At a campaign rally in Fort Dodge, Iowa, Donald Trump, speaking of the Islamic State, once told supporters, “I would bomb the shit out of ’em. I would just bomb those suckers.” During Trump’s nascent tenure as Commander-in-Chief, air strikes conducted by the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq and Syria have increased. So have civilian casualties: coalition strikes killed more civilians in March than in any other month since our mostly aerial war against the Islamic State began, in late 2014. Last Thursday, the U.S. military also acknowledged that a strike had mistakenly killed eighteen of our local allies in Syria. The victims belonged to the Syrian Democratic Forces, or S.D.F., a coalition of Arab and Kurdish fighters that partners closely with U.S. Special Operations Forces and has been preparing for months to attack the Islamic State stronghold of Raqqa. The incident was widely presented as evidence that President Trump is following through on the promise he made in Fort Dodge, as well as an illustration of the perils attending such a strategy. An article on the front page of the Times the next day said that the blunder raised “concerns about whether the White House is applying any rigor to the process of approving airstrikes,” and a front-page article in the Washington Post called it “the worst friendly-fire incident of the war against the Islamic State.”

It is unclear, however, if anything beyond the shifting exigencies of the battlefield has changed in Iraq and Syria. According to the military, the rules of engagement have not been revised under Trump, and it is impossible to gauge the precise insidious influence of Trump’s rhetoric on the men and women who work in the rooms where target requests are analyzed. Although Trump has, more generally, allowed our war planners greater autonomy, James Mattis, H. R. McMaster, Joseph Votel, and John Nicholson have been planning these wars for fifteen years. We have been bombing the shit out of someone or other for at least that long.

The scrutiny that American airpower has attracted during the Trump Administration is both welcomed and frustrating. Even during the three months immediately preceding Trump’s Inauguration, the organization Airwars documented an alarming escalation in both coalition strikes and their collateral damage: more than three hundred credibly reported civilian deaths in the vicinity of Mosul and more than two hundred in the vicinity of Raqqa. “With reported fatalities from coalition strikes at record levels, we would have expected significant media engagement,” Chris Woods, the director of Airwars, said in a statement on President Barack Obama’s last day in office. “Instead, anything beyond local reporting has been almost nonexistent.”

In October, I visited an Iraqi village the morning after it was hit by a coalition air strike that was remarkably similar to the one in Raqqa last week: a strike that inadvertently killed American-supported local forces critical to a major upcoming battle against the Islamic State, or ISIS, and in doing so further undermined the already precarious confederation to which those forces belonged. The village, Haj Ali, is about thirty miles south of Mosul, predominantly Sunni, and led by a laconic, middle-aged sheikh named Nazhan Sakhar Salman. Nazhan has been allied with America since 2007, when he volunteered his tribe to participate in the Awakening movement, an initiative that paid Sunnis to help U.S. troops combat Al Qaeda during the worst years of the insurgency. I’d written about Nazhan in a story for The New Yorker when ISIS was still in control of Haj Ali. At the time, Nazhan commanded roughly three hundred former Awakening fighters who occupied positions on a Kurdish trench just a few miles away from the village. Last summer, two years after ISIS forced Nazhan into exile, his militia, in coördination with the Iraqi Army and U.S. Special Operations Forces, was finally permitted to leave its trench and attack Haj Ali. The long-anticipated battle was over in a matter of hours; only one of Nazhan’s men was killed.

The purpose of my trip to Iraq in October was to cover the imminent Mosul offensive, but, shortly after I arrived, I asked my translator to call Nazhan, to say hello. The sheikh told us he was getting married the next day, and invited us to the wedding. The ceremony was held at an immense hall in an upscale neighborhood of Erbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan. By the time we got there, more than a thousand people had assembled. I was used to seeing Nazhan in green fatigues or shiny business suits, but tonight he wore an ankle-length thawb and matching headdress; the bride—Nazahn’s third—sat beside him on a dais in a sequinned gown that sparkled under the venue’s neon purple lights. When a five-tier, gilded cake was carted out beneath them, the couple descended to cut the first slice with a sword. A video camera attached to the end of a twenty-foot jib hovered above them. The guests, men on one side, women on the other, pressed close to capture the moment on their phones.

Most of them were from Haj Ali. After ISIS was routed from the village, nearly everyone who’d been stuck there moved to a camp for internally displaced people in Kurdistan, and this was the first time that so many of the villagers, after being divided for two years by the trench, had gathered under the same roof. The mood was exuberant. Joining hands, the male and female sides of the hall converged to dance to electric renditions of traditional tribal songs. Whenever I’d visited Nazhan’s fighters on the trench, they had constantly played these songs, or songs like them, in their trucks and on their phones. One day, Nazhan had told me that the singer, Abdullah Mustafer, was among the people stranded in Haj Ali. According to Nazhan, ISIS had forced Mustafer to sign a contract that promised he would never sing again. Now a friend led me through the crowd to a stage on the far side of the hall framed by fake gold columns. Mustafer, sporting gelled-back hair and a triangular soul patch, held the microphone high and upside down—a parched man drinking. “Haj Ali, we freed you!” he cried. “Haj Ali, you’re free! Mosul, we will free you! Mosul, we are coming!”

Before I left the party, I promised Nazhan that I’d come see him in Haj Ali soon. A couple of days later, my translator and I drove down there. The village was deserted. Nazhan’s militia was responsible for the new front line, on the outskirts of town; the Iraqi Army maintained checkpoints—many of them prominently displaying large Shia flags—inside the village and along the main road. The soldiers posted at the checkpoints were all talking about the air strike. It was bad, they said, although no one knew how bad.

When we reached the tribe’s makeshift headquarters, a gutted blockhouse pocked with bullet holes, we saw men digging graves in a small, dirt cemetery. I counted at least a dozen mounds heaped beside fresh holes. Fighters had congregated outside, on a concrete veranda. Some of them wept into their hands; some stared blankly at the ground. I recognized a young fighter named Ali, whom the others all called Mustache. Ali spoke good English; he was one of Nazhan’s favorites. Despite his age and inexperience, he had been elevated to a leadership position while they were still on the Kurdish trench. When we greeted him, he turned away. It took us some moments to understand that he was not Ali. Ali had been killed in the strike, and this man was his brother.