After weeks of media excitement and public anger as to whether Britain would join the dozen nations reportedly bombing both Iraq and Syria, an eerie silence has befallen the British media.
While the Oxford English Dictionary defines an airstrike as “an attack made using aircraft,” some might say that the term sounds a bit too light and fluffy for what are actually 510 lb laser-guided Paveway IV bombs. The British bombs dropped in Syria landed within hours of MPs cheering for intervention in the December 2nd Commons vote.
“Following the vote in the House of Commons last night, Royal Air Force Tornado GR4 aircraft flew their first offensive operation against Daesh terrorist targets inside Syria,” the U.K. Ministry of Defence claimed after jets struck six targets on an oilfield, 35 miles inside Syria’s eastern border with Iraq.
Since then, tumbleweeds have blown through the British press, and the deafening silence prompted Anti-Mediato contact Airwars to find out what is going on.
Airwars.org is a collaborative project tracking the international air war against Daesh in Iraq and Syria. Employing a specialist in Iraq and a Syrian analyst in the U.K., the project uses data drawn from U.S. and allied militaries to track and document coalition airstrikes. Attempting to fill the gaping hole in independent and trustworthy monitoring from the region, Airwars also document and follow up on reports of civilian casualties.
We know from the MoD website that one strike has been carried out in Syria by the U.K. in the past week December 6th-13th (the only non-U.S. strike according to figures given to us by the Coalition.) That compares with 21 reported U.K. strikes in Iraq that week. Airwars Director, Chris Woods, told Anti-Media.
Pointing to the archive of all known public military records of the coalition’s air war against Daesh, Woods added:
By comparison, there were 9 reported UK strikes in Syria and 10 in Iraq the previous week.
Much of what Airwars knows about ongoing coalition actions in Iraq and Syria comes from the coalition members, themselves, via daily, weekly, or monthly situation reports — not all coalition forces provide reports of their actions.
Despite the public furor at some MPs cheering for the U.K.’s fourth war in 14 years, the majority of operations by British forces continue to take place in Iraq. The revelations will confirm what many knew — that months of U.S. and Russian bombing has left few targets in Syria — and there was no need for further British imperialist intervention.
In 2013, a Russian spokesperson described Britain as “a small island that no one listens to.” Perhaps the U.K. suffers from the political version of small-penis syndrome — or is it the island nation mentality that explains the historical over-extending of its role in global affairs? Regardless, it seems the recent push for British military intervention, so far, appears to have been largely symbolic.
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May be largely symbolic, I’ll go with that, but as always it’s at least partly economic- as in the economic fortunes of those who profit from war getting their war, with no small amount of persuasion and, likely, no real objective beyond sustaining the conflict for as long as possible.