War News Stories

Excerpts of Key War News Stories in Major Media

Below are key excerpts of revealing news articles on war from reliable news media sources. If any link fails to function, a paywall blocks full access, or the article is no longer available, try these digital tools.

For further exploration, delve into our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center.

Note: This comprehensive list of news stories is usually updated once a week. Explore our full index to revealing excerpts of key major media news stories on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.

There is an epidemic of child sex crimes in and around Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Since 2021, and the American withdrawal from Afghanistan, dozens of elite soldiers stationed at the military base have been convicted of raping children, distributing child pornography, and other similar offenses. Many of these soldiers served in Afghanistan, where ... the U.S. military aided their local allies in "bacha bazi" (boy play): the practice of kidnapping and keeping boys as sex slaves, large numbers of whom were enslaved on U.S. military compounds. According to investigative journalist Seth Harp, who uncovered a massive narcotics smuggling and distribution network run by elite military operators ... there has been a tenfold increase in such cases since 2021. [Former United States Army Lieutenant Colonel, Special Forces Green Beret, and a former Battalion Commander at Fort Bragg Anthony] Aguilar notes: "When you deploy as a military and you have all of your 90 cubic inch containers that get locked up will all your stuff in it. Those don't get inspected when they fly back over on a military aircraft and land at Fort Bragg…[They learn] How easy it would be to transport and traffic weapons, drugs, and yes, even humans, back and forth, from country to country. It is all very doable. And it is all very lucrative." "Military leadership at the highest ranks are aware of what is happening, and they choose to cover it up. The whole time that the U.S. was in Afghanistan, they were working with, protecting, funding, and arming guys who were systematically raping little boys, keeping them in chains on U.S. military bases – chained children on U.S. bases who were raped on a nightly basis!" At Forward Operating Base Shank in Logar Province in 2014, [former Fort Bragg paratrooper Jordan] Terrell recalls seeing a group of young bachas running around the base. One, he noticed, "had something hanging out of his butt." At first confused by the site, he later realized that what he saw was the child's prolapsed anus from being repeatedly sodomized.

Note: The State Department belatedly released a report admitting that, for nearly 20 years of occupation, there existed, "a government pattern of sexual slavery on government compounds." US diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks reveal that American contractors at DynCorp engaged in drug use and the exploitation of young "dancing boys" in Afghanistan. At the same time, US soldiers were formally ordered not to intervene as Afghan police and militia allies sexually abused children on US bases. Dyncorp was also involved in child sex slavery rings in Bosnia and Colombia, where US military soldiers and international contractors working under DynCorp bought, raped, and trafficked kids as young as 12.

The AI surveillance platform provider Palantir is no stranger to controversy. It brings in billions each year from controversial partnerships with groups like Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Israeli Defense Forces, something CEO Alex Karp isn't keen on changing anytime soon. In an interview ... this week, Karp even took it a step further, arguing that legalizing US war crimes would open up a whole new market for Palantir. Unlike other moguls profiting off the military industrial complex who hide behind concepts like "democracy" and "national security," the Palantir CEO isn't afraid to put his mouth where his money is with disarmingly bombastic language. In a letter to shareholders earlier this year, for instance, Karp quoted hawkish political scholar Samuel Huntington in arguing that the "rise of the West was not made possible ‘by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion… but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence.'" While this could be seen as a damning indictment of Western civilization and its violent stranglehold over the world economy, Karp instead positions it as a source of inspiration. In another part of his interview ... the Palantir CEO reaffirmed his commitment to ICE, emphasizing the important role he plays in making immigrants lives worse. "I'm going to use my whole influence to make sure this country stays skeptical on migration and has a deterrent capacity that it only uses selectively," Karp said.

Note: Listen to an audio clip of Jeffrey Epstein promoting Palantir to Ehud Barak. Read how Palantir helped the NSA spy on the entire planet. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Big Tech and the disappearance of privacy.

