Yeah it's not a training, no fucking way in hell.

As you said... the risk of civilian casualties is insane, look how close they were to those palm trees.

And thats no slight on the chopper pilots... but you land a chopper between all those trees and create all that wind... what happens when a thick ass palm frond falls out of the tree and into the blades...

Bottom line is the desert is filled with military training compounds that are built to mimic all sorts of different scenarios including a populated urban center.

Those training areas are a half hour chopper flight tops from that location... there's no fucking way they'd take that risk.

The timing makes it all that much more suspicious, i mean guys in bio suits rushing boxes to choppers... this means they didn't even want to risk sending in ground teams they wanted to be sure whatever the fuck they took out of that building was in the air and GTFO asap.

...weeks before covid cases got reported in the US.

...and that building was scheduled for demolition.

IPOT did a whole video on that building and the owners and what ties they had to people... some shady shit going down for real.