According to an estimate conducted by Micah Zenko, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), and national security expert Jennifer Wilson, a CFR research associate, President Barack Obama dropped over 26,000 bombs on at least 7 countries in 2016.
“In President Obama’s last year in office, the United States dropped 26,171 bombs in seven countries. This estimate is undoubtedly low, considering reliable data is only available for airstrikes in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and Libya, and a single “strike,” according to the Pentagon’s definition, can involve multiple bombs or munitions. In 2016, the United States dropped 3,027 more bombs—and in one more country, Libya—than in 2015.”
Zenko’s recorded 2015 figures were substantially lower, estimated at a total of 23,144 bombs dropped that year — almost 3,000 less than 2016.
Of the confirmed bombings in both 2015 and 2016, the vast majority (24,287 in 2016) were targeted at Iraq and Syria, according to analysis of official data by Zenko. Of all the bombs dropped in 2016, Syria was hit by the most at 12,192 bombs, with Iraq following at a close second at 12,095 bombs.
This map from Statista and The UK Independent displays where the bombs were dropped:
Zenko’s research concluded that the US dropped 79 percent of all 30,743 coalition bombs in 2016.
While President Obama reduced the number of US troops fighting on the ground in Afghanistan and Iraq, air-strikes proliferated under his administration.
He expanded the use of unmanned drone strikes outside the confines of war zones in Afghanistan and Iraq to neighboring countries including Pakistan and Yemen, and widened the scope of U.S./NATO air bombing campaigns from 2 countries up to seven, without even a single formal declaration of war on any of the additional countries.
President Obama left the White House in 2017 after 2 four-year terms, with an impressive array of war achievements, having authorized ten times more drone strikes than his predecessor, George W. Bush, and having kept the country at war for longer than any President in US history.
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