In mid-December, as negotiations to end Russia's war in Ukraine gathered pace, a group of Ukrainian officials sat in a conference room in New York for a meeting with senior executives at BlackRock, the world's largest asset manager. They had come to discuss a crucial element of a peace plan drafted by Kyiv and Washington: Ukraine's postwar recovery. BlackRock had been enlisted to help build a strategy for what President Volodymyr Zelensky has called an $800 billion "prosperity plan." The meeting, held at BlackRock's headquarters, kick-started work on identifying funding sources and investment priorities. BlackRock's role has generated more questions than answers, as the Trump administration steers plans for rebuilding Ukraine toward American business interests. Seven European and Ukrainian officials ... voiced doubts about BlackRock's ability to attract the enormous investments envisioned. The involvement in the talks of a private firm whose main business is to maximize financial returns has reinforced concerns that the Trump administration views Ukraine's reconstruction as a profit-making opportunity for the U.S. government and American companies, rather than as primarily a humanitarian or security matter. Last year, President Trump pushed for a deal granting the United States a stake in Ukraine's mineral wealth. In peace talks with Kyiv, the president's main negotiators have been real estate developers.

Note: First, Blackrock buys up government bonds used to finance military spending, meaning it directly profits from the debt created by war itself. Then, after the war, Blackrock is set to profit again – this time from reconstruction contracts, land grabs, and privatization efforts. Read about this and more with our Substack, Working Together To End the War On Peace in Ukraine, which challenges the dominant narrative on the Ukraine war, arguing that US and NATO policies, covert intelligence agency operations, media censorship, and corporate profiteering have fueled the conflict while blocking genuine peace efforts.

The American weapons maker Anduril ... is partnering with EDGE Group, a weapons conglomerate controlled by the United Arab Emirates, a nation run entirely by the royal families of its seven emirates that permits virtually none of the activities typically associated with democratic societies. In the UAE, free expression and association are outlawed, and dissident speech is routinely and brutally punished without due process. A 2024 assessment of political rights and civil liberties by Freedom House, a U.S. State Department-backed think tank, gave the UAE a score of 18 out of 100. The EDGE–Anduril Production Alliance, as it will be known, will focus on autonomous weapons systems, including the production of Anduril's "Omen" drone. The UAE has agreed to purchase the first 50 Omen drones built through the partnership. EDGE Chair Faisal Al Bannai explained in a 2019 interview that EDGE was working to develop weapons systems tailored to defeating low-tech "militia-style" militant groups. Nathaniel Raymonds, who leads the Humanitarian Research Lab at the Yale School of Public Health ... argued that "not since Operation Cyclone," the CIA effort to arm the Afghan mujahideen, "has there been a covert action by any nation state to arm a paramilitary proxy group at this scale and sophistication and try to write it off as just a series of happy coincidences."

Note: For more, read our concise summaries of news articles on war.

As more details come to light about Jeffrey Epstein, the billionaire sex trafficker is increasingly suspected of having used his wealth, influence, and connections to shape the way political power is used, particularly when it comes to foreign policy. If true, what kind of foreign policy did he favor and what goals did he hope to achieve? Over the years, Epstein exchanged emails with former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak opposing the Iran nuclear deal and favoring military action against Syria; expressed concern about Israel's intensifying turn away from the two-state solution; and counseled Donald Trump adviser ... Steve Bannon on how the Trump administration could best take on this leading global rival of the United States. The country that featured most heavily in Epstein's private discussions contained in the files wasn't Israel; it was China. It was in his private chats with the virulently anti-China Bannon that the country most often came up, with Epstein often framing China as a serious threat that had to be defeated. Epstein bounced between certainty that China was falling apart and warnings that it was a formidable foe. China is "a unified nationalist economic country" whose forty-year-long strategy is "right on track," Epstein told Bannon in July 2018. "My meeting the other day was around how these peasants looked into their own systems, found the NSA cybertools that we had inserted and then used them against us interests," Epstein wrote [in another exchange].

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on war and Jeffrey Epstein.

