This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.
For more than 20 years, the civilian casualties of the Global War on Terror have, at best, been nameless, faceless victims to most Americans. They've been "30 pine nut farm workers" killed in a 2019 drone strike in Afghanistan or "a woman and child" slain in a similar attack a year earlier in Somalia. Rarely do we ever learn their names or anything about their lives.
Four years ago, Adel Al Manthari, a civil servant with the Yemeni government, was driving near the village of Al Uqla when a U.S. missile ripped through his SUV's roof. Three fellow occupants were killed instantly. Another died days later at a hospital. Al Manthari suffered severe burns to the left side of his body, a fractured hip, and catastrophic damage to his left hand. Those injuries left him unable to walk or work, in debt, and forced his daughters, aged 8 and 14 at the time of the strike, to drop out of school. While two independent investigations found that the men in the car were civilians, the Pentagon still maintains they were Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula "terrorists."
Al Manthari and his family struggled along until, earlier this year, his injuries flared up and doctors warned him that he was at imminent risk of developing gangrene, losing his legs, and maybe even his life. He desperately needed surgery he couldn't afford from hospitals that demand payment up front. While Congress set aside $3 million to provide compensation to victims like him, the Pentagon refused to even acknowledge pleas made on his behalf. It took a GoFundMe campaign to provide Al Manthari with the surgery he needed to, hopefully, save his legs. Even if that procedure proves successful, he has an expensive road including post-surgical treatment and long-term care ahead.
Those like him wounded by drone strikes, the witnesses to such attacks, and the family members of the victims are bound together by loss and pain, an international, cross-border brother-and-sisterhood forged by American war and cruelty. Today, TomDispatch regular Andrea Mazzarino, co-founder of Brown University's Costs of War Project, shines a light on the civilian suffering so many of us have long ignored and asks that we don't look away.
Adel Al Manthari has already spent four years living with severe trauma. It will be with him for the rest of his days. For Americans like me who paid the taxes that bought the drone and missile that wounded him and provided the salary for the pilot who fired it, the very least we can do is bear witness to his lasting injuries and confront the suffering we caused him and, as Mazzarino makes clear, so many others. Nick Turse
War as Terrorism
Conflicts We Can't Win, Suffering We Don't See
Anyone who grew up in my generation of 1980s kids remembers G.I. Joe action figures those green-uniformed plastic soldiers you could use to stage battles in the sandbox in your backyard or, for that matter, your bedroom. In those days, when imagery of bombed-out homes, bloodied civilians, and police violence wasn't accessible on TV screens or in video games like Call of Duty, war in children's play took place only between soldiers. No civilians were caught up in it as "collateral damage."
We kids had no way of faintly grasping that, in its essence, war actually involves civilian deaths galore. And why should we have? In that era when the only foreign conflict most of us knew about was the 1991 U.S. tromping of Iraq, mainly an air-power war from the American point of view, we certainly didn't think about what we would now call war crimes. It might have been cause for a therapy referral if one of us had taken a G.I. Joe and pretended to shoot a child, whether armed with a suicide bomb or not.
Having lived through more than a century and a half of relative peace in our homeland while fighting endless conflicts abroad, only in the past 20 years of America's post-9/11 war on terror, waged by U.S. troops in dozens of countries around the world, have some of our children begun to grapple with what it means to kill civilians.
War in a Trumpian (Dis)information Age
As a Navy spouse of more than 10 years and a therapist who specializes in treating military families and those fleeing foreign wars, I believe that the post-9/11 wars have finally begun to come home in a variety of ways, including how we think about violence. Conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, and beyond have reached U.S. shores in all sorts of strange, if often indirect manners, starting with the surplus small arms and tactical equipment (some of it previously used in distant battle zones) that the Pentagon has passed on to local law enforcement departments nationwide in ever increasing quantities.
Our wars have also come home through the "anti-terror" grants of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), itself a war-on-terror creation, that have funded local law-enforcement purchases of armored vehicles and other gear. Such weaponizing programs have helped embolden police officers to see themselves as warriors and citizens like George Floyd as enemy combatants, which helps explain the increased use of force during police encounters in these years.
Additionally, in the last decade, this country's wars have come home in the form of more mass shootings by white supremacist and anti-government types targeting minorities and people of color. Meanwhile, the DHS continued to focus disproportionately on the dangers of Islamist extremists, while overlooking the threat posed by far-right groups, despite their easy access to firearms and the reality that many of their members have military backgrounds.
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