Monday, 18 June 2007

Killing Of The Innocent Continues

It is always the innocent who invariably loses the most during War, and so we see again as seven children die after there school is hit by air strikes by US and Afghan troops.
The school was in a compound suspected by coalition forces to house Taliban insurgents and followed "intelligence" that militants had taken shelter at the complex.
Of course the militants are beneath contempt for endangering the lives of these children by using them as human shields but it is happening with unnerving regularity, as we see in Afghanistan, Iraq and last years Lebanon conflict.
The insurgents hide among civilians and the airborne missile take out everyone and everything around them and then it's a shoulder shrug and a brief explanation that it is there fault for hiding there.
Yes, in an ideal world the insurgents would stay well away from civilian buildings but they don't and planting a dozen missiles into the vicinity and hoping that you get the bad guys while knowing full well that you will kill civilians is horrific.
Send in the ground troops to flush them out or find another way with dealing with the scum but killing 7 kids to take out 2 militants as happened here, just makes your military look as if they have little or no regard for innocent lives, and is an excellent recruitment advert for Al Queada .

4 comments:

Cheezy said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Cheezy said...

Your last sentence spells it out very clearly. The mindset of our leaders seems to be that there are a finite number of 'bad guys' in these places, and that once we wipe them all out, then that will be that... The possibility that killing seven kids (and of course we've killed many, many more than that) could acturally be producing more (cough, cough) 'terrorists' than we're destroying doesn't seem to have occurred to them.

Stephen K said...

You're absolutely right, Lucy. Simply destroying a village or a dwelling because extremists are hiding among innocents make us no better than they are.

Daniel said...

If we're no better than they are then there is no hope.

But despite that fact, I've more or less opened my blog again but with greatly lowered expectations for it and myself.

Take care.