November 30 marks the International Day of Remembrance for all Victims of Chemical Warfare. Between 1961 and 1971, the U.S. military sprayed an estimated 20 million gallons of herbicides over southern Vietnam, along the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos, and parts of Cambodia. Nearly two-thirds was Agent Orange, later discovered to be contaminated with 2,3,7,8-Tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin (TCDD) – a potent, long-lasting dioxin. TCDD is a known human carcinogen and an endocrine disruptor, linked to cancers, reproductive disorders, and birth defects that can span generations. By the letter of the CWC, Agent Orange is not classified as a "chemical weapon." If you ask a Vietnam veteran suffering from Parkinson's, cancer, heart disease, or any of the 19 types of conditions the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) associates with Agent Orange exposure, you'll hear a very different story. To them, it was every bit a weapon designed to destroy life and health. A 2018 Government Accountability Office report found that over 757,000 veterans – about one in four who served – were receiving benefits linked to Agent Orange. The 2022 PACT Act broadened that circle to veterans who served in other areas where Agent Orange was used. By 2024, more than 84,000 new Vietnam-era veterans were granted compensation, many due to exposure. Fifty years after the Vietnam War ended, the toxic legacy of Agent Orange and other dioxins lingers on.

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on military corruption and toxic chemicals.

The European Union expects Georgia to change radically to accommodate the EU. The Georgian government expects the EU to change radically to accommodate Georgia. What brought matters to a head between Georgia and the EU was the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The Georgian government condemned the invasion, sent humanitarian aid to Ukraine and imposed certain sanctions on Russia. However, it tried to block Georgian volunteers going to Ukraine to fight and rejected Western pressure to send military aid and to impose the full range of EU sanctions, leading to fresh accusations of being "pro-Russian." On this, President Kavelashvili pushed back very strongly. He accused the West of trying to provoke a new war with Russia that would be catastrophic for Georgia. Georgia has a government that represents the interests of our people…the same media outlets that accuse us of being under Russian influence tell the same lie about President Trump," [he said]. President Kavelashvili accused the U.S. "deep state" and organizations like USAID, the National Endowment for Democracy, and the European Parliament of mobilizing the Georgian opposition to this end; "but despite all this pressure, we stood and continue to stand as guardians of Georgian national interest and of Georgian economic growth" – the latter comment a veiled reference to the very important economic links between Georgia and Russia.

Note: Our Substack, Working Together To End the War On Peace in Ukraine, challenges the dominant narrative on the Ukraine war, arguing that US and NATO policies, wartime corruption, media censorship, and corporate profiteering have fueled the conflict while blocking genuine peace efforts. Learn more about how war is a tool for hidden agendas in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center. For more, read our concise summaries of news articles on war.

Americans working for a little known U.S.-based private military contractor have begun to come forward to media and members of Congress with charges that their work has involved using live ammunition for crowd control and other abusive measures against unarmed civilians seeking food at controversial food distribution sites run by the Global Humanitarian Fund (GHF) in Gaza. UG Solutions was hired by the GHF to secure and deliver food into Gaza. Israel put GHF in control of what used to be the UN-led aid mission. The UN, ... has called the new model an "abomination" which "provides nothing but starvation and gunfire to the people of Gaza," referring to the 1000 Gazans who have been killed near or at the GHF centers since May. The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) have been accused of shooting and shelling unarmed civilians. The American contractors say they have witnessed it and have been told to use live ammunition in their own crowd control efforts. UG Solutions is a mercenary group. They are not a party to the conflict in Gaza, were recruited to participate in hostilities, were not sent by the U.S. government, are not a national of a party in the conflict, are not part of a military, and are there for personal gain. Similar to Blackwater, they are primarily doing defensive operations and the U.S. State Department has helped fund the GHF but they are headquartered in the U.S. working for a foreign entity, in a combat zone, for money.

Note: Learn more about human rights abuses during wartime in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center. For more, read our concise summaries of news articles on war.

