15 years into the Afghan War, Pentagon statements are almost never the final word on what happened. False denials and upbeat predictions that never pan out have left US credibility incredibly low. Time and again, UN reports have contradicted the official US narrative, only to be proven correct, to the embarrassment of the occupation forces.

Patience appears to be wearing thin after 15 years of inconvenient truth getting in the way of the military's version of events, with both UN and US officials saying relations between the two are "a nightmare." ...

The disagreement was a common enough one. ... [I]n recent years hardly an incident of US airstrikes killing civilians goes by without the initial US statement being that everyone, whether they're women or children or what have you, were "terrorists."

As the war gets worse, the UN's reports are increasingly documenting some of the most unsavory parts, like the rising civilian death toll in Afghanistan including a growing number of people killed in airstrikes, and with US commanders under constant pressure to show at least the illusion of progress in the war, that's likely to mean growing efforts to silence the UN.

"Russian specialists have documented the use of shells equipped with toxic substances by militants in eastern Aleppo. The shells were fired into western Aleppo by militants in eastern Aleppo. The samples we collected leave us with no doubt that poisonous materials were used. Through our ministry of defense, we immediately appealed to the leadership of the Hague and requested that the organization for the prohibition of chemical weapons urgently dispatch its experts to Aleppo, in order to participate in the analysis of the samples. Unfortunately, as a result of pressure from our Western colleagues, the leaders of the organization refused to carry out this task citing security concerns. As I know from my colleagues in the defense ministry, we're examining the possibility of bringing the samples we gathered to the OPCW office in the Hague, so maybe then it will be difficult for them to avoid analyzing them."