Pentagon press secretary Rear Admiral John Kirby, when asked Tuesday about the number of Islamic State (ISIL/ISIS) fighters killed in ongoing coalition strikes in Iraq and Syria, gave a rather colorful response: “[W]e don’t have the ability to — to count every nose that we schwack.” Kirby said that although the number is “several hundred,” he argued the total is not “relevant.”
Here’s the full exchange:
Q: Admiral, when you said in response to Nancy’s question with numbers, that hundreds of — we know that hundreds of ISIL fighters have been killed, can you be more specific on that number? And also, can you give us any idea of civilians killed in the airstrike campaign?
KIRBY: I cannot give you a more specific number of — of how many ISIL fighters. We just know it’s hundreds: several hundred. It’s not –
I’d like to make two points. First of all, we don’t have the ability to — to count every nose that we shwack [sic]. Number two, that’s not the goal. That’s not the goal. The less of these guys that are out there, certainly that’s the better, but the goal is to degrade and destroy their capabilities.
And we’re not getting into an issue of body counts. And that’s why I don’t have that number handy. I wouldn’t — I wouldn’t have asked my staff to give me that number before I came out here. It’s simply not a relevant figure.
On civilian casualties, what I know is that CENTCOM, Central Command, is investigating several, what they believe to be credible allegations of possible civilian casualties. I don’t know all the details of that. I would point you to Central Command. I know that they are actively investigating what they believe to be at least a few incidents of civilian causalities that they think, you know, warrant further investigation, that they have found credible to investigate. On their own, they’ve done this. But again, I’d point you to Central Command for more detail on that.
And if I could just editorialize a second, I mean, this is something we always take seriously. We are very mindful of trying to mitigate the risk to civilians every time we operate, everywhere we operate. And so when we do believe that we’ve had occasion to cause collateral damage or hurt, kill civilians, we take it seriously and we look into it. It matters to us.