In 1945, the horrors unleashed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were largely hidden from the outside world. Eighty years later, thanks to the testimonies shared by those who survived the atomic bombings of my country, we have a window into the truth of what happened on those dark August days when weapons of previously unimaginable power destroyed our cities. We also know what happened over the torturous months and years that followed, as those who weren't immediately burned alive succumbed to radiation poisoning and cancer. Nuclear bombing survivors have helped ... fuel public demand for post-Cold War arms-control treaties that resulted in significant stockpile reductions in the United States and Russia. They helped persuade nuclear-armed countries to stop explosive weapons tests that caused grave harm to the environment and to the servicemembers and civilians involved. They worked to establish the "nuclear taboo" that has spared the use of nuclear weapons in warfare for eight decades. They delivered millions of petition signatures to the United Nations that helped ... reduce nuclear risks. Again and again, they have proved that progress is possible, and for their decades of work to ensure that ... no country ever again face the unthinkable, the survivors in 2024 were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Demanding a nuclear-free world isn't naive. True naivete is believing that weapons designed to annihilate cities will keep us safe.

Note: Learn more about war failures and lies in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center. For more, read our concise summaries of news articles on military corruption.

According to the Global Sanctions Database, the United States, European Union, and UN have sanctioned 25% of the countries in the world. The United States by itself sanctioned 40% of these countries, sanctions that are unilateral because they do not have the assent of a UN Security Council resolution. In the 1960s, only 8% of the world's countries were under sanctions. This inflation of sanctions demonstrates that it has become normal for the powerful North Atlantic states to wage wars without having to fire a bullet. As US President Woodrow Wilson said in 1919 at the formation of the League of Nations, sanctions are ‘something more tremendous than war'. The cruellest formulation of Wilson's statement was made by Madeleine Albright, then the US ambassador to the UN, regarding the US sanctions against Iraq in the 1990s. From 1990 to 1996, sanctions ... resulted in the excess deaths of over 500,000 children under the age of five. The number of people who die because of sanctions is greater than the number of battle-related casualties (106,000 deaths per year) ‘and similar to some estimates in the total death toll of wars including civilian casualties (around half a million deaths per year)'. The most vulnerable population groups, as you would expect, are children under five and older people. Deaths of children under five years ‘represented 51% of total deaths caused by sanctions over the 1970–2021 period'.

Note: The above article is largely based on an article published in The Lancet titled "Effects of international sanctions on age-specific mortality: a cross-national panel data analysis." Learn more about human rights abuses during wartime in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center. For more, read our concise summaries of news articles on government corruption.

For the past 12 years, I have tried to share moments beyond the dramatized images of battlefield action, emotional homecomings and veterans in crisis. I've photographed the often-overlooked everyday moments that make up this military life. The constant moves and goodbyes. Objects that make up this life that don't exist in civilian domestic spaces. The days after a deployment, when a service member "re-integrates" back into the family and into civilian society. John didn't start going to therapy until after he had turned in his retirement papers. He was concerned that it might jeopardize his career. I am on my computer when John leaves a notebook on my desk. He doesn't say anything. It is the journaling he has been doing with his therapist – her new strategy to get him to open up. He starts the journal with how many US soldiers and Afghan security forces were killed in each operation and what awards were given: Silver Stars, Bronze Stars with valor, Purple Hearts. I know the casualties are what weighs most heavily on him, but he is proud of the awards given to his soldiers. Then he goes into detail about a traumatic event he experienced in Afghanistan. As I read his vivid recollections of violence – which included body parts, trails of blood and the smell of burnt flesh – tears ran down my face. I am only beginning to understand what he has been through. John's career spanned the entirety of the 20-year "war on terror."

Note: Read about the tragic traumas and suicides connected to military drone operators. A recent Pentagon study concluded that US soldiers are nine times more likely to die by suicide than they are in combat.For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on war.

