At a campaign rally in Fort Dodge, Iowa, Donald Trump, speaking of the Islamic State, once told supporters, “I would bomb the shit out of ’em. I would just bomb those suckers.” During Trump’s nascent tenure as Commander-in-Chief, air strikes conducted by the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq and Syria have increased. So have civilian casualties: coalition strikes killed more civilians in March than in any other month since our mostly aerial war against the Islamic State began, in late 2014. Last Thursday, the U.S. military also acknowledged that a strike had mistakenly killed eighteen of our local allies in Syria. The victims belonged to the Syrian Democratic Forces, or S.D.F., a coalition of Arab and Kurdish fighters that partners closely with U.S. Special Operations Forces and has been preparing for months to attack the Islamic State stronghold of Raqqa. The incident was widely presented as evidence that President Trump is following through on the promise he made in Fort Dodge, as well as an illustration of the perils attending such a strategy. An article on the front page of the Times the next day said that the blunder raised “concerns about whether the White House is applying any rigor to the process of approving airstrikes,” and a front-page article in the Washington Post called it “the worst friendly-fire incident of the war against the Islamic State.”

It is unclear, however, if anything beyond the shifting exigencies of the battlefield has changed in Iraq and Syria. According to the military, the rules of engagement have not been revised under Trump, and it is impossible to gauge the precise insidious influence of Trump’s rhetoric on the men and women who work in the rooms where target requests are analyzed. Although Trump has, more generally, allowed our war planners greater autonomy, James Mattis, H. R. McMaster, Joseph Votel, and John Nicholson have been planning these wars for fifteen years. We have been bombing the shit out of someone or other for at least that long.

The scrutiny that American airpower has attracted during the Trump Administration is both welcomed and frustrating. Even during the three months immediately preceding Trump’s Inauguration, the organization Airwars documented an alarming escalation in both coalition strikes and their collateral damage: more than three hundred credibly reported civilian deaths in the vicinity of Mosul and more than two hundred in the vicinity of Raqqa. “With reported fatalities from coalition strikes at record levels, we would have expected significant media engagement,” Chris Woods, the director of Airwars, said in a statement on President Barack Obama’s last day in office. “Instead, anything beyond local reporting has been almost nonexistent.”

In October, I visited an Iraqi village the morning after it was hit by a coalition air strike that was remarkably similar to the one in Raqqa last week: a strike that inadvertently killed American-supported local forces critical to a major upcoming battle against the Islamic State, or ISIS, and in doing so further undermined the already precarious confederation to which those forces belonged. The village, Haj Ali, is about thirty miles south of Mosul, predominantly Sunni, and led by a laconic, middle-aged sheikh named Nazhan Sakhar Salman. Nazhan has been allied with America since 2007, when he volunteered his tribe to participate in the Awakening movement, an initiative that paid Sunnis to help U.S. troops combat Al Qaeda during the worst years of the insurgency. I’d written about Nazhan in a story for The New Yorker when ISIS was still in control of Haj Ali. At the time, Nazhan commanded roughly three hundred former Awakening fighters who occupied positions on a Kurdish trench just a few miles away from the village. Last summer, two years after ISIS forced Nazhan into exile, his militia, in coördination with the Iraqi Army and U.S. Special Operations Forces, was finally permitted to leave its trench and attack Haj Ali. The long-anticipated battle was over in a matter of hours; only one of Nazhan’s men was killed.

The purpose of my trip to Iraq in October was to cover the imminent Mosul offensive, but, shortly after I arrived, I asked my translator to call Nazhan, to say hello. The sheikh told us he was getting married the next day, and invited us to the wedding. The ceremony was held at an immense hall in an upscale neighborhood of Erbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan. By the time we got there, more than a thousand people had assembled. I was used to seeing Nazhan in green fatigues or shiny business suits, but tonight he wore an ankle-length thawb and matching headdress; the bride—Nazahn’s third—sat beside him on a dais in a sequinned gown that sparkled under the venue’s neon purple lights. When a five-tier, gilded cake was carted out beneath them, the couple descended to cut the first slice with a sword. A video camera attached to the end of a twenty-foot jib hovered above them. The guests, men on one side, women on the other, pressed close to capture the moment on their phones.

Most of them were from Haj Ali. After ISIS was routed from the village, nearly everyone who’d been stuck there moved to a camp for internally displaced people in Kurdistan, and this was the first time that so many of the villagers, after being divided for two years by the trench, had gathered under the same roof. The mood was exuberant. Joining hands, the male and female sides of the hall converged to dance to electric renditions of traditional tribal songs. Whenever I’d visited Nazhan’s fighters on the trench, they had constantly played these songs, or songs like them, in their trucks and on their phones. One day, Nazhan had told me that the singer, Abdullah Mustafer, was among the people stranded in Haj Ali. According to Nazhan, ISIS had forced Mustafer to sign a contract that promised he would never sing again. Now a friend led me through the crowd to a stage on the far side of the hall framed by fake gold columns. Mustafer, sporting gelled-back hair and a triangular soul patch, held the microphone high and upside down—a parched man drinking. “Haj Ali, we freed you!” he cried. “Haj Ali, you’re free! Mosul, we will free you! Mosul, we are coming!”

