US military claim of killing 50,000 terrorists ‘fairytale’: Ex-US diplomat
The US government’s claim of killing thousands of terrorists in the fight against Daesh (ISIL) is a “stuff of fairy tales” and far from reality, says a former American diplomat.
J. Michael Springmann, a former high-ranking US diplomat in Saudi Arabia, made the remarks after a senior American military official said that the US-led coalition conducting airstrikes in Iraq and Syria had killed 50,000 Takfiri terrorists in the two countries since 2014.
The latest assessment by the unidentified official even exceeded the 45,000 estimate announced in August by Lieutenant General Sean MacFarland, who commands the so-called coalition forces.
The Pentagon has yet to specify how it has arrived at such assessments.
This “is stuff of fairy tales,” Springmann said. “It is pure American military nonsense.”
“The American military has been playing games with numbers of enemy soldiers or civilians killed for three quarters of a century,” he said.
Noting that such practices dated back to the Second World War and continued through the Vietnam War, Springmann argued that the statistics provided by the US government are fabricated and differ from reality.
“How do they know? What figures do they put forward? What proof do they have? They [those who were killed do not have Daesh written on their forehead or something,” he explained.
“This is pure speculation, pure imagination,” he said, adding that the time has come for the world to challenge these numbers and ask Washington for proof.
The American commander’s remarks came at a time when Washington and its allies were under fire for targeting hundreds of Iraqi and Syrian forces in what they call unintentional errors.
Only on Friday, over 90 Iraqi soldiers perished when US war planes bombed their positions near Mosul as government and volunteer forces were battling to flush Daesh terrorists out of the major northern city. Some 100 more Iraqi troops were also wounded in the so-called friendly-fire attack.
The is while in September, 62 Syrian forces were killed after coalition fighter jets targeted them four times while they were surrounded by the Daesh group in the Dayr al-Zawr air base.
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