Alwaght- US-led coalition airstrike on an Iraqi town left numerous civilians dead and injured on Wednesday, RT reported Saying authorities refuse to take responsibility for careless actions and bad intelligence, which are usually covered up by double standards.
Dozens of civilians, including many women and children, were killed in a discriminate airstrike on the ISIS-held town of Qaim in Iraq, hitting a busy market in the small town, which is located in Anbar province, near the Syrian border.
The US-led coalition’s joint air force operates in the area, but coalition representatives denied conducting any strikes in Qaim.
Deutsche Welle cited Maath al-Jughaifi, a tribal leader in Haditha, the nearest city, as saying "between 70 people and 80 people were killed." Al-Jughaifi confirmed the strike had been carried out by the US-led coalition.
There’s little-to-no possibility that the coalition will ever acknowledge responsibility for the alleged airstrike, political analyst Daniel Patrick Welch told RT.
"They are not going admit it, because only ‘bad people’ like the Russians carry out airstrikes that hit civilians. But no one else is bombing ISIL in that area, as far as I’m aware, or has the capacity to do so from the air,” Welch told RT.
"It could be that they’re not airstrikes like the attack on the convoy in Syria last month. But the trouble is the discrepancy in accountability and the recording that the US [is doing of] targeting and hitting civilians, or Syrian soldiers, or any of these other things, hospitals, which has been going on for years and years, and is swept under the rug. Whereas everything else done by the Syrian Army or by the Russian air force is highlighted and called a war crime."
The double-standard approach to civilian deaths in the ongoing wars in the Middle East is blatant, all the incidents should be treated the same way, said Welch.
"The fact is, you have to condemn all. You know, civilians die in war and it’s unavoidable. The question is that Syria is returning sovereignty to the legitimate government. And that’s not what’s going on around the region. ISIS and all its affiliates are offshoots of a deliberate US and western policy to arm Islamic jihad and use it as a weapon against any of its enemies it sees in the region and around the world."
While one should not jump to conclusions as to the source of the alleged airstrike until “the dust settles,” in general, US policy to nurse terrorists world-wide, and then battle them using rather questionable means must be exposed and condemned, said Welch.
“The thing is, there’s no question that the US has targeted hospitals, weddings sometimes by accident, and sometimes not. Counter-terrorism winds up being terrorism ... it’s not excusing any of the devastation or the treachery that’s befallen Syria on behalf of either the Russians or the Syrian Army,” said Welch. “But you have to look at things at their context. And this is the same proliferation of Islamic extremist militarized global jihad, that was loosed in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, Libya, Yemen. This is the same thing that’s happening worldwide and the US has to be held to account. It doesn’t change no matter who’s running the joint. The goals of empire are always the same".
