Dec. 18, 2021
Azmat Khan wrote a Pulitzer Prize-winning article for the New York Times Magazine on the Pentagon's hidden documents detailing American air warfare failures in the Middle East
Yet what the hidden documents show is that civilians have become the regular collateral casualties of a way of war gone badly wrong.
To understand how this happened, The Times did what military officials admit they have not done: analyzed the casualty assessments in aggregate to discern patterns of failed intelligence, decision-making and execution. It also visited more than 100 casualty sites and interviewed scores of surviving residents and current and former American officials. In the coming days, the second part of this series will trace those journeys through the war zones of Iraq and Syria.
Taken together, the reporting offers the most sweeping, and also the most granular, portrait of how the air war was prosecuted and investigated — and of its civilian toll.