‘WHAT do you mean by people?” The phrase stuck in my throat with burning indignation. I’d just had a simple question of the UK’s latest bombing campaign spat back at me.

It was “bizarre”, the lecturing military spokesperson told me, for a journalist to ask how many “people” have been killed in UK attacks in Syria-Iraq or to enquire about how those targets are selected. Unquestioning trust, like that of soldiers squelching towards death at the Somme, should apparently be placed in the vainglorious claims of the British military establishment.

The following day the issue was raised directly to the Foreign Secretary in parliament: do we know who UK forces are killing? It was an important moment. Previously the Government has been steadfast in using a sterile language of death. Anyone “targeted” must be a “terrorist”, “militant”, “extremist”.

For once Philip Hammond MP saw death beyond black-and-white categories. “People will have been killed as a result of airstrikes,” he said, although how many people and how they are targeted remains unpublished or unknowable.

Terminology is crucial, as it can automatically dehumanise those killed to remove the prospect of military error. Corpses, once defined for political ends, rarely have a habit of speaking back.

The UK military admitted to me that a lack of ground support means we cannot count or confirm the people that we kill in bombings. The naive may assume that UK bombs will only fall on bad people – as if there is a strict dichotomy of good and evil among those on the ground.

Yet there are hundreds of splinter organisations fighting in Syria, including extremists we support and oppose. How does the UK know it is bombing the right fighters, never mind whether it is bombing civilians? The SNP have now submitted further questions on this issue to Parliament.

This week nine Iraqi soldiers were killed accidentally by American bombing. AirWars, an independent research group, estimates that up to 200 fighters on the West’s side have accidentally been killed during the 500-day US-led bombing campaign of more than 31,000 missiles. They also estimate up to 2,104 civilian deaths.

The UK is now fully complicit in this military chaos, following its responsibility for the Iraq carnage that spawned Daesh in the first place. Instead of recognising the futility of violence, the UK Government uses euphemisms to evade the impact of air strikes.

They claim there have been no reports of civilians killed in UK air strikes (note the difference from claiming that no civilians have been killed). According to AirWars, this “cannot at present be publicly verified... because the UK refuses to declare the locations of almost 200 Reaper drone strikes in Iraq.” So how can “reports” be received?

As long as we do not know who the UK is killing, this will be taken as a vindication of the war. Journalists struggle to gather evidence, and only when governments are caught blood-handed are apologies given.

The scale of civilian killings in Iraq and Afghanistan was denied until the official war logs were leaked. Torture was denied, until the photos emerged. Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Until it didn’t.

The civilian killings that emerge often have Western agencies acting as advocates for justice. The infamous “Collateral Murder” video, where US helicopter pilots kill more than a dozen civilians, was leaked following calls from Reuters, which lost two journalists in the attack. The recent killing of 42 innocents at Kunduz hospital also became a focal point due to Doctors Without Borders. Middle Eastern dead rarely have such effective spokespeople in our media.

So misinformation is persistent, while chaos in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya is constant. There should as a result be intense scepticism towards the claims of the military establishment regarding Syria. But this rarely emerges in the UK’s nationalistic press.

An exception, journalist Ewen MacAskill, optimistically wrote that 2015 was set to be the first year in a century that the UK was not at war. That hope died. In 2016, beyond our festival of peace, a new determination is required so that one day the guns fall silent and are beaten into ploughshares.

That cause is for our politicians, our media and our language – to avoid what George Orwell warned was the corruption of political language “to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable”.

At the heart of rejecting war propaganda is persistently raising questions of moral and military nuance – even if this is met with incredulity among those who promote war.

While they claim not to have a definition, what do I mean by people? Glasgow poet Tom Leonard said it best. It is “not to be complicit … a human being and a citizen of the world. Responsible to that world – and responsible for that world.” Merry Christmas.