(Credit: Pixbay)

The New York Times exposé on the US military’s cover-up of one of its most horrific civilian massacres in Syria should spur war crimes prosecution at the International Criminal Court. Instead, the US killing of at least 80 women and children hardly made the headlines in most western countries. The reaction of much of the international media was first to keep its silence. This allowed the United States Central Command to justify the airstrikes that were kept hidden for over two years and then let the revelations disappear without a trace yet again.

In the UK, the Daily Mail’s token articles provided the most extensive, though belated, coverage. Even the Guardian and the BBC essentially served as mouthpieces for the US military choosing to largely regurgitate US coverage sans critical analysis, as was the case elsewhere, including Der Spiegel, Bild and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in Germany, the likes of Forbes and the International Business Times as well as several publications across the Middle East, including Al Jazeera.

In the original article, a US Special Forces team was found to have called in an airstrike against a group gathered by the bank of the Euphrates near the town of Baghuz. High-resolution US drones captured the impact of two 2,000-pound bombs and one 500-pound bomb that were dropped on an unwitting crowd. But the impression left is that Washington was engaged in combat and the killings were “legitimate self-defence”, proportional, and that “appropriate steps were taken to rule out the presence of civilians”.

A war has been raging in Syria for the past decade, inflamed and prolonged by foreign interventions on all sides, but in particular by the US and its allies. Washington’s role in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East has been catastrophic. The US must be held accountable for all the needless deaths and sufferings caused by its interventions, not have it brushed under the carpet.