Before I left the party, I promised Nazhan that I’d come see him in Haj Ali soon. A couple of days later, my translator and I drove down there. The village was deserted. Nazhan’s militia was responsible for the new front line, on the outskirts of town; the Iraqi Army maintained checkpoints—many of them prominently displaying large Shia flags—inside the village and along the main road. The soldiers posted at the checkpoints were all talking about the air strike. It was bad, they said, although no one knew how bad.

When we reached the tribe’s makeshift headquarters, a gutted blockhouse pocked with bullet holes, we saw men digging graves in a small, dirt cemetery. I counted at least a dozen mounds heaped beside fresh holes. Fighters had congregated outside, on a concrete veranda. Some of them wept into their hands; some stared blankly at the ground. I recognized a young fighter named Ali, whom the others all called Mustache. Ali spoke good English; he was one of Nazhan’s favorites. Despite his age and inexperience, he had been elevated to a leadership position while they were still on the Kurdish trench. When we greeted him, he turned away. It took us some moments to understand that he was not Ali. Ali had been killed in the strike, and this man was his brother.

Inside, along the wall of a long narrow room, old men sat on ratty couches across from several Iraqi Army officers. Nazhan was in Kirkuk, where he’d brought the dead to be officially identified and registered, so that their children would be eligible for benefits. His brother Isded sat on a metal folding chair at the far end of the room. My translator and I greeted him, expressed our condolences, and installed ourselves on one of the couches.

“Sheikh, I’ve visited all of our positions,” the Army commander told Isded. “The most important thing is—”

“This kind of talk doesn’t matter now,” Isded interrupted. He was glaring with frank contempt at the commander, who opened his hands in a gesture of appeal and continued detailing the measures he planned to take, the extra weapons and ammo and so on.

One of the elders waved impatiently. “This was a crime. All of those fighters were our relatives.”

“Two brothers were killed,” Isded said.

“They’d faced death many times,” the old man said. “They’d fought many battles. They finally make it back to their home, and they’re killed by our friends.”

“It’s a loss for us, too,” the commander insisted, not quite convincingly.

In the days that followed, I spoke with Isded privately, met with Nazhan, and interviewed several witnesses of the fighting that night. Everyone related basically the same account: at around 10:30 P.M., as many as forty ISIS militants attacked Nazhan’s line on the edge of Haj Ali, engaging the tribal fighters in an intense gun battle that lasted about two hours. Ali, who was in charge of that sector, repeatedly radioed the Iraqi Army units inside the village for support. None came. Two tribal fighters were killed in the ambush, but eventually the militants withdrew and Ali consolidated his men in an abandoned house that they had been using as a base since liberating the area. According to every tribal fighter I spoke with, the house had an Iraqi flag on the roof, and U.S. Special Operations Forces had visited it on numerous occasions to meet with Ali. Nazhan also told me that he had provided the G.P.S. coördinates of the house to both the Iraqi Army and the Americans so that they could mark it as a friendly position. Nonetheless, about fifteen minutes after the attack had been repelled, a missile launched from a coalition jet obliterated the house, killing everyone inside except a sole survivor. The death toll was nineteen.

I later returned to Haj Ali and visited the house. It looked like a dump site for busted slabs and scrap metal. In the end, I failed to write about the strike, instead focussing on the upcoming campaign to liberate Mosul. The wire services covered the incident from Baghdad, but it received little attention from major news outlets; most didn’t mention it at all. U.S. Central Command issued a statement on the day of the strike, claiming that it had been called in by Iraqi security forces and that eight ISIS militants were inside the house when it was hit. (A spokesman from the U.S. Army told me last week that it was unknown whether any ISIS fighters were killed in the strike, which the spokesman confirmed had “resulted in the unintentional death of partnered tribal forces.”)

In a hospital in Kirkuk, I found a man who’d been wounded during the firefight that night, before the strike. Lying on a cot with a chest tube draining into a canister on the floor, Abdulatif Hussein told me, “I was there. I saw everything. My brother was killed. Anyone who says there was ISIS in that house is a liar. ISIS never reached that house.” Hussein said he was in another house, a few hundred feet from Ali’s. “The fighting had already stopped,” he said. “All the ISIS fighters had retreated back the way they’d come. We were celebrating. Ali was on the radio congratulating everyone.”

I asked about the sole survivor. I said I was anxious to speak with him. “He still doesn’t know what happened,” Hussein said. “He doesn’t remember, and no one has told him. They told him it was a grenade, so he thinks he’s the only one who was injured. No one knows how to tell him all his friends are dead.”

