Beginning in 2014 and 2015 respectively, US and Russian interventions would in time lead to some 75,000 air strikes against Iraq and Syria. However much the coalition’s actions against ISIS (Daesh) and Russia’s support for Assad differ in intent and context, both have been disastrous for people on the ground; the bombing campaigns alone have killed between 20,000 and 55,000 Syrian and Iraqi civilians. The alliance’s figure of 1,417 civilian deaths has been widely contested. In December 2021 a New York Times investigation based on a review of 1,300 Pentagon reports concluded that ‘the air war has been marked by deeply flawed intelligence, rushed and often imprecise targeting, and the deaths of thousands of civilians, many of them children, a sharp contrast to the American government’s image of war waged by all-seeing drones and precision bombs. The coalition claims it values transparency and is willing ‘to work with anyone making allegations or providing new, credible information’, b
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” —Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of the World Order, 1996, p. 51