Some of you may still remember claims that Russia and the Syrian state were deliberately committing atrocities against civilians in Aleppo. I warned against these just before Christmas here http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2016/12/peter-hitchens-amid-the-bombs-of-aleppo-all-you-can-hear-are-the-lies.html

Earlier I had made a fuller analysis, http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2016/12/give-a-dog-a-bad-name-why-is-russia-always-presumed-guilty-.html

in which I had asked ‘In what important way does Russian bombing of Aleppo differ from the bombings of Fallujah and Mosul, where Islamist fanatics have been bombed by Western planes(ours included, I believe)?’

Now an interesting report in yesterday’s (March 12th) Sunday Telegraph, a proper despatch from Mosul itself by Josie Ensor, of whom I know nothing except that she, unlike many reporters who purported to describe recent events in Aleppo from Beirut or London, is actually where the fighting is, has offered a partial answer.

Here it is : http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/03/12/just-hours-freedom-mosuls-civilians-die-bombs-liberators/

With the headline ‘Just hours from freedom, Mosul's civilians die under the bombs of their liberators’

The print report appeared on page 17 of the Sunday Telegraph, under the slightly different headline

‘It feels like the coalition is killing more than Isil’

At the core of the report are these paragraphs; ‘That anyone still lives in the ruins is a measure of how desperate the situation has become. The Iraqi army says it has carried out 3,780 sorties against Isil in northern Iraq since the offensive to liberate Mosul began, which averages out to almost 30 a day. The US, which is supporting Iraqi forces, has conducted more than double that.

“They dropped leaflets over the city telling us not to worry about the strikes, saying that they were extremely precise and would not hurt the civilians,” says Mr Ahmed, 47. “Now it feels like the coalition is killing more people than Isil.”

He said he thought as many as 300 people had been killed in raids during the battle to liberate Samood and his late brother’s neighbourhood al-Mansour. It was difficult to immediately verify the claim. A recent report by Airwars, a UK-based organisation which monitors international air strikes against Isil, suggested as many as 370 civilian deaths could be attributed to coalition raids in the first week of March alone.’

The figures are of course speculative estimates, and clearly states as such, as they should and must be. But named individuals are quoted as having themselves experienced civilian casualties.

And in my opinion such deaths were unavoidable in the battle for Mosul which all have known was coming for many months, and which is remarkably similar in shape and nature to the battle which the Russuans and Syrians fought in Aleppo in November and December. In both cases Islamist fanatics were defending thickly-populated cityscape, whose civilian population were afraid to leave, or unable to leave, very likely because of intimidation from the terror groups which control the city. In Aleppo, the Islamist fanatics faced Syrian ground troops back up by Russian airstrikes, and some Syrian bombing. In Mosul, they face Iraqi troops and Western airpower.

If you recall the allegations against Russia and Syria during the Aleppo battle, they were largely to do with motive. Civilians allegedly died because they were targeted, hospitals and aid convoys, likewise, were hit because the Russians or Syrians were deliberately seeking to hit them. Actually this could only be proved by discovering that orders of this kind had been given. Satellite pictures, analysis of bomb-shards etc, cannot achieve it. Nor can assertions. I have yet to see any proof that this was their motive.

It will no doubt be pointed out that the Western and Iraqi forces in Mosul are not using ‘barrel bombs. But I have never really understood why these are so much worse than the (generally far more powerful) bombs used by Western air forces. Pinpoint accuracy is a myth, and the phrase ‘surgical strike’ is an abomination which no truthful person should use to describe hurling explosives at buildings. If you bomb and shell areas with civilians in them, civilians will die or be hideously burned, dismembered and otherwise harmed. This even happens when fragmentation bombs are not used, and care is taken. In any case our then ally the Iraqi leader Nouri al Maliki, used barrel bombs in Fallujah against his internal opponents, and it never seemed to bother us at the time. Our old friend, Major General Selective Outrage is on the march again.

The ‘Airwars’ report cited in the Telegraph story is here https://airwars.org/news/westmosulcivilians/ and is rightly careful to point out that some of the sources for its information are far from independent.

How would our view of the Aleppo battle have been, had the same laudable scruples been shown in reporting it?

Might it have been generally understood that civilian casualties were deeply regrettable, unintended but inevitable in the defeat of unscrupulous Islamist militants, who had been using civilians as human shields?

What is lacking in the Mosul conflict – but was fiercely present in the Aleppo battle - is any sign of any attribution of war crimes or barbaric motives to the attacking forces seeking to drive the Islamists from Mosul, as Russia drove their equivalents from Aleppo. Little girls are not Tweeting from Mosul about the wicked US airstrikes, and being taken up by worldwide media, nor are ‘human rights observatories’ and suchlike groups describing the struggle as one of deliberate attacks on civilians by wicked people with evil motives. Indeed, ISIS’s propaganda organisation is immensely inferior to that which managed to portray the Aleppo battle as one between wicked oppressors and innocent civilians, somehow entirely leaving out of the picture (metaphorically and literally) the gnarled and bearded Islamist fanatics who controlled Eastern Aleppo, and whose beliefs are startlingly similar to those of ISIS. All we ever saw, in the films and pictures which reached Western media, were wounded children, cowering, veiled women and noble, handsome unarmed men rushing to the rescue of the wounded.

Think on these things.