per enemy combatant in military history. Both the British and American armed forces have in recent years operated on a rough estimate of one enemy combatant killed for every three to four civilian deaths. Until the Gaza war this was regarded as a low level of civilian casualties in a heavily built-up conflict zone. But when ISIS was expelled from Mosul, or even when the Taliban and al-Qaeda were in Afghanistan, there were no serious accusations that these ratios counted as “genocide,” “ethnic cleansing,” or a “war crime.”
