The Council on Foreign Relations recently published a blog on their website according to which the United States dropped 26,171 bombs in seven countries in 2016, including Pakistan. The other six countries in the list are Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen and Somalia. The published article revolves around the fact-finding investigation of exactly how many bombs the US dropped on terrorism affected countries. It takes help from the data of airstrikes in Operation Inherent Resolve (OIR) which is the campaign to counter Islamic State.
However, the information is vague as a single airstrike doesn't account for how many bombs are dropped. It only gives data in general about the day-to-day coalition airstrikes. The Pentagon's own definition says that a single strike can involve multiple bombs.
The largest number of bombs were dropped in Syria and Iraq, 12,192 and 12,095, respectively, due to the presence of multiple terrorist groups of which IS is most prominent. This is approximately 93 percent of the bomb dropped by the US, according to the data. Afghanistan was subjected to 1,337 airstrikes, and 496 bombs were dropped in Libya. Only three bombs were dropped in Pakistan during 2016; the number was 11 in 2015. In 2016, the last year of his presidency, President Barack Obama emphasized on increasing airstrikes and reducing the number of ground troops.
Comments
Comments are closed for this article.