August 4, 2025 marks the 30th anniversary of Operation Storm. Little known outside the former Yugoslavia, the military campaign unleashed a genocidal cataclysm that violently expelled Croatia's entire Serb population. Croat forces rampaged UN-protected areas of the self-declared Serb Republic of Krajina, looting, burning, raping and murdering their way across the province. Up to 350,000 locals fled, many on foot, never to return. Meanwhile, thousands were summarily executed. As these hideous scenes unfolded, UN peacekeepers charged with protecting Krajina watched without intervening. Meanwhile, US officials strenuously denied the horrifying massacres and mass displacement amounted to ethnic cleansing, let alone war crimes. Operation Storm was for all intents and purposes a NATO attack, carried out by soldiers armed and trained by the US and directly coordinated with other Western powers. Despite publicly endorsing a negotiated peace, Washington privately encouraged Zagreb to employ maximum belligerence, even as their ultranationalist Croat proxies plotted to strike with such ferocity that the country's entire Serb population would "to all practical purposes disappear." High-ranking Croat officials privately discussed methods to justify their coming blitzkrieg, including false flag attacks. In preparing for the offensive, Croatian soldiers were trained at Fort Irwin in California and the Pentagon aided in planning the operation.

Note: Learn more about how war is a tool for hidden agendas in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center. For more, read our concise summaries of news articles on war.

A new study of defense department spending previewed exclusively to the Guardian shows that most of the Pentagon's discretionary spending from 2020 to 2024 has gone to outside military contractors, providing a $2.4tn boon in public funds to private firms in what was described as a "continuing and massive transfer of wealth from taxpayers to fund war and weapons manufacturing". The report from the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and Costs of War project at Brown University said that the Trump administration's new Pentagon budget will push annual US military spending past the $1tn mark. That will deliver a projected windfall of more than half a trillion dollars that will be shared among top arms firms such as Lockheed Martin and Raytheon as well as a growing military tech sector with close allies in the administration such as JD Vance, the report said. The US military budget will have nearly doubled this century, increasing 99% since 2000. "The US withdrawal from Afghanistan in September 2021 did not result in a peace dividend," the authors of the report wrote. "Instead, President Biden requested, and Congress authorized, even higher annual budgets for the Pentagon, and President Trump is continuing that same trajectory of escalating military budgets." The growth in spending will increasingly benefit firms in the "military tech" sector who represent tech companies like SpaceX, Palantir and Anduril.

Note: Learn more about arms industry corruption in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center. For more, read our concise summaries of news articles on military corruption.

Today marks 50 years since the end of the American War in Vietnam, which killed an estimated 3.3 million Vietnamese people, hundreds of thousands of Cambodians, tens of thousands of Laotians and more than 58,000 U.S. service members. But for many Vietnamese, Laotian and Cambodian people; Vietnamese Americans; and U.S. Vietnam veterans and their descendants, the impacts of the war never ended. They continue to suffer the devastating consequences of Agent Orange, an herbicide mixture used by the U.S. military that contained dioxin, the deadliest chemical known to humankind. As a result, many people have been born with congenital anomalies – disabling changes in the formation of the spinal cord, limbs, heart, palate, and more. This remains the largest deployment of herbicidal warfare in history. In the 1973 Paris Peace Accords, the Nixon administration promised to contribute $3 billion for compensation and postwar reconstruction of Vietnam. But that promise remains unfulfilled. Between 2,100,000 and 4,800,000 Vietnamese, Lao and Cambodian people, and tens of thousands of Americans were exposed to Agent Orange/dioxin during the spraying operations. Many other Vietnamese people were or continue to be exposed to Agent Orange/dioxin through contact with the environment and food that was contaminated. Many offspring of those who were exposed have congenital anomalies, developmental disabilities, and other diseases.

Note: Rep. Rashida Tlaib recently introduced The Agent Orange Relief Act of 2025 to attempt to provide relief for some of the victims of this toxic chemical. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on military corruption and toxic chemicals.

