BEIJING: The US deploys military forces in over 150 countries around the world with approximately 165,000 active-service personnel stationed outside its territories and hundreds of military bases covering nearly all the continents. Contrary to its pompous PROMISES OF MAINTAINING PEACE IN CONflICT zones, what the United States left behind is underestimated civilian casualties and innumerable untended families.

Last week, the US Department of Defense (DoD) published its annual report on civilian casualties, confessing that there were some 23 civilians killed and 10 injured in 2020 as a result of US military operations in Afghanistan, Somalia and Iraq.

An additional 63 historical deaths and 22 injuries were reported for the years ranging from 2017 to 2019, mostly in Syria and Yemen, which “were inadvertently not reported in the past.”

The 21-page Pentagon document, quietly released and partly classified, has been a requirement under

Section 1057 of the 2018 National Defense Authorization Act. Since 2017, 773 civilians in total have been killed and 335 injured based on US DoD’s own tally.

Independent observers and nongovernment organizations regularly publish much higher civilian death tolls than the figures that the United States is willing to admit. This year is no exception.

Airwars, a UK-based nonprofit company tracking and archiving international wars against Islamic State and other militant groups, estimated that a minimum of 102 civilians have been killed in US operations in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria last year — five times higher than the official Pentagon figures.

The United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (Unama), which has been recording extensive data on civilian harm since 2009 attributed 120 civilian casualties in 2020 to US-led coalition forces.

Casualties from US actions in Afghanistan, in particular, appear to have been officially undercounted. While the Pentagon reports only 20 deaths and five injuries caused by its own actions in the country last year, Unama says that US-dominated international forces killed at least 89 civilians and injured 31 more.

Hina Shamsi, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Security Project, accused the Biden administration of obscuring the full toll of US military operations.

“The grossly inadequate official accounting for the costs and consequences of the United States’ lethal actions abroad prevents meaningful public oversight and accountability for wrongful deaths and perpetual war policies,” Shamsi said.

While the United States keeps trumpeting its contribution to regional stability and world peace, hundreds of victim families receive no compensation both morally and financially.

The DoD’s document admits that although US Congress allocated $3 million to the Pentagon in 2020 for financial compensation to the families of civilian victims, no such compensation has been paid so far.

“It is striking that in 2020, the Defense Department did not offer or make any amends payments to impacted civilians and families despite the availability of funds from Congress,” said Shamsi. “Civilian victims, their families and the American public deserve far better than this.”

The Center for Civilians in Conflict’s research in 2019 indicated that there were inherent obstacles in US military’s investigations into civilian harm and a very high barrier for civilians to lodge a formal claim.