DISREGARD

Trump’s Afghanistan Airstrikes Increased Civilian Deaths by 330 Percent, Brown Costs of War Study Reports

Costs of War project reports “the number of civilians killed by international airstrikes increased about 330 percent from 2016, the last full year of the Obama administration.”

A new study from the Costs of War Project at Brown University finds the civilian death toll in Afghanistan has skyrocketed under President Donald Trump. As Trump relaxed military authorization rules for airstrikes in 2017, “the number of civilians killed by international airstrikes increased about 330 percent from 2016, the last full year of the Obama administration, to 2019, the most recent year for which there is complete data from the United Nations,” writes study architect Neta C. Crawford. Going back even further, between 2016 and 2017, U.S. and Afghan government forces killed “an average of 582 civilians each year,” a number that rose by nearly 95 percent from 2017 to 2019, when an average of 1,134 civilians were killed annually. Even after the U.S.-Taliban peace deal in February, Crawford finds, a decline in U.S. bombing has led to the U.S.-sponsored Afghan Air Force killing 156 people and injuring 193 through September alone, “exceeding its total harm to civilians compared to 2019.”