USA -backed forces found a trove of intelligence in laptops and thumb drives left behind by Islamic State fighters retreating from a battle for the strategic Syrian town of Manbij, a Pentagon spokesman said Wednesday.
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The United States military has found enough credible information to begin a formal investigation into allegations that USA -led coalition air strikes killed civilians on July 19 in Syria, a spokesman for the coalition fighting Islamic State, Colonel Chris Garver, said on Wednesday.
The gathered material, mostly in Arabic, includes items ranging from notebooks to laptops, as well as textbooks and USB drives.
Coalition officials often say theirs is the most precise air campaign in history.
Members of Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) attend the funeral of eight fellow fighters who died during an assault against ISIS in the town of Manbij, in the Syrian Kurdish town of Kobane on June 24.
“As foreign fighter would enter, they would screen them, figure out what languages they speak, assign them a job – and then send them down into wherever they were going to go, be it into Syria or Iraq, somewhere”, Garver said.
We want to make sure that all that information is disseminated in a coherent way among our coalition partners, Mr. McGurk said last week, during a meeting of foreign and defense ministers in Washington, so that we can track the networks from the core and all the way to wherever the dots might connect, whether that is in Europe or in North Africa or Southeast Asia.. By shutting that down, you make it harder for them to kind of plan the larger-scale, kind of more coordinated attacks’.
He added that rebels have recovered “the massive amounts of intelligence materials”, including four terabytes of digital information, from the parts of the city they cleared of Daesh militants.
Garver said he’s not surprised at the amount of ISIL activity in the region.
And as coalition fighters enter Manbij, they are finding ISIL-occupied homes rigged with homemade bombs, which Garver said might have been an attempt to destroy the information that was kept inside, or a method to kill coalition fighters, particularly as ISIL loses terrain. “We have not seen an increase in civilians leaving the center of the city”.
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US-backed Syrian Opposition fighters prepare a rocket-launcher as they advance into the ISIS group bastion of Manbij, in northern Syria, on June 23, 2016.
