On March 17, US airstrikes
leveled three buildings in Mosul’s Old City, killing hundreds of civilians
within. The official death toll is still not totally clear, but all told was
well in excess of 200, and close to 300 according to some accounts. The Pentagon
version is that they were responsible for 14 deaths.
In the course of
trying to manage the narrative, the Pentagon had claimed to have video footage
of ISIS forcing hundreds of civilians into the homes right before the US
strikes, though they never offered this footage, and rather showed footage of
ISIS moving civilians before a much smaller incident. Witnesses and survivors of the US strike say the whole US story
about ISIS putting them in the homes never happened.
Rather,
they insist airstrikes had been leveling houses in the area for days, and
ultimately everybody ended up collected into just three houses close together,
hundreds of people from scores of families, when major US airstrikes came and
brought the buildings down on top of them.
Indeed,
the whole reason the houses had been so popular with fleeing civilians is that
they were relatively far away from the fighting, and they assumed there’d be no
reason for them to be attacked, since they were small and isolated. The
Pentagon has yet to respond to the eyewitness accounts, which radically differ
from their own version of events.
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