U.S. offensives target civilians not fighters

More than 100,000 Iraqi civilians, including women and children, have died in Iraq since the war was launched in March 2003, mostly as a result of airstrikes by the occupation forces, according Iraqi and U.S. public health experts.

And recently Iraqi townspeople and the U.S. military stated that innocent civilians are being targeted by the U.S. airstrikes in Iraqi residential neighborhoods along the Euphrates River in far western Iraq, and not what the U.S. Army claims to be “insurgents, an editorial on the Washington Post stated.

he exact number of civilians killed in those strikes is strongly disputed by the Marines, the article stated, but townspeople, tribal leaders, as well as medical officials and witnesses’ accounts assert that scores of noncombatants were killed in the U.S. military’s last month operations, including airstrikes carried out ahead of the U.S. 17-day offensive in Anbar province.

"These people died silently, complaining to God of a guilt they did not commit," said Zahid Mohammed Rawi, a physician in the town of Husaybah, said.

Read on ....