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Authored by Andrew Korybko via Substack,

Regardless of why Putin might have held off on this for so long, he's now arguably motivated at least in part by the tantalizing possibility of reaching big-ticket resource deals with the US after the conflict ends, the details of which his and Trump's envoys have been negotiating for over a year already.

The New York Times cited allegedly intercepted Russian communications to report that Russia plans to obliterate Ukraine's power, heating, and water systems this winter. While their claim can't be confirmed, it aligns with Putin mildly "escalating to de-escalate" over the summer in response to Zelensky's strike campaign, which has taken the form of ramping up attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure. If the report is true, then Russia doesn't just aim to sever Ukraine's military logistics, but to bring Ukraine to its knees.

Putin has thus far eschewed this arguably due to his belief that Russians and Ukrainians are kindred people. Some have suggested that Russia might not have had the drone and/or missile capacity to do so earlier, however, whether due to low production till now and/or to hedge against the scenario of a hot war with NATO. In any case, Putin now seems to have made peace with the humanitarian consequences of ending the war on Russia's terms sooner rather than later, or at least on as many of them as possible.

He might be motivated by more than just Ukraine's "war of attrition" against Russia that began over the summer with American backing and interestingly enough France's as well. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent reportedly told his Russian counterpart over the summer that no business deals are possible so long as the conflict continues. Since then, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner met with Putin to discuss such deals among other topics, after which Kirill Dmitriev traveled to the US to follow up on that.

For background, Putin boasted in late February 2025 that American companies "will make a decent profit" from investments in Russia's resource industry, and Trump's Special Envoy to Belarus John Coale recently confirmed that he received approval to pitch a Belarusian-like deal to Putin. It would involve sanctions relief in exchange for the release of "political prisoners". Putin's ally Alexander Lukashenko already agreed to several such deals and is now negotiating a massive potash one with Trump.

Just last week, Lukashenko also proposed a trilateral Belarusian, Russian, and US fertilizer plant deal, but that requires the US lifting its sanctions on Gazprom. Russian officials from Putin on down have called for the West to lift its sanctions on Russia, and while the US might lift some if Putin agrees to a Belarusian-like quid pro quo, the Ukrainian Conflict will first have to end for this to happen at scale. Their resultant resource-centric strategic partnership could then revolutionize the global economic architecture.

The Russian economy has survived the West's unprecedented sanctions onslaught, largely due to the combination of its natural resources and national payment system, but its Economic Development Ministry expects only 0.6% GDP growth this year. United Russia's landslide victory during last month's Duma elections, the first since the large-scale phase of the Ukrainian Conflict began, gives Putin the mandate to do whatever is needed to win the war and deliver more prosperity to his people afterwards.

It's therefore within the realm of possibility, consistent with Russia's policy of demanding the lifting of Western sanctions, that Putin is motivated at least in part to end the conflict on as many of Russia's terms as possible sooner rather than later so as to then reach big-ticket resource deals with the US. This imperative, which could revolutionize the global economic architecture and deliver more prosperity to his people, contextualizes the New York Times' report about him planning to bring Ukraine to its knees.

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity.news,

North Yorkshire staff who handle anti-terror work were shown a slide stating that "Mother Mary wore a hijab." The line was used to argue that Islam's attitude to women does not conflict with Western values. The same presentation told them "Jesus grew a beard," as Muslim men are instructed to, and that "the hijab was prevalent in the UK only 100 years ago," illustrated with pictures of British shawls that have nothing to do with Islam.

Mary was a Jewish woman in first-century Judea. She lived about six centuries before Islam, and centuries before the hijab as it is understood today. No image of her, or of Jesus, was made for centuries after their lifetimes. Early Christian art first showed Jesus as a beardless youth.

None of that stopped a publicly funded programme from feeding the claim to council staff, and from putting related material in front of police officers, students and civil servants who run the Prevent counter terror program.

?"I am sick to the back teeth of this two tier approach to faith in this country!"

Bishop @BishopDewar rages after a council in North Yorkshire has been told that Mary wore a Hijab@petercardwell pic.twitter.com/iwyvm95JMZ

— Talk (@TalkTV) September 30, 2026

The session was delivered by Abbas Najib, a former police officer and chief executive of Better Communities Bradford, the charity behind Project Unity. The Telegraph reported that the charity has received £490,000 from the National Lottery Community Fund since 2019, including a £35,000 grant to roll the programme out. Najib has said Project Unity has been delivered to more than 2,500 people across West and North Yorkshire.

