraqi civilian whose home was targeted by a US air strike that killed his entire family.
0:39.0	The precision of the bombing is unmistakable.
0:43.5	I mean, two missile strikes, one on my brother's house and one on my house.
0:50.0	In the process, Osmart revealed that the American air war against ISIS, which the US describes as the most precise in history, was resulting in a staggering number of civilian deaths.
1:05.0	So how could this be a mistake?
1:08.0	And she discovered that the US left behind a paper trail that documented those civilian deaths.
1:17.5	Today.
1:18.5	Osmart returns to describe exactly what that paper trail revealed.
1:30.0	It's Tuesday, January 18th.
1:35.5	Osmart, there aren't that many colleagues of ours whose appearance on this show happened once every four years.
1:41.5	And you're one of them. And the first phase of your reporting occurred back in 2017.
1:48.5	So tell us what you have been up to since. And about this second phase of your reporting.
1:54.5	Right. So the last time we spoke, I had just finished this ground investigation into 100 air strikes in Iraq, where I discovered that the actual rate of civilian casualties were much, much higher than what the US was claiming.
	...

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