After years of legal proceedings and months of investigation, the New York Times concluded that the number of civilian casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan far exceeded the number acknowledged by the United States.
According to the report, summarizing efforts to investigate US wars in the Middle East, the newspaper wrote: Demonstrates civilian deaths and inadequate accountability over the years.
The newspaper gained access to Pentagon documents through a lawsuit filed in March 2017 against the US Department of Defense and Central Command and a request for freedom of information.
Reporters from the New York Times also visited more than 100 of the dead and interviewed survivors, as well as former and current U.S. service officials.
The study, published in a two-part report this week, found that US air warfare was "extremely poor" and that civilian casualties were "extremely low" in the hundreds.
The document disproves the Pentagon's claim that drone technology has made it possible for part of a house to be destroyed by enemy fighters while the rest of the structure remains intact.
The New York Times report revealed that in five years, US forces carried out more than 50,000 airstrikes in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria.
Noting that the military must navigate a wide range of protocols to estimate and minimize civilian casualties before launching air strikes, the report acknowledged that often available intelligence could be "misleading." It can fall short, or sometimes lead to catastrophic mistakes. "
The newspaper pointed out that sometimes aerial videos did not show people in buildings under plants or in tarpaulins or aluminum enclosures.
The report further states that "available data can be misinterpreted, such as when people flee to the site of a recent bombing and are considered militants rather than rescuers".
The report says that "sometimes motorcyclists show an attack while advancing in a certain way while they are only motorcyclists".
The New York Times cited three specific reports to prove its point.
One of them was the July 19, 2016 incident when US Special Forces bombed three hideouts of ISIS terrorists in the northern Syrian region, and initial reports said 85 militants were killed while 120 farmers and other villagers were killed.
Another example was the November 2015 attack in the Ramadi area of Iraq, in which a man was seen dragging a heavy object into an ISIS stronghold, while the survey revealed that the object was actually a child who had been killed in an airstrike.