The news from Raqqa last week coincided with the detonation of a twenty-one-thousand-pound Massive Ordnance Air Blast bomb in a remote, mountainous region of eastern Afghanistan. John Nicholson, the top U.S. commander in that country, said, “It was the right time to use it tactically, against the right target on the battlefield.” The target happened to be located in the same district where, just a few days earlier, a Green Beret had been killed, and an official later told a Wall Street Journal correspondent, “I think the loss of our soldier helped motivate leaders to approve it.” That we would answer the loss of a single American soldier with twenty-one thousand pounds of explosives and a mile-wide blast radius is plausible. Our rising preference for airpower has corresponded with a declining tolerance for Western deaths and a parallel declining regard for non-Western lives. This is a trend that Trump appears eager to accelerate. But it is also one that predates him.

Obama oversaw ten times as many drone strikes as George W. Bush—more during his first year in the Oval Office than during Bush’s entire Presidency. The majority of these strikes took place in isolated areas of Yemen and Pakistan, where determining civilian casualties is extremely difficult. In Afghanistan, the number of munitions deployed by the U.S. Air Force spiked by forty per cent in 2016, a direct result of broadened military powers vouchsafed by Obama. This was after an American gunship in Afghanistan decimated a hospital operated by Médecins Sans Frontières, killing more than forty staff members and patients.

While managing the fallout of that catastrophe, then-Secretary of Defense Ash Carter acknowledged, “There was American air action in that area . . . there was definitely destruction in those structures.” One is reminded of former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s comments following America’s first aerial assassination attempt. In early 2002, after a Hellfire missile launched from a Predator drone mistakenly killed three civilian men rather than its intended target, Osama bin Laden, Rumsfeld explained, “A decision was made to fire the Hellfire missile. It was fired.” Back then, the accidental killing of three villagers by U.S. aircraft merited an extensive feature in the Times. The victims, it emerged, were extremely poor. They had travelled to the site of the attack—a remote, mountainous region of eastern Afghanistan—to collect scrap metal from previous U.S. air strikes.

Some days after the strike in Haj Ali, I went to see Abdullah Mustafer, the wedding singer, at the camp where he was living. We sat on the floor of a small tent equipped with an air-conditioner. As we talked, Mustafer’s three young daughters kept ducking through the flap; his eighteen-month-old son napped by his side. I told Mustafer how exciting it had been to see him sing at Nazhan’s wedding after having heard so many of his tracks on the trench. “I need to practice to get back in shape,” he said. “I didn’t sing at all during those two years, even if I was alone in my house. I was too scared.”

Mustafer told me about his itinerant career, performing in clubs throughout Iraq before the arrival of ISIS, and his desire to sing professionally again. He recounted in grim detail the many horrors of living in Haj Ali during its occupation: the executions, lashings, and crucifixions. When I asked him to describe the day that Haj Ali was liberated, he said, “We knew it was coming because of the increase in air strikes.” Then, almost offhandedly, he revealed that his brother, Nathir, had been killed by a strike four days before Nazhan’s men recaptured the village. I was surprised; it was the first I’d heard of this. Mustafer pointed to one of the children who had come into the tent to listen to our conversation. This was Nathir’s son, he said, Mohammad. He had been with Nathir when it happened.

Mustafer said that Nathir, Mohammad, and a cousin were leaving a friend’s house in Nathir’s car when two ISIS fighters in a pickup truck approached on the street. Nathir stopped to let them pass. Just as the truck reached the driveway, a missile hit it. The explosion shattered Nathir’s windshield, killing him and wounding Mohammad and the cousin. In the tent, Mohammad, who was ten years old, rolled up his sweatpants and showed me the many small scars that dotted his legs. Besides Mohammad, Nathir had had one other son and five daughters; now Mustafer was responsible for all of them.

The cousin, Abdullah Youssef, was staying in another tent in a different part of the camp. Mohammad offered to lead us to him. We found Youssef reclining on a mattress, wearing swim trunks, his left leg extended. Four metal pins, the size of chopsticks, protruded vertically from his shin. Another one of Mustafer’s brothers was also there, and he said that he had been inside the house Nathir was leaving that day. “I came running out,” he told me. “Nathir was lying on top of Mohammad, protecting him. He was still alive, moaning, ‘Allah, Allah.’ He had big wounds on his chest and back.” The truck had been carrying ammunition, which had begun to cook off in the fire. The brother brought Nathir and Youssef to a hospital in a neighboring ISIS-controlled town, but Nathir died before they got there.

Youssef told me that doctors at the hospital screwed pins into the wrong places on his shattered leg—that’s why his ankle was deformed the way it was. After Haj Ali was liberated, Mustafer took Youssef to a Kurdish hospital, where doctors removed the pins and put in new ones. “It was very expensive,” Youssef said. “And now we have to find the money to have them removed.”

I kept glancing at Mohammad, who had said almost nothing since I’d arrived. I tried to imagine him in that car, covered by his dying father. The shattered glass, flames, smoke, moans. The popping rounds. I asked him if he remembered it. Mohammad said, “A truck came and there was an explosion. It was very dark. They put a bandage on my leg.”