In un lungo articolo pubblicato sul New York Times (disponibile qui senza paywall), Azmat Khan spiega come i dati contenuti nei rapporti ufficiali del Pentagono circa il numero di vittime collaterali causate dai bombardamenti aerei contro l’ISIS in Siria e Iraq, nonché le valutazioni dell’intelligence a proposito della pericolosità di determinati siti, spesso non collimino con le informazioni raccolte attraverso reportage sul campo.

For Ali Fathi Zeidan and his extended family, West Mosul was in 2016 still the best of many bad options. Their longtime home in a nearby village, Wana, had been taken by ISIS, then retaken by Kurdish pesh merga forces, and — as if that were not enough — it stood just seven miles below the crumbling Mosul Dam, which engineers had long warned might soon collapse, creating a deluge that would kill everyone in its path. The family had avoided the camps for internally displaced people, where they would have faced a constant risk of separation, and found their way instead to the city, to a grimy industrial neighborhood called Yabisat. They moved into a storage facility, divided it up into separate rooms, brought in a water tank, built a kitchen and a bathroom. Though ISIS had taken Mosul, parts of the city were still relatively safe. Now it was home.

Family was everywhere. Zeidan’s daughter Ghazala was married to a man named Muhammad Ahmed Araj, who grew up in the neighborhood. Araj’s brother, Abdul Aziz Ahmed Araj, lived nearby in a small, crowded apartment. Zeidan’s other daughter moved into an apartment on the other side of Mosul with her husband and their six children, but one of them, 11-year-old Sawsan, preferred to spend her time across town in Yabisat: She was attached to her grandparents and loved playing with her cousins.