Civilian deaths in Iraq and Syria have reportedly spiked since Trump took power. What is going on?

[Sunlei]

Is Trump committing war crimes in Iraq and Syria?

By Hamid Dabashi @HamidDabashi
Hamid Dabashi is the Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.

Soon after Trump began to bomb Iraq and Syria, a few months into his presidency, some journalists were quick to make the connection between his campaign promises and his wartime delivery: "Trump said he would 'take out' the families of ISIS fighters. Did an air strike in Syria do just that?"

Only a few weeks later, the scope of Trump's war on Muslim civilians became fully evident. In an official report, UN war crimes investigators said US-led coalition air strikes on the ISIL stronghold of Raqqa were causing "staggering loss of life". <<< LINK HERE TO report.

According to the report, "hundreds of civilians are reported to have been killed since March [2017] <<<<LINK HERE TO REPORT. ." UN officials further added: "We note in particular that the intensification of aerial bombardment, which have paved the ground for an SDF advance in Raqqa, has resulted not only in staggering loss of civilian life, but has also led to 160,000 civilians fleeing their homes and becoming internally displaced."

Even American journalists now started to ask the obvious question: "Why is the US killing so many civilians in Syria and Iraq?" On 19 June, the New York Times finally revealed:

"Two weeks ago, the American military finally acknowledged what nongovernmental monitoring groups had claimed for months: The United States-led coalition fighting the Islamic State since August 2014 has been killing Iraqi and Syrian civilians at astounding rates in the four months since President Trump assumed office. The result has been a 'staggering loss of civilian life', as the head of the United Nations' independent Commission of Inquiry into the Syrian civil war said last week."........

CONTINUED http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2017/06/trump-committing-war-crimes-iraq-syria-170625104609942.html

"Donald Trump as commander-in-chief of US armed forces is deliberately, decidedly, purposefully, targeting Muslim civilians.”