Crimes US has committed in Middle East: Killing civilians, trampling on people’s right to life

Cartoon by Ma Hongliang

Since the founding of the United States, there has been fewer than 20 years when the nation was not at war. The obsession that Americans have with war is in the genes of their country.

By rallying its allies to launch the Gulf War, the Afghanistan War, and the Iraq War, as well as engaging in the Syrian War, the US has created a humanitarian disaster in the Middle East and surrounding regions during the past several decades.

The US has acted as a bully in the Middle East and intends to maintain its hegemony in the region by fair or foul means. For the US, the international law can be violated, the United Nations (UN) can be ignored and the right to life enjoyed by people living in the region can be trampled on.

The “Costs of War” project of Brown University in the US said that more than 174,000 people died in the war in Afghanistan, of whom more than 47,000 were civilians.

According to the UN Refugee Agency, the nearly 20-year war in Afghanistan forced 2.6 million Afghans to flee abroad and displaced 3.5 million others.

Syria had a population of over 22 million before a series of wars and conflicts broke out inside the country in 2011. According to statistics by the UN Refugee Agency, by July 2022, the number of registered Syrian refugees exceeded 5.6 million.

Data released by the UN revealed that US military interventions claimed at least 350,000 lives in Syria, displaced more than 12 million people, and left 14 million civilians in urgent need of humanitarian assistance.

According to available records, between 2016 and 2019, 3,833 civilians in Syria were directly killed in bombings by the US-led coalition and half of them were women and children.

Those wars, fought in the name of “democracy,” “freedom” and “human rights,” have brought death and blood to people in the Middle East. The crimes the US has committed in the Middle East have torn off the fig leaf of American-style human rights.