Gen. Joseph Votel, who heads U.S. Central Command, which oversees operations in the Middle East, said Thursday that the intelligence haul was “extraordinarily important”.
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“ISIL has launched a series of attacks in Iraq and Syria in which civilian deaths were not an unintended outcome; civilian deaths were the intent”, he said.
A USA special forces raid past year in Syria against a senior Islamic State leader, Abu Sayyaf, produced 7 terabytes of data, US officials said, revealing information about the group’s leadership, financing, and security.
“We take all measures during the targeting process to avoid or minimize civilian casualties or collateral damage and to comply with the principles of the Law of Armed Conflict”, Centcom’s statement on Thursday concluded.
The U.S. started bombing Syria in September 2014 and soon after began providing air support for the Kurdish YPG.
Moscow has, however, not admitted a single civilian death caused by its actions in Syria.
“Providing safe routes for those civilians who wish to flee Aleppo city will not avert a humanitarian catastrophe”.
Centcom’s toll included three civilians killed in the April 5 airstrike against a “financial storage facility”, part of an effort at the time to blow up any physical currency inside ISIS territory that appears to have been abandoned nearly immediately thereafter, and four killed later that month in Mosul is an attempt to kill “an ISIS leader”. There have been reports that as many as 50 civilians were killed in the strike carried out in the Aleppo province.
“The ministry cited striking similarities between the massacres committed by the US-led Coalition and the terrorist organizations in an attempt to exacerbate the situation across Syria following the Syrian army’s recent wins in Aleppo city”, continued the letter to the United Nations quