Timeline of crimes committed by the United States and Great Britain
August 20, 1619. The Dutch deliver the first group of slaves to North America. During almost 200 years of slave trade, over 10 million slaves were brought to North America, with millions dying en route.
April 6, 1712. The first major slave revolt flared up in New York, with military units quelling it. Some captured rebels were burned alive, one was broken on the wheel, and the rest were hanged.
May 28, 1830. US Congress passed the Indian Removal Act, which provided for the forced relocation of thousands of Native Americans from the wealthy southeast to the wild lands of the Great Plains. The campaign became known as the Trail of Tears (ethnic cleansing and forced relocation of American Indians from their native lands in the southeastern United States to Indian Territory).
August 21, 1831 The biggest slave rebellion in US history, led by Nat Turner, flared up in Virginia. It was crushed by government forces. Sixty Whites and nearly 100 slaves died in the process. After it was over, 56 slaves were executed, Nat Turner was skinned alive, and another 200 black slaves were lynched.
March 3, 1863. US Congress approved the Dakota Removal Act providing for the removal of the Dakota from their ancestral homelands.
May 1, 1898. The US Navy defeated the Spanish fleet in the Battle of Manila, the Philippines. The Americans promised the islanders free assistance in their fight for independence. However, under the US-Spanish peace treaty signed in Paris on December 10, Spain relinquished its right to the islands to the United States for $20 million. The Filipinos saw that they had been blatantly cheated. Clashes between US troops and resistance fighters grew into full-scale battles, which encouraged the United States to launch punitive raids, executions and torture. The biggest battle, known as the Balingiga Massacre on Samar Island, took place in 1901 and reportedly left over 50,000 Filipinos dead. Historians assess the overall number of civilians killed by American troops at 200,000.
June 4, 1898. Annexation of the Hawaiian Islands, previously independent and known as the Kingdom of Hawaii. For more than 50 years, Hawaii was part of the United States with the status of a US territory and enjoyed only limited rights. Only in 1959 was Hawaii declared a state for the merits of its residents during World War II.
July 28, 1915. 330 US Marines disembark in Port-au-Prince and subsequently occupied Haiti. The invasion was ordered by President Woodrow Wilson with the aim of protecting US corporate interests. The occupation ended on August 1, 1934, after President Franklin Roosevelt approved a liberation agreement.
May 13, 1916. Beginning of the military occupation of the Dominican Republic by US troops, which was part of a series of military conflicts in South America collectively known as the Banana Wars. The US authorities cited the need to protect the country from German aggression and establish an internal legislative order. In November 1916, they officially announced that the Dominican Republic was fully under the US army’s control. The occupation ended in 1941 with the complete liberation of the country.
August 15, 1918. At the request of France and Britain, US troops disembarked in Vladivostok in the Russian Far East in August 1918. Commanded by Major General William Graves, the expeditionary corps had 7,950 officers and men. Officially, the United States declared that it was following a policy of non-interference and would help neither of the opposing parties. After Admiral Kolchak’s army was defeated in 1919, it made no sense to keep the corps in Russia any longer and the US force was finally pulled out of the Russian Far East by April 1, 1920. According to some data, the unit lost 189 men. Between 1918 and 1919, American soldiers made up part of the Western intervention forces in northern Russia. The interventionists were allied with the White movement.
April 13, 1919. British forces fired on civilians in Amritsar, India, during the Amritsar massacre. People protesting British colonial rule were surrounded inside Jallianwala Bagh, a walled-in park, and attacked. Acting on orders from Brigadier General Reginald Dyer, 50 soldiers fired their weapons until they ran out of ammunition. Between 379 and 1,000 protesters, including 40 children, were killed in 10 minutes, and 1,100 more were wounded. At the urging of The Morning Star newspaper, the grateful British public at large lauded General Dyer as a hero and raised a bonus of 26,000 pounds in his honour.
July 8, 1920. The US announced an embargo on trade with the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR).
February 16, 1920 - November 19, 1922. A US Marines guard occupied Russky Island, Primorye Territory, allegedly to protect a US radio station and property.
June 18, 1935. The Anglo-German Naval Agreement was concluded, which changed the ratio between the navies of Great Britain and Nazi Germany and contributed to the revival of the German navy.
May 13, 1939. MS St Louis, which left Hamburg for Cuba with 930 Jewish refugees on board, was denied entry to the United States. The Jews were not allowed into Cuba, the United States, or any of the Latin American countries. The ship had to return to Europe. As a result, according to European historians, almost half of the St Louis passengers did not survive the Holocaust.
February 14, 1942. The UK adopted the Area Bombing Directive. The day after the directive was issued, Chief of the Air Staff Charles Portal wrote to Commander-in-Chief of the RAF Bomber Command Sir Arthur Travers Harris: “I suppose it is clear the aiming points will be the built-up areas, and not, for instance, the dockyards or aircraft factories.” It is therefore clear that the UK’s “carpet bombing” raids did not target military facilities but were designed to exterminate civilians and to dispirit the survivors. In fact, this method of warfare can be described as terrorism. The Area Bombing Directive was applied against Cologne (May 30, 1942, over 13,000 buildings destroyed) and Hamburg (July 23 ̵ August 3, 1943, during which 45 percent of the city was ruined, and more than 35,000 people killed). Carpet or saturation bombing was also used in 1942-1943 against Bingen, Dessau, Chemnitz, Stuttgart and Magdeburg.
February 19, 1942. US President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, launching the internment of certain groups of US citizens in the so-called relocation camps and other confinement sites. The president authorised the Secretary of War to designate certain “military areas” from which “any or all persons may be excluded.” The order affected Americans of Japanese ancestry in particular, with all of them being removed from the West Coast and south Arizona; approximately 120,000 of them were interned.
The order was also applied to German and Italian Americans. As many as 11,000 German Americans, 3,000 Italian Americans and a number of Jewish refugees from Germany were interned. Jews were affected because the US government did not distinguish between ethnic Jews and ethnic Germans. Some of the interned were soon released, while others remained in the camps for several years after the war. These groups, like the interned Japanese, included people born in the United States, especially children.
President Gerald Ford formally terminated Executive Order 9066 on February 19, 1976. In December 1982, the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians published its findings in a report titled Personal Justice Denied, concluding that the incarceration of Japanese Americans had not been justified by military necessity and that the decision to incarcerate was based on “race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.”
February 15, 1944. Western Europe’s oldest monastery (abbey), located on the top of a hill overlooking the town of Cassino, was almost completely destroyed in a series of US and UK air raids. The allies dropped 1,150 tonnes of bombs on the abbey, turning the top of Monte Cassino into a smoking ruin. Subsequent investigations established that the only people killed in the monastery by the bombing were Italian civilians seeking refuge there. There is no evidence proving that any German troops were killed in or near the abbey.
April 1, 1944. Up to 600 bombers attacked Belgrade. Some local residents happily greeted the Allied warplanes, but soon became disappointed. The air raid began at 12 pm when many city residents were attending Easter Day services at churches. According to eyewitness accounts, the air strike was nothing but carpet bombing. Meanwhile, even during fighting with Nazi Germany hostilities were suspended on Easter Day and during Christmas celebrations. The city’s central districts were the hardest hit. Various estimates put the death toll at about 2,000 civilians, and about 1,000 people were injured to varying degrees. It should be noted that four Serbian air crews serving with the US Air Force bomber unit that hit Belgrade were ordered to go on leave prior to the air raid.
April 16-17, 1944. The bombing of Belgrade. US command planned to destroy major German military facilities and communication centres in Belgrade. However, by that time, there were very few German troops in the city; the allies’ bombs destroyed residential neighbourhoods, hospitals and churches, and peaceful civilians constituted the majority of casualties. According to different estimates, about 2,000 civilians were killed and about 1,000 were injured in Belgrade.
April 17, 1944. The bombing of Sofia. US air raids resulted in the destruction of 12,657 houses and the death of over 4,200 civilians. At that time, Bulgaria’s defence industry was too weak to pose any threat to the countries of the anti-Hitler coalition, and there were no military plants in Sofia. The allies deliberately bombed civilian facilities, and all the air raids did was cause major problems with post-war reconstruction.
Dresden was bombed on February 13-14, 1945. During the first air raid, in the evening of February 13, 1945, 244 heavy RAF Lancaster bombers dropped 507 tonnes of high-explosive bombs and 374 tonnes of incendiary devices on the city. The second raid, lasting 30 minutes and carried out during the night, was twice as devastating as the first, 529 aircraft dropped 965 tonnes of high-explosive bombs and over 800 tonnes of incendiaries. In the morning of February 14, 311 US Air Force B-17s dropped over 780 tonnes of bombs on the city. In the afternoon of February 15, 210 US aircraft dropped an additional 462 tonnes of bombs on the city. This was the most destructive European air raid during World War II. The area that was completely devastated in Dresden by the air raids was four times larger than the zone of destruction in Nagasaki caused by the first US atomic bomb on August 9, 1945. Over 75-80 percent of Dresden buildings were damaged or destroyed. Irretrievable cultural losses included the destruction of the old Frauenkirche and Hofkirche churches, the famous opera house and the world-famous Zwinger architectural-palatial ensemble. At the same time, damage to the city’s industrial enterprises was insignificant, and the railway system suffered only minimal affects. It is hard to estimate the total casualties following the air strikes on Dresden because the city then accommodated several dozen military hospitals and hundreds of thousands of refugees. Many people were buried under the rubble or incinerated during the firestorm. Various sources put the number of air raid victims at between 25,000 ̵ 50,000 and 135,000 or more. According to many historians, the bombing of Dresden was not justified by any military considerations. The hard-hitting Allied air strikes were aimed at achieving a political goal, that is, at demonstrating Western air power to the advancing Red Army.
On February 14, 1945, the Allies bombed Prague, with over 60 B-17 Flying Fortress aircraft dropping 152 tonnes of bombs on the city’s densely populated districts. In all, 701 civilians were killed, and 1,184 more wounded. About 100 buildings, including many cultural and historical landmarks, were destroyed. US Air Force representatives later claimed that the air raid was conducted by mistake after bombers heading for Dresden strayed off course. However, military historians believe that the air strike was intended to destroy local industrial facilities in the future Soviet occupation zone.
March 8, 1945. The first US ground forces arrived in South Vietnam, with 3,500 Marines landing in Da Nang.
March 10, 1945. The US Air Force obliterated Tokyo by dropping 1,665 tons of high explosive and napalm bombs on the city. The attack killed at least 80,000 city residents, mostly civilians. Military experts remain divided on whether the air strike was justified or not.
May 3, 1945. Britain’s RAF planes destroyed three cargo ships in the Bay of Lubeck, the Cap Arcona, the Thielbek and the Deutschland, which carried 10,000 prisoners, mostly Soviet citizens but also Poles and Norwegians, from the Neuengamme, Dora Mittelbau and Stutthof Nazi concentration camps. British air reconnaissance said there was a lot of contradictory information at the end of the war and no time to properly check it. The Royal Air Force command ordered the destruction of the ships because its intelligence assumed that high-ranking SS officers, including Heinrich Himmler, were on board in an attempt to escape to Norway. Overall, approximately 9,000 inmates of Nazi concentration camp were killed in that air raid.
May 22, 1945. The British Armed Forces' Joint Planning Staff presented two possible future plans (offensive and defensive) of a military campaign against the Soviet Union, ordered by Prime Minister Winston Churchill and codenamed Operation Unthinkable. Documents relating to these plans are currently held at the UK National Archives. The immediate goal of the offensive plan was the forceful expulsion of Soviet troops from Poland, while the defensive plan had to do with organising the defence of the British Isles in the event of a possible Soviet invasion of Western Europe. The offensive plan was seen as the scenario for the Third World War. The potential starting date was July 1, 1945.
The ground campaign plan included two main attacks in northeastern Europe in the direction of Poland. Although outnumbered by the Soviet forces, the Allies hoped to succeed due to the element of surprise and superior command and control of the air force. If the Red Army was not fully defeated further west and pulled out, total war was inevitable. The plan for Operation Unthinkable was handed over to the Soviet Union by the Cambridge Five. The Soviet General Staff took appropriate countermeasures.
July 1, 1945. The hypothetical date for the start of the Allied “expulsion” of the Red Army from Poland (which never took place) planned as part of Operation Unthinkable developed by the British Armed Forces’ Joint Planning Staff on May 22, 1945, on orders from Prime Minister Winston Churchill.
August 6, 1945. A US aircraft drops an atomic bomb on Hiroshima in Japan, annihilating between 90,000 and 166,000 people. The need to use atomic weapons in the final stages of World War II is still debated, with some historians calling it an “act of state terrorism.”
August 9, 1945. A US aircraft drops an atomic bomb on Nagasaki in Japan, killing between 60,000 and 80,000 people. The need to use atomic weapons in the final stages of World War II is still being debated, with some historians calling it an “act of state terrorism.” During World War II, nearly 120,000 ethnic Japanese residents in the United States were interned and committed to concentration camps.
March 5, 1946. While on a private visit to the United States, Sir Winston Churchill delivered his famous speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri. The speech greatly impressed people in the United States and Western Europe, and largely pre-determined subsequent global developments. Churchill warned of the threat of another all-out war and Soviet tyranny. He also scared the audience with impending calamities and an inevitable “iron curtain” that the Soviets had allegedly lowered in Europe. The speaker borrowed this term from Josef Goebbels’ editorial in the February 25, 1945 issue of the newspaper Das Reich. According to the British politician, a new US-British military-political alliance was expected to give both powers an overwhelming superiority over the Soviet Union. Russian historians agree that Churchill’s speech heralded the beginning of the Cold War between the Soviet Union and its former allies, members of the anti-Hitler coalition.
March 12, 1947. President of the United States Harry Truman set forth a new national foreign policy doctrine that stipulated economic, financial and military support for non-Communist regimes, open involvement in the domestic affairs of other countries and the creation of a chain of military bases on their territories. President Truman defined the incipient US-Soviet rivalry as a conflict between democracy and totalitarianism. At the same time, the Russian-language version of the Voice of America (VOA) radio station launched its broadcasts. The radio station was initially established in 1942 as a tool for fighting Goebbels’ propaganda. Following a change in foreign policy priorities, the United States decided to use VOA for waging an information and psychological war against the Soviet state. In 1949, VOA started broadcasting in Ukrainian. In 1951 it also began broadcasting for Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan.
June 27, 1950. The US sent its 7th Fleet to the Taiwan Strait and took the island of Taiwan under military control.
June 18, 1954. The United States orchestrated a mercenary intervention that resulted in a coup d'état in Guatemala.
January 1, 1957. The US Operation Dropshot, which was declassified in 1978, was a contingency plan for a possible third world war between the Soviet Union and the United States involving large-scale use of nuclear, chemical and bacteriological weapons. On December 19, 1949, the Joint Chiefs of Staff approved what was one of the most ambitious plans for military aggression against the Soviet Union, involving the United States dropping 300 nuclear bombs and 250,000 tonnes of conventional bombs on 100 Soviet cities. The goal was to destroy the bulk of the country’s population and up to 85 percent of its industrial potential.
May 1, 1960. A US U-2 spy aircraft flown by Francis Gary Powers was shot down by a Soviet missile over defence plants in Sverdlovsk (present-day Yekaterinburg), which led to a crisis in Soviet-US relations. Powers, who parachuted from the plane, was detained and sentenced by the Soviet Supreme Court to 10 years in prison. In February 1962, he was exchanged for Soviet intelligence officer William August Fisher (Rudolf Abel).
April 17, 1961. The Bay of Pigs (Bahía de los Cochinos) invasion by US-trained Cuban counterrevolutionaries.
August 10, 1961. The United States starts using chemicals in the course of its war in Vietnam. To destroy vegetation and forests, as part of the Operation Ranch Hand, almost all areas in Southern Vietnam and many areas in Laos and Cambodia were sprayed with a total of 72 million litres of Agent Orange and other defoliants, including 44 million litres of dioxin-containing liquids. This led to tens of thousands of deaths in the postwar period. In all, there were 4.8 million victims of chemical attacks in Vietnam. Currently, residents of many areas in south Vietnam continue to suffer from the effects of Operation Ranch Hand. America’s massive use of chemicals has led to grave consequences for Vietnam’s ecosystem. The chemicals destroyed almost all mangrove forests (500,000 hectares) and affected 60 percent (nearly 1 million hectares) of the jungle and 30 percent (over 100,000 hectares) of forest on the plains. Since 1960, rubber plantation yields have dropped by 75 percent. US forces wiped out between 40 percent and 100 percent of arable land for bananas, rice, sweet potatoes, papaya, and tomatoes, 70 percent of coconut plantations, 60 percent of rubber-tree plantations, and 110,000 hectares of beef-wood plantations. As a result, Vietnam’s environmental balance has suffered a serious change. In the affected areas, 18 bird species are left of 150, amphibians and insects have disappeared almost entirely, the number of fish in rivers has declined and the composition of them has changed. The microbiology of soils has been disrupted. The number of rain-forest tree and bush species has plummeted, with only individual species of trees and several cut-grass species, unfit for fodder, remaining in the affected areas. Changes in Vietnam’s wildlife have entailed the displacement of an innocuous rat species by plague carriers. Ticks spreading dangerous diseases have appeared among the acarian species composition and malaria mosquitoes are supplanting the innocuous endemic species.
February 3, 1962. President John F. Kennedy approved the Embargo on All Trade with Cuba.
August 7, 1964. The US Congress passes the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution that authorised an open US aggression against Vietnam.
March 2, 1965. The United States launched the bombing of North Vietnam under Operation Rolling Thunder, thereby becoming an active participant in the war. During that war, the United States dropped the equivalent of more than 100 kilograms of bombs per resident of North and South Vietnam and poured 77 million litres of toxic chemicals on more than 14 percent of the territory, causing horrible mutations. Overall, chemical weapons destroyed 60 percent of the jungle, over 30 percent of lowland forest and over 905,000 hectares of crop areas. In 1969 alone, over 285,000 people were poisoned with toxic gases.
April 28, 1965. The US military intervention in the Dominican Republic. During Operation Power Pack, US marines landed in the Dominican Republic to overthrow the government which had seized power as a result of the civil war. The United States occupied the country until September 1966, stationing up to 12,000 troops there. The general elections ended with the creation of a pro-American government.
July 22, 1967. The Detroit Rebellion. An upsurge in the Black movement in the United States. To suppress the riots and cut the breaches of law and order, Governor George Romney ordered in 8,000 Michigan National Guard troops with armour. President Lindon Johnson sent 4,700 troops to the city from the 82nd and 101st airborne divisions. The enforcement resulted in 43 dead, 467 wounded, 7,200 taken into custody, and over 2,000 buildings damaged.
March 16, 1968. The population of the village of Song My in South Vietnam’s Quang Ngai Province was massacred, and the community was torched down to the last home and shed. US soldiers brutally killed 567 local residents, including 173 children and 182 women, 17 of whom were pregnant. Second Lieutenant William Calley became the only member of the US Armed Forces to be found guilty of the crime, and he was sentenced to life imprisonment and hard labour. He was pardoned after three and a half years of house arrest.
April 30, 1970. The invasion of Cambodia by South Vietnam and the United States.
May 4, 1970. Nine unarmed students from Kent State University, Ohio, were killed and four were wounded during a peace rally against the Vietnam War.
January 30, 1972. The 1st Battalion of the British Army’s Parachute Regiment shot unarmed civilians during a protest march organised by the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA) in the Bogside area of Derry, Northern Ireland. The British killed 13 protesters, including six children and one priest. The tragedy is remembered as Bloody Sunday, or the Bogside Massacre.
April 24, 1980. The botched Operation Eagle Claw carried out by the United States to liberate the Americans held captive in Iran. The Americans lost eight military personnel, one aerial refuelling tanker and several helicopters. The hostages were not released.
May 21, 1982. British troops landed on East Falkland to establish a bridgehead at Port San Carlos, starting a war against Argentina.
April 15, 1986. The US Air Force bombed Libyan cities during Operation El Dorado Canyon, following accusations that the Libyan government supported international terrorism. Some Western analysts view this attack as a punitive expedition.
In the early 1980s, relations between the United States and Libya deteriorated greatly. The administration of President Ronald Reagan accused Libya and its leader Muammar Gaddafi of supporting international terrorism. The US-Libyan standoff peaked in March 1986. On April 2, 1986, a bomb exploded aboard a Trans World Airlines flight from Rome to Athens, killing four. On April 5, a bomb went off at the La Belle discotheque in West Berlin, frequented by US service personnel. Two US soldiers and a Turkish waitress were killed, and about 200 more were wounded. The United States claimed that the Libyan intelligence service had organised both incidents.
After the terrorist act, President Reagan ordered preparations for an air strike on Libya. Five facilities near Tripoli and Benghazi were selected. According to the US intelligence community, the targets were used to train terrorists and to deliver weapons to terrorist organisations. The facilities included military barracks, a base for training frogmen and a military airfield in Tripoli, as well as barracks and an airfield in Benghazi. The operation involved over 100 aircraft, with 27 of them mostly destroying the above-mentioned targets. In all, they dropped about 150 tonnes of ordnance. The US administration said the air strike did not aim to eliminate Gaddafi. Many analysts doubted this statement because Gaddafi’s Tripoli residence came under attack, although he was not there at the time.
July 3, 1988. The USS Vincennes fired a missile at and downed an Iran Air Airbus A300 on its way over the Persian Gulf, killing 290 people on board, including 16 crew members and 66 children. The US government acknowledged its mistake, but no official apologies followed.
January 17, 1991. The military personnel of the US, the UK and several other countries launched Operation Desert Storm to liberate Kuwait.
February 28, 1993 - April 19, 1993. The National Guard, FBI and the US Armed Forces carried out a law enforcement siege of the Mount Carmel compound of the religious sect Branch Davidians, located 14 kilometres outside Waco, Texas. They made use of artillery and tanks, setting the centre on fire, and resulting in the deaths of 82 Davidians, including over 20 children.
August 30 - September 20, 1995. NATO’s air Operation Deliberate Force against Bosnian Serbs. There was no UN Security Council resolution for the operation, for which reason it could be regarded as a case of open interference in the internal affairs of the former Yugoslavia. This seriously undermined the Serb’s military potential, which allowed the Bosnians and Croats to seize a number of Serb territories. It took a toll of 152 civilian lives, with nearly 300 people suffering various injuries.
On March 24, 1999, NATO launched its military operation code-named Operation Allied Force against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The ultimatum to the Serbian troops to withdraw immediately all their forces from Kosovo and Metohija, legitimate Serbian territories, served as a formal pretext for the invasion. The operation consisted of extensively bombing the Serbian troops in Kosovo and other targets on Serbian territory, including residential neighbourhoods, television and radio broadcasting facilities, hospitals, factories and businesses, as well as infrastructure. Apart from the United States, 14 NATO countries took part in the operation. During the air strikes, they used banned ordnances with radioactive substances, mostly depleted uranium. The bombing caused heavy damage to civilian sites destroying 82 railroad and motor bridges, 48 hospitals, 25 post office and telegraph stations, 70 schools, nine university buildings and four student dormitories, 18 kindergartens, 35 churches and 29 monasteries, including UNESCO-protected heritage sites, a television centre in Belgrade, a convoy of Albanian refugees, as well as the building of China’s embassy in Serbia.
According to the Serbian government, the bombing killed around 2,500 people, including 89 children, and wounded 12,500. Some 863,000 people, primarily Serbs living in Kosovo, left the region, and another 590,000 became forced refugees. There was no definitive assessment of the damage inflicted on industrial, transport and civilian infrastructure in Yugoslavia, with estimates ranging from $30 billion to $100 billion.
The Independent International Commission on Kosovo, created on August 6, 1999, at the initiative of Prime Minister of Sweden Goran Persson to investigate war crimes committed by NATO’s leadership in Yugoslavia, came to the conclusion that NATO’s military intervention was illegal, since the alliance failed to receive a mandate from the UN Security Council. The commission criticised NATO for using cluster munitions, as well as bombing chemical factories and oil refineries in Yugoslavia considering the grave impact on the environment. In March 2002, the UN confirmed that NATO’s bombing caused radioactive pollution in Kosovo.
January 11, 2002. The United States opened the Guantanamo Bay detention camp within Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba for detainees accused of terrorism. The prison is notorious for its human rights abuses, including indefinite detention without charge or trial, torture and other forms of violent, inhuman or humiliating treatment or punishment.
On March 20, 2003, the invasion of Iraq started, code-named Operation Iraqi Freedom. Having invaded Afghanistan and ousted the Taliban from power, the United States focused on Iraq, accusing the country’s leadership of working with al-Qaeda and developing WMDs. Information from US intelligence pointed the other way, but the George W. Bush administration ignored this. Kuwait served as a bridgehead for launching the offensive after the Turkish parliament categorically refused to offer its territory for this unfortunate undertaking. Ground forces were deployed almost immediately, without extensive air strikes. They did not encounter any meaningful resistance. On April 9, Baghdad fell without a fight, and on April 15, Tikrit, signalling the end of active hostilities. The confrontation evolved into a guerrilla war.
According to official statistics, the United States lost 149 people in the first 21 days of active warfare, while the civilian death toll was around 7,300. Here’s an interesting fact: Washington attacked Iraq without a formal declaration of war. George W. Bush ordered his troops to attack this country. For no particular reason. According to the WHO, some 151,000 Iraqis died in the violence that engulfed the country between the start of the operation and mid-2006. This is just an aggregated estimate of the confirmed cases. NGOs believe that there were hundreds of thousands or even millions in civilian casualties. The coalition included Great Britain, Australia and Poland.
August 3, 2007 US Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan takes its biggest toll of civilian lives as the US air force attacks targets in Mazar-e-Dini, killing at least 200.
On March 19, 2011, a NATO military coalition launched an invasion of Libya, which resulted in regime change and the killing, with great relish, of its legitimate leader, Muammar Gaddafi. The United States interfered in the Libyan civil war on the side of the rebels against the Muammar Gaddafi regime by perverting UN Security Council Resolution 1973. It provided for a no-fly zone over Libya, and NATO countries used it for bombing, instead of protecting civilians.
France, Great Britain and Canada initially backed the Americans, and later NATO assumed the operation command. The US called its part of the invasion Operation Odyssey Dawn. It provided for shelling military targets without deploying armed forces on the ground. It ended on October 31 with Muammar Gaddafi’s ousting and his terrifying murder. All this shattered Libyan statehood and resulted in a refugee crisis in Europe that has been going on for many years now.
August 9, 2014. In Ferguson, Missouri, a white policeman shot and killed a local black resident, Michael Brown, sparking off both riots and widespread unrest in the city itself and protests against police brutality against African Americans across the country.