When the United States and its Middle Eastern allies went to war against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, there was nothing clean or surgical about the campaign. Retaking Mosul from the militant group’s fighters, a struggle that ran from the fall of 2016 through the following summer, left between 9,000 and 11,000 inhabitants of the city dead, according to an Associated Press report, with about a third killed by the U.S.-led coalition and Iraqi air bombardments. Many of those victims were simply described as “crushed” in the subsequent medical reports. In 2021, my colleagues at this newspaper reported...