In nearly two years of fighting in Iraq and Syria, U.S. officials say they have killed as many as 20,000 Islamic State fighters and caused only 41 civilian deaths. Military analysts and human rights activists said those figures are absurd. “They don’t pass the straight-face test,” said retired Col. Christopher Kolenda, who led troops in Afghanistan and served as a senior adviser to U.S. commanders there. He recently completed a study on civilian casualties for the George Soros-funded Open Society Foundations.

Since the U.S. military began bombing in August 2014, it has not made a single condolence payment in Iraq or Syria, military officials said. The burden is on Iraqis and Syrians to seek compensation for American mistakes, but for those who lost relatives, there is often no clear way to even lodge a complaint.

Ekabee’s email was a desperate attempt to catch the attention of the U.S. military’s vast bureaucracy. She wanted the Americans to know that their pilots had destroyed her car and killed multiple civilians.

The email passed from the U.S. Embassy staff to the U.S. military command in Baghdad and then on to investigators in Qatar. In it, Ekabee described fleeing her home in Mosul and paying a driver to smuggle out the car she had left behind.