GettyPresident Donald Trump has vowed to defeat terrorist group ISIS, previously promising to ‘bomb the shit out of ’em.’
His predecessor Barack Obama, on the other hand, has been criticised for not employing more decisive military action against enemies abroad.
But while pundits would paint the former president as a reluctant fighter, many Americans would be surprised to know that Obama was actually a hawk when it came to ‘bombing the shit’ out of enemies, as Trump would put it.
GettyIn a chart made by Statista and the Independent, former president Obama had already upped the number of bombs on foreign countries.
According to figures, U.S. forces dropped over 3,000 more bombs in 2016 than 2015, taking the grand total of strikes for the year to at least 26,171.
Here’s where they were:
Statista/The IndependentThe figures are likely to be an underestimate as the only reliable data comes only from a handful of countries. And under the Pentagon’s definition, multiple bombs can also be classed as a single strike.
But of the known bombings, most (24,2878) took place in Syria and Iraq. Other U.S. bombs also rained down in Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan – seven majority-Muslim countries.
While Obama came to office pledging to end George W Bush’s wars, he leaves the position as having been at war longer than any president in U.S. history.
Micah Zenko, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, concludes that the U.S. dropped 79 per cent of all 30,743 coalition bombs in 2016.
While President Obama reduced the number of American soldiers fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq, air-strikes rocketed under his leadership.