Najib confirmed the slide to LBC and said the programme stands by it. "Hijab is an Arabic word meaning a covering, and in everyday use it simply means a woman's head covering," he claimed.

He further suggested "Mary is depicted wearing one in Christian art across the centuries, and headscarves were common among women in Britain within living memory. The point of the slide is that covering the head is a shared tradition across faiths and cultures, not something foreign or unique to Islam."

That is a semantic trick dressed up as history. A veil in later Christian art is not a hijab. A headscarf worn by a British woman in 1920 is not Islamic dress. Calling either one a hijab writes a seventh-century religion backwards onto a first-century Jewish woman, then presents the rewrite as proof that criticism of modern Islamic practice is a myth.

The Mary slide was not an isolated flourish. Project Unity material, which has also reportedly been presented to students, police officers and civil servants responsible for Prevent, includes a defence of Sharia.

One slide states: "Sharia is not a foreign threat. It is a moral tradition - like any other - shaped by faith, reason and a commitment to human dignity."

Another says one element of Islamic jurisprudence requires that "children cannot be struck on the face, cannot be marked, and must freely consent to marriage." Pro-Palestinian marches are described in the talks as "protesting genocide."

Written material accompanying the sessions claims women are not oppressed by the stipulations of Islam, and that "Muslims, the immigrant, the brown person" were scapegoated for a flatlining economy, with the blame laid on "the rich."

North Yorkshire Council has tried to put distance between itself and the content. Odette Robson, the council's head of community safety and CCTV, said the session was a guest presentation at the York and North Yorkshire Hate Crime Conference in 2025, a joint event with City of York Council and North Yorkshire Police, and that Najib was not paid.

"Attendees were free to question evidence, test assertions and explore alternative viewpoints," she said, adding "The purpose was to encourage discussion and reflection rather than to promote any particular standpoint."

The councillors who have seen the material are not buying the distinction. Reform group leader Tom Seston said: "A Reform council would scrap all DEI initiatives such as this and put council staff back to work delivering for residents, instead of receiving political lectures from anti-British activists. North Yorkshire Council should ban this activist and his charity from all work with the council."

Independent councillor Michelle Donohue-Moncrieff, a Roman Catholic, said she was "deeply disturbed that taxpayers' money was used to fund political propaganda being fed to council staff members. In particular, the reference to Mary, the Mother of God, wearing a hijab is both inaccurate and unacceptable."

She added: "Mary is not just some random historical figure to be used to justify Islam. These types of references are not intended to explain Islam. They are a Trojan horse designed to diminish Roman Catholicism and Christianity as a whole. North Yorkshire Council should apologise and ensure that training of this nature never happens again."

The same Project Unity material was used at that 2025 hate crime conference in front of North Yorkshire Police officers. Najib played a 2024 clip of Nigel Farage warning that "we have a growing number of young people in this country who do not subscribe to British values, in fact loathe much of what we stand for," and clarifying that he meant Muslims, citing marches over Israel's actions in Palestine. Officers were then shown footage of a man racially abusing a Muslim bus driver and asked to weigh the two.

Najib's question to the room: "Ask yourself, who is going to get into trouble between those two gentlemen? And who did the most harm?" He added the comparison he wanted them to sit with: "Sitting in a national news studio and saying 'Jews hate Britain', he'd be locked up before he left the studio, and too right, too."

The police force has said the talk was not part of its training programme and was not delivered by a police employee. That does not change who was in the room, or what they were asked to conclude: that a politician's words about integration may have done more harm than a racial assault.

Najib's defence of that exercise is the same line he uses for the Mary slide. "Project Unity exists to reduce anti-Muslim hostility and strengthen trust between communities," he said. Participants, he argued, were being asked to apply one standard, and to consider how the same words would land if said about Jewish people or black people.

The standard on offer is not equal treatment under the law. It is a demand that doubts about integration, grooming, Sharia, or the compatibility of political Islam with British institutions be treated as a species of hate.

This is not a rogue workshop in Yorkshire. In March 2026 the government published a non-statutory definition of "anti-Muslim hostility," the rebrand it adopted after dropping "Islamophobia" under free-speech pressure, and promised a special representative to push it into schools, universities and public services.

