Cover Story of New York Times Magazine, Nov 19, 2017

choi

(1) Cover:

"THE US-LED BATTLE AGAINST ISIS IS KILLING FAR MORE IRAQI CIVILIANS THAN THE COALITION HAS ACKNOWLEDGED.

"The Survivors Are Left to Wonder Why They Were Targeted. Most Will Never Receive an Answer.

(2) Right after table of contents in the magazine is "Contributors."  Leading the list (at the top) are Azmat Khan (female) and Anand Gopal (male):

"Azmat Khan is an investigative journalist and a Future of War fellow at New America and Arizona State University. For an investigation into the civilian death toll of the US-led war against ISIS, she teamed up with Anand Gopal, an assistant research professor at Arizona State and the author of 'No Good Men Among the Living.' In the first article for the magazine for both of them, their reporting took them to more than 100 airstrike sites in Iraq, conducting interviews over the course of 18 months. 'I met a family so desperate to prove that their relatives had died in an airstrike,' Khan says, 'that they actually sneaked back into ISIS territory and dug up their bodies. For so many Iraqis, commemoration itself becomes an act of justice.' "

Note:
(a) The www.nytimes.com does not have the above.
(b) New America (organization)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_America_(organization)
(c) the book: Anand Gopal, No Good Men Among the Living; America, the Taliban, and the war through Afghan eyes. Picador, 2015.

(3) Azmat Khan and Anand Gopal, The Uncounted; An on-the-ground investigation reveals that the US-led battle against ISIS -- hailed as the most precise air campaign in history -- is killing far more Iraqis than the coalition has acknowledged.
https://www.nytimes.com/interact ... raq-airstrikes.html

Excerpts in the windows of print:

Not a single person in Iraq or Syria has received a condolence payment for a civilian death since the war began in 2014.

Coalition officers speak of every one of the acknowledged deaths as tragic but utterly unavoidable.

My comment:
(a) The article is very, very long, but fascinating -- to me, due to wonderful writing skill and because I want to know the first-hand experience of a coalition airstrike.
(b) Their writing style is such that if you do not understand, move on and a few sentences later, the authors explain.
(c) Due to its length, my recommendation is that you read until the paragraph: "We continued in this fashion, door to door. What we found was sobering: During the two years that ISIS ruled downtown Qaiyara, an area of about one square mile, there were 40 airstrikes, 13 of which killed 43 civilians — 19 men, eight women and 16 children, ages 14 or younger. In the same period, according to the Iraqi federal police, ISIS executed 18 civilians in downtown Qaiyara.

Then skip to the last section, whose first paragraph starts with "THIS SPRING, Iraqi forces pushed deeper into western Mosul, into the Old City