Pentagon to Study Civilian Deaths in US Strikes Amid Criticism - Report

WASHINGTON (Sputnik) - The US Defense Department has taken significant action to investigate and minimize civilian casualties in counterterrorism operations worldwide amid the criticism of the Pentagon’s failure to prevent deaths of innocent people, the Washington Post reported.

The initiative, the first of its kind for the Pentagon, would seek to understand why US military death counts differ from reports from outside sources that indicate much larger numbers, the Washington Post reported on Monday.

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The Pentagon said last week that since the start of the US military operations against the Daesh* in Iraq and Syria in 2014, some 1,190 civilians had been killed by American strikes. A UK-based company that assesses civilian harm resulting from airstrikes against the terrorist group – Airwars – announced that at least 7,478 civilians lost their lives in the strikes.

The new initiative will provide more precise data of innocent people being killed in US counterterrorism wars and outline strategies on how to avoid civilian harm in the future operations.

The US-led coalition of more than 70 countries has been fighting Daesh militants in Syria and Iraq since 2014. The coalition's operations in Syria are not authorized by the government of President Bashar Assad or the UN Security Council. In December, President Donald Trump announced the US troops' pullout from the republic but gave no time frame.

*Daesh (also known as ISIS/ISIL/IS) is a terrorist group banned in Russia