The US military may soon have an army of faceless suicide bombers at their disposal, as an American defense contractor has revealed their newest war-fighting drone. AeroVironment unveiled the Red Dragon in a video on their YouTube page, the first in a new line of 'one-way attack drones.' This new suicide drone can reach speeds up to 100 mph and can travel nearly 250 miles. The new drone takes just 10 minutes to set up and launch and weighs just 45 pounds. Once the small tripod the Red Dragon takes off from is set up, AeroVironment said soldiers would be able to launch up to five per minute. Since the suicide robot can choose its own target in the air, the US military may soon be taking life-and-death decisions out of the hands of humans. Once airborne, its AVACORE software architecture functions as the drone's brain, managing all its systems and enabling quick customization. Red Dragon's SPOTR-Edge perception system acts like smart eyes, using AI to find and identify targets independently. Simply put, the US military will soon have swarms of bombs with brains that don't land until they've chosen a target and crash into it. Despite Red Dragon's ability to choose a target with 'limited operator involvement,' the Department of Defense (DoD) has said it's against the military's policy to allow such a thing to happen. The DoD updated its own directives to mandate that 'autonomous and semi-autonomous weapon systems' always have the built-in ability to allow humans to control the device.

Note: Drones create more terrorists than they kill. For more, read our concise summaries of news articles on warfare technology and Big Tech.

In recent years, Israeli security officials have boasted of a "ChatGPT-like" arsenal used to monitor social media users for supporting or inciting terrorism. It was released in full force after Hamas's bloody attack on October 7. Right-wing activists and politicians instructed police forces to arrest hundreds of Palestinians ... for social media-related offenses. Many had engaged in relatively low-level political speech, like posting verses from the Quran on WhatsApp. Hundreds of students with various legal statuses have been threatened with deportation on similar grounds in the U.S. this year. Recent high-profile cases have targeted those associated with student-led dissent against the Israeli military's policies in Gaza. In some instances, the State Department has relied on informants, blacklists, and technology as simple as a screenshot. But the U.S. is in the process of activating a suite of algorithmic surveillance tools Israeli authorities have also used to monitor and criminalize online speech. In March, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced the State Department was launching an AI-powered "Catch and Revoke" initiative to accelerate the cancellation of student visas. Algorithms would collect data from social media profiles, news outlets, and doxing sites to enforce the January 20 executive order targeting foreign nationals who threaten to "overthrow or replace the culture on which our constitutional Republic stands."

Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on AI and the erosion of civil liberties.

Corporate media is heralding the fall of Bashar al-Assad and the emergence of Abu Mohammed al-Jolani as the new leader of Syria, despite his deep ties to both al-Qaeda and ISIS. CNN portrayed him as a "blazer-wearing revolutionary." In 2013, [CNN] labeled him one of "the world's 10 most dangerous terrorists," known for abducting, torturing and slaughtering racial and religious minorities. Western governments consider Jolani's new organization, HayĘĽat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), as one and the same as Al-Qaeda/Al-Nusra. Jolani – whose real name is Ahmed Hussein al-Shar'a ... was captured by the U.S. military and spent over five years in prison, including a stint at the notorious Abu Ghraib torture center. While in Iraq, Jolani fought with ISIS and was even a deputy to its founder. Immediately upon release in 2011, ISIS sent him to Syria with a rumored $1 billion to found the Syrian wing of al-Qaeda. While both journalists and politicians in the U.S. are scrambling to change their opinions on Jolani and HTS, the reality is that, for much of its existence, Washington has enjoyed a very close relationship with al-Qaeda. The organization was born in Afghanistan in the 1980s, thanks in no small part to the CIA. Between 1979 and 1992, the CIA spent billions of dollars funding, arming, and training Afghan Mujahideen militiamen (like Osama bin Laden) in an attempt to bleed the Soviet occupation dry. The Bush administration would use [the 9/11] attacks as a pretext to invade both Afghanistan and Iraq, claiming that America could never be safe if al-Qaeda were not thoroughly destroyed. And yet, by the 2010s, even as the U.S. was ostensibly at war with al-Qaeda in Iraq and Afghanistan, it was secretly working with [al-Qaeda] in Syria on a plan to overthrow Assad. The CIA spent around $1 billion per year training and arming a wide network of rebel groups to this end. As National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan told Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in a leaked 2012 email, "AQ [al-Qaeda] is on our side in Syria."

Note: As recently as 2016, Syrian militias armed by the Pentagon were fighting with Syrian militias armed by the CIA. Read more about how radicalized Iraqis were swept into US military detention at Camp Bucca–a notorious facility often called a "terrorist university"–where they forged alliances that directly led to the rise of ISIS.