The working group that shaped the definition was chaired by former attorney general Dominic Grieve. Every member of that panel has links to organisations successive governments have kept at arm's length, including the Muslim Council of Britain and Muslim Engagement and Development.

The definition is not a criminal offence. Ministers have been careful to say so. What it is, in practice, is a script. Project Unity is what that script looks like when it reaches a conference room: Christian history renamed, Sharia redescribed as a moral tradition "like any other," and an elected politician measured against a hate crime. The audience included people whose job is counter-terror work.

The other half of the machine is record-keeping. Officials at the Standards and Compliance Unit, the body set up to handle complaints about Prevent, have been logging social media posts that criticise the programme, including posts that accuse it of fixating on the "far Right" while soft-pedalling Islamist extremism. The database was withheld for more than a year and released only after an appeal to the Information Commissioner. Between March 2024 and February 2025 the unit made 77 such observations, mostly from X.

Jacob Smith of Rights & Security International, whose team forced the release, said: "It is shocking that the government has been trawling X and Reddit to find out who has been critiquing Prevent - and then storing that information. You should be allowed to criticise government policy without being put on a list."

Put the pieces together. A lottery-funded charity tells anti-terror staff that the mother of Christ wore a hijab and that Sharia is not a foreign threat. The same charity asks police to decide whether Nigel Farage's words did more harm than a man abusing a bus driver. A government panel with Islamist-linked members writes the definition those sessions are built to serve. A Home Office-linked unit keeps a list of people who say the counter-extremism programme has its priorities backwards.

None of this required a new blasphemy statute. All it required was grants, a conference slot, a working definition, and a database. The people supposedly paid to protect the public were the ones sat in the room being indoctrinated.

Authored by Larry C. Johnson via SonarIntelligence (Sonar21),

Once again Karl W. Miller has put numbers to a problem that most of the commentariat still treats as a temporary price spike. His latest forward outlook, "The Five-Year Global Energy Crisis," dated October 3, makes an argument that should alarm every finance ministry from Berlin to Jakarta. The war's damage to Gulf energy infrastructure is not a disruption that ends when the shooting stops. It is a reconstruction problem measured in years and trillions of dollars, and while it is solved, the world will be short of the fuels that run its economy.

A ceasefire is not a repair crew

Miller's central insight is simple. A ceasefire can reopen a shipping lane overnight. It cannot manufacture a compressor, mobilize commissioning engineers, or pay a contractor. The next phase of this crisis, he writes, is a competition for cash, equipment, qualified contractors and finished fuel.

His cost model is sobering. In his aggressive case, rebuilding the damaged Gulf energy system requires $1.16 trillion in total program funding. Under prolonged stress, with scarce equipment, rising prices and delays, the bill reaches $2.53 trillion. Even his faster case runs to nearly half a trillion dollars. He is careful to say these are model outputs, not contractor quotes, and that the true extent of the damage is the largest unknown. An April assessment put energy-related repair costs at only $34-58 billion. But the direction of his argument doesn't depend on the exact figure. Every month of delay makes the same repair more expensive, because the global market for specialized equipment and crews is already stretched by LNG expansions, refinery maintenance and power projects elsewhere.

The timeline is just as stark. Weighted by cost, the rebuild averages almost five years from today. Only 60% of the work finishes by 2031, and the longest-lead packages run to seven years.

The money problem comes first

The most original part of Miller's analysis is about cash. A damaged refinery may be worth rebuilding and technically repairable, and still sit idle because the government that owns it has to pay for food imports, salaries, electricity and water first. Lost export revenue doesn't stop those bills. When a state borrows to keep paying them, that money can't also pay an engineering contractor.

Iraq shows the problem in practice. In July, it faced a monthly public salary obligation of about $5.96 billion with a funding shortfall of $2.52 billion. A government in that position rebuilds nothing. It pays its people, and the export capacity that would restore its revenue waits. Miller's warning is that this trap can stop reconstruction before it starts: without engineering funds and vendor deposits, factory slots go to other customers and delivery dates slip.

