tweeted this morning.
The U.S. has bombed Iraq 131 times this year. There was not a single airstrike in 2012 and 2013, reflecting the official end of the war. Now the U.S. is back at it with a new enemy in its sights—the Islamic State.
CENTCOM has provided precise numbers for the strikes against Islamic State fighters. We know roughly where they happened, and what vehicles were hit (though not how many people died.) We can watch some of them, because CENTCOM has been helpfully posting declassified footage to YouTube for the past three weeks.
Up until this latest social media spree, CENTCOM’s YouTube channel was the kind of military propaganda we’re used to—recruitment-style videos and smiley troop fare like “Faces of Freedom,” featuring a sergeant and his bomb-sniffing dog. It hasn’t been quite up to the level of the Israeli Defense Forces’ social media PR blitz, but these new videos, and the detailed descriptions of strikes (being compiled here by journalist Chris Woods), seem to mark a new effort.
The U.S. has bombed Iraq 131 times this year. There was not a single airstrike in 2012 and 2013, reflecting the official end of the war. Now the U.S. is back at it with a new enemy in its sights—the Islamic State.
CENTCOM has provided precise numbers for the strikes against Islamic State fighters. We know roughly where they happened, and what vehicles were hit (though not how many people died.) We can watch some of them, because CENTCOM has been helpfully posting declassified footage to YouTube for the past three weeks.
Up until this latest social media spree, CENTCOM’s YouTube channel was the kind of military propaganda we’re used to—recruitment-style videos and smiley troop fare like “Faces of Freedom,” featuring a sergeant and his bomb-sniffing dog. It hasn’t been quite up to the level of the Israeli Defense Forces’ social media PR blitz, but these new videos, and the detailed descriptions of strikes (being compiled here by journalist Chris Woods), seem to mark a new effort.
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