The reporting team of the In the Dark podcast has assembled the largest known collection of investigations of possible war crimes committed in Iraq and Afghanistan since 9/11–nearly eight hundred incidents in all. Much of the time, the reporting concluded, the military delivers neither transparency nor justice. The database makes it possible, for the first time, to see hundreds of allegations of war crimes–the kinds that stain a nation–in one place, along with the findings of investigations and the results of prosecutions. We limited our search to ... allegations of violence perpetrated by U.S. service members or deaths in U.S. custody that happened in Iraq and Afghanistan after September 11, 2001. Of the seven hundred and eighty-one cases we found, at least sixty-five per cent had been dismissed by investigators who didn't believe that a crime had even taken place. In a hundred and fifty-one cases, however, investigators did find probable cause to believe that a crime had occurred, that the rules of engagement had been violated, or that a use of force hadn't been justified. These include the case of soldiers raping a fourteen-year-old girl and subsequently murdering her and her family; the alleged killing of a man by a Green Beret who cut off his victim's ear and kept it; and cruelty toward detainees at Abu Ghraib prison and at the Bagram Air Base detention facility. Yet, even in these cases, meaningful accountability was rare.

Note: Learn more about human rights abuses during wartime in our comprehensive Military-Intelligence Corruption Information Center. War destroys, yet these powerful real-life stories show that we can heal, reimagine better alternatives, and plant the seeds of a global shift in consciousness to transform our world.

On February 1, 2025, U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM), in coordination with the federal government of Somalia, conducted the first airstrikes in the country under the new Trump administration. The strikes targeted ... a hub for ISIS-Somalia (IS-S). IS-S is now an integral financial and recruitment hub for the global Islamic State network, generating millions of dollars in revenue and growing its ranks with fighters from as far north as Morocco to as far south as Tanzania. The United States has been carrying out operations in Somalia since at least 2002 without a formal war declaration. Shortly after the September 11, 2001, plane attacks, George W. Bush ... sent Special Forces and CIA operatives to Somalia to capture suspected al-Qaeda members. The Obama years saw an unprecedented rise in drone warfare. The full scale of the air war remains unknown. The death toll of these operations are also unknown; U.S. claims denying civilian casualties are routinely disputed by people on the ground and the Somali government. A 2023 letter authored by 24 Somali and international rights organizations and addressed to the Secretary of Defense says: "Civilian victims, survivors, and their families have yet to receive answers, acknowledgement, and amends despite their sustained efforts to reach authorities over several years." From Somalia to Afghanistan, Iraq to Libya, the American promise of safety arrives on the wings of drones, its humanitarianism indistinguishable from war.

Note: Read a leaked CIA report that admits drone strikes and targeted killings can backfire by increasing support for extremist groups, especially when civilians are killed or insurgent leaders gain notoriety. For more, read about the failure of US military policy in Somalia.

Russia and the U.S. agreed Tuesday to start working toward ending the war in Ukraine and improving their diplomatic and economic ties, the two countries' top diplomats said after talks that reflected an extraordinary about-face in U.S. foreign policy under President Donald Trump. After the meeting, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the two sides agreed broadly to pursue three goals: to restore staffing at their respective embassies in Washington and Moscow, to create a high-level team to support Ukraine peace talks and to explore closer relations and economic cooperation. He stressed, however, that the talks – which were attended by his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, and other senior Russian and U.S. officials – marked the beginning of a conversation, and more work needs to be done. No Ukrainian officials were present at the meeting. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said his country would not accept any outcome from the talks since Kyiv didn't take part. Ties between Russia and the U.S. have fallen to their lowest level in decades in recent years – a rift that has been widening ever since Russia illegally annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014 and only worsened after Moscow's full-scale invasion. The U.S., along with European nations, imposed a raft of sanctions on Russia in an effort to damage its economy. Meanwhile, Russia continued to pummel Ukraine with drones, according to Kyiv's military.

Note: Watch our new video on transforming the war machine. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on war.

Important Note: Explore our full index to revealing excerpts of key major media news stories on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.