The fuel gap is the global transmission belt

For the rest of the world, the damage arrives through diesel and jet fuel. The figures Miller cites are already severe. Gulf diesel net exports in August were just over a quarter of prewar levels. Combined Gulf and Russian diesel exports were 1.6 million barrels a day below February. Global oil stocks had fallen 507 million barrels since February, and global refinery throughput in August was 4.2 million barrels a day below a year earlier.

Looking forward, Miller's severe case assumes a shortfall of at least 3 million barrels a day of diesel and jet fuel, every year for five years. That's about 1.1 billion barrels a year and 5.5 billion barrels over the period. He is explicit that this is a deliberate stress test, not a forecast, and that a faster-recovery path closes the gap by the fourth year. But the stress case is a plausible one. Restored capacity can be absorbed by refinery outages, deferred maintenance, recovering demand and delivery bottlenecks. Damaged refineries don't come back at full capacity on the first day.

Inventories cannot fill a gap of that size for that long. Five and a half billion barrels is far beyond any country's emergency stocks, which is why drawing down Europe's reserves now, under pressure from Washington, only buys weeks. Without enough new supply, the balance can close in only one way: by using less fuel.

How the shortage reprices everything

The economic damage extends well beyond the missing barrels. When supply falls short, buyers bid for the marginal cargo, and that bid sets the price for all the fuel still being bought. Miller's illustration: a $40-a-barrel premium across 10 million barrels a day of purchases adds $146 billion a year to fuel bills. Applied only to the 3 million missing barrels, it would add $43.8 billion and badly understate the real cost.

Scarcity also reprices credit. At $150 a barrel, a buyer purchasing 1 million barrels a day needs $2.25 billion to hold 15 extra days of inventory, and $3 billion at $200. Longer voyages tie up more fuel and more money in transit. A supplier can have the barrels while its customer can't get a letter of credit. And a cargo that wins a bidding war for one country leaves another short. Competition redistributes the shortage before it eliminates it.

Who absorbs the shock

Diesel carries the crisis into the real economy. It runs road freight, farm machinery, mines, construction fleets and backup generators, none of which can switch fuels quickly. Higher diesel costs pass straight into freight rates and food prices, and when diesel isn't available at any price, activity simply stops. Jet fuel carries the shock into aviation: higher fares, fewer routes and higher air cargo surcharges. Kerosene hits the households with the least room to adjust, in countries where it is still used for heating, cooking and lighting.

Miller's regional assessment follows the money:

• Europe competes for replacement diesel and jet cargoes while running its refineries close to their limits.
• South and Southeast Asia face higher import bills, currency pressure and greater need for trade credit.
• Africa and smaller importers are the most vulnerable. Tenders fail, credit lines run out, and small cargoes become uneconomic long before global stocks are exhausted.
• The United States and other Atlantic suppliers face export demand competing with their own diesel needs, with refineries running so hard they have little tolerance for outages.

The ultimate balancing mechanism is demand destruction: freight deferred, low-margin factories idled, flights cancelled, and poorer importers losing every bidding contest. Miller warns against mistaking that for recovery. Lower consumption caused by rationing through price or credit is not a repaired energy system.

Case study: Europe

Europe shows what Miller's framework looks like in practice. The continent burns about 5 million barrels of diesel a day, fuel for the trucks that move its goods, the tractors that plant its crops and, as winter approaches, the boilers that heat millions of homes.

How much does Europe produce, and how much does it import? Running flat out, EU refineries can produce roughly 4.5 to 5 million barrels a day of diesel and gasoil, and they are already operating close to their maximum. That leaves Europe roughly 85-90% self-sufficient at best. The remaining 10-15% comes from imports, and that margin sets the price for the entire market. Kepler puts the EU's diesel imports from outside the bloc at about 580,000 barrels a day this year. Britain, which lost much of its refining capacity over the past two decades, is far more exposed: it imports more than half the diesel it uses.

The origin of those imports has changed dramatically. Russia was long Europe's largest outside supplier until the EU embargoed Russian diesel in 2023. The Gulf filled much of the gap, until the war cut it off. Since March, the United States has supplied more than half of Europe's diesel imports, and more than two-thirds in August and September. Europe has traded dependence on Moscow for dependence on Washington, and Washington has just shown it is willing to use that leverage, threatening an export ban unless Europe released its emergency stocks.

Europe's diesel depends on imported crude as well. Its refineries run almost entirely on foreign oil: the EU imports about 97% of the crude it consumes. But the Gulf was never Europe's main crude supplier. In 2025, Gulf Cooperation Council states supplied only about 7% of EU crude imports, Iraq another 5.8%. Europe's crude now comes chiefly from the United States, Norway and Kazakhstan, which together supplied nearly half of EU petroleum imports in the second quarter of 2026. The volume has held steady; the bill rose 56%. But the crude isn't the crude Europe's refineries were built for. Much of Europe's refining capacity was designed around medium sour crudes such as Russia's Urals, with conversion units that turn the heavier part of the barrel into diesel. American shale crude is light and sweet. It refines readily into gasoline and naphtha, but it yields proportionally less diesel and jet fuel, the very products Europe is short of. As Miller notes, sour crude isn't uniquely required to make diesel; the replacement barrels work, but not at the same yield or cost. The Gulf supply Europe really lost was finished diesel from Gulf refineries, and that is what the United States has replaced. The result is a double dependence: Washington is now Europe's largest supplier of both the crude its refineries run and the diesel they can't make. Even the non-American barrels carry risk. Most Kazakh crude reaches Europe through a Black Sea terminal at Novorossiysk, on Russian soil, a route that has already been hit by Ukrainian drones.

How long can Europe store diesel? This is where Europe's apparent cushion turns out to be thinner than it looks. Unlike crude oil, which can sit in salt caverns for decades, diesel degrades. Under ideal conditions, conventional ultra-low-sulfur diesel can typically be stored for six to twelve months. With stabilizers, biocides and well-managed tanks, that can be extended to 18 to 24 months. Oxidation forms gums and sediment, water collects, and microbes grow in the fuel.

European diesel has an added problem. The EU standard, EN 590, allows up to 7% biodiesel in road diesel, and biodiesel oxidizes faster than petroleum diesel. Concawe, the European refiners' research association, recommends a maximum storage time of six months for biodiesel and current blends containing it. Strategic stockholders can extend that by holding biodiesel-free product, but even then the reserve has to be rotated, sold into the market and replaced with fresh fuel on a cycle of a year or two.

That changes what Europe's reserve really is. EU countries and Britain held about 52 million tonnes of gasoil and diesel in June, including nearly 38 million tonnes of emergency reserves, roughly two months of consumption. But a diesel reserve is not a stockpile Europe can fill once and forget. It is a stock that must be continually turned over, which means continually bought, and bought in the same tight market Miller describes. Every barrel released now to satisfy Washington has to be replaced later, at a higher price, from suppliers who are already short. And because diesel degrades, Europe can't solve the problem by buying extra while it's cheap and holding it for years. A reserve with a shelf life of a year or two cannot cover a structural deficit that Miller's severe case puts at five years.

The conclusion for Europe is stark. It produces most of its own diesel but has no spare refining capacity. It depends on imports for the margin that sets prices, and those imports now come mostly from a single supplier that has shown it will use them as leverage. And its emergency reserve is both perishable and finite. In Miller's terms, Europe is one of the buyers most exposed to the marginal cargo, and the least able to wait out a five-year shortage.

The implications for the global economy

Put together, Miller's analysis describes a world economy facing a prolonged supply shock, not a temporary one. Fuel costs feed into nearly everything, so central banks fighting the inflation this crisis has already produced will face pressure for longer than they expect. Emerging-market importers face a combination of high fuel bills, weak currencies and tighter credit that has historically produced debt crises and unrest. And the reconstruction itself will absorb capital, equipment and specialist labor that would otherwise build new energy supply elsewhere, so the shortage may delay the investment needed to end it.

Miller's strategic conclusion is the one policymakers least want to hear. Ending the conflict removes one source of disruption. It does not repair the energy system, which requires a separate sequence of financing, engineering, manufacturing, construction and commissioning that will take years. Until that is done, reliable fuel and the cash to buy it will determine which economies absorb the burden. Neither will be distributed evenly.

Authored by Chris Summers via The Epoch Times,

Former world chess champion Garry Kasparov has said the security services from both the United States and Lithuania have warned him that his life was in danger, after a Russian plot was discovered which allegedly targeted Kremlin critics living abroad.

Last month the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) said five people had been charged with plotting, on behalf of Russian intelligence, to assassinate two opposition figures.

One of the targets was in the United States, and the other in Lithuania.

DOJ did not identify Kasparov - who moved to the United States from Russia in 2013 and lives in New York - but in a Substack post the 63-year-old former chess grandmaster said he had been warned his life was in danger.

He identified the other person as Ivan Tyutrin, the co-founder of the Free Russia Forum, who is based in Lithuania.

"Neither I nor Ivan have been told explicitly that we were the targets whose names are redacted in the indictment of the assassins," Kasparov said.

"We were, however, warned by security services in Lithuania and the United States that our lives were in danger and that we should take precautions, which I did and will continue to do."

The Epoch Times reached out to the Free Russia Forum for comment, but did not receive a response by publication time.

Kasparov - who was born in Baku in what is now Azerbaijan, when it was part of the Soviet Union - became famous when, at the age of 22, he beat Anatoly Karpov to become world chess champion, a title he held until 2000.

Kasparov, an increasingly outspoken critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin, chairs the Renew Democracy Initiative, a nonprofit that describes itself as an "intellectual home for the pro-democracy movement" globally.

In his The Next Move Substack, Kasparov said his friend and fellow opposition figure, Boris Nemtsov, was "murdered in cold blood in front of the Kremlin" in February 2015.

'I Will Not Hide': Kasparov

"But I will not stop, and I will not hide, even if I thought it was possible to do so. I believe that the best defense is a good offense," Kasparov said.

"My family and I will not truly be safe as long as Putin is in power in Russia - a circumstance shared by millions."

The DOJ only referred to the targets of the alleged Russian intelligence plot as Victim-1, who lived in the United States, and Victim-2, who lived in Lithuania.

They said a U.S. national had been offered $40,000 to "eliminate" or "disappear" Victim-1.

A U.S. citizen was also contacted about surveilling and murdering Victim-2, who was allegedly described by the plotters as a "bad guy" who was "telling lies about Russia."

The Kremlin said last month it saw no reason to comment on the U.S. allegations, saying there was an absence of credible evidence and facts.

Russia has previously denied conducting such plots on foreign soil.

Authored by Dave DeCamp via AntiWar.com,

The Pentagon has raised combat pay for US troops for the first time since 2002, Task & Purpose has reported, as the Iran war continues and another round of escalation between the US and Iran appears to be coming.

Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell announced the pay increase last week. "Our troops in harm’s way deserve compensation that reflects their risk. For the first time in over two decades, the Department of War is increasing Hostile Fire Pay and Imminent Danger Pay," he wrote on X.

Parnell said that Hostile Fire Pay, which troops can receive if their base or unit comes under enemy fire, has been increased to $450 per month, double the previous amount.

Imminent Danger Pay, provided to troops "subject to the threat of physical harm or imminent danger," has increased to a maximum of $275 per month, up $50 from the previous rate. US troops can receive either Hostile Fire Pay or Imminent Danger Pay, but cannot receive both simultaneously.

While increasing combat pay, the Pentagon is also reducing the maximum amount troops can receive in Hardship Duty Pay-Location from $150 to $100 per month. The benefit compensates troops stationed in areas with particularly difficult living conditions, rather than for exposure to combat.

After the Iran war started, the Pentagon expanded the locations that are eligible for Imminent Danger Pay to include Arab states that host US bases, Turkey, Cyprus, the Greek island of Crete, the US base at Diego Garcia, and the waters of the Arabian Gulf, Arabian Sea, and Gulf of Oman.

Throughout the war in Iran, US bases across the Middle East have been pounded by Iranian missiles and drones, resulting in a significant number of US casualties, which have been downplayed by the Pentagon.

According to the Pentagon’s official numbers, since the US and Israel started the war with a sneak attack on Iran on February 28, at least 19 US troops have been killed, and 861 have been wounded.

——> Pentagon doubles combat pay for troops under fire • Hostile-fire pay jumps from $225 to $450 a month starting today • Imminent-danger pay rises to $275 as U.S. forces stay in Iran-related danger zones https://t.co/RxEXmaq53p

— Odisus (@Odisus) October 1, 2026

According to a recent report from The Washington Post, the Pentagon has not reported all of the US military deaths in the region since the conflict began. The report put the number of deaths of US service members at up to 23, though it said not all undisclosed deaths were directly tied to the conflict, and it also said that three civilian contractors have died.