More horror

While the rest of the world focused on the terror attack near the British Parliament last week, a United States-led coalition air strike killed more than 200 civilians in Mosul, Iraq. The air raid was supposed to target Islamic State fighters. Days before the horrific events of Mosul, US-led forces had targeted a school in the Syrian province of Raqqa, killing dozens of civilians, preceded by the complete demolition of a mosque near Aleppo that also slaughtered dozens. Under Donald Trump, the US has gone from one massacre after another. It began with the failed operation carried out by US Navy SEALs in Yemen, where 30 civilians were killed, mostly women and children. This is unlike the policy followed by his predecessor Barack Obama, who at least pretended to care about minimising civilian casualties, even though that was never the case.

Besides their barbaric and criminal nature, these attacks have strengthened the hand of ISIS and Al-Qaeda, who thrive on the resentment brought on by the deaths of innocent civilians lost to Western forces to shore up their support base. "Trump's actions are not a departure from what he said he would do, nor inconsistent with the predictions of those who described his foreign policy approach as 'non-interventionist', writes noted journalist Glenn Greenwald. "To the contrary, the dark savagery guiding U.S. military conduct in that region is precisely what Trump expressly promised his supporters he would usher in."