The West kills civilians just like ‘evil’ Putin

IN WHAT important way is the West’s bombing of Mosul, now going on, different from Russian bombing of Aleppo last December?

In both cases, heavily armed and ruthless Islamist fanatics have used civilians as human shields as they fight to the finish in thickly populated city streets and backyards.

In both cases, innocent civilians have, regrettably, died or been badly injured in the bombardment. In Mosul, estimates are that at least 300 civilians have already died during Western air attacks on Islamic State positions.

Most of us would accept, with a heavy heart, that this is the horrible price we have to pay for the defeat of IS. But when Russian forces did the same in Aleppo, the action was denounced almost everywhere as a hideous and deliberate war crime.

What’s the reason? In my view, it’s propaganda – and some of the media’s gullible willingness to believe it. IS’s close cousins, the bearded zealots of the Al-Nusra Front, used sophisticated techniques to persuade journalists (almost all far away from the scene) that the Russians were the bad guys.

So we ended with democratic, Western media, normally busy denouncing Islamist extremism, giving sympathetic coverage to some of the worst jihadists in the world. When Mosul falls, as it will, and those who defeated IS are applauded, as they will rightly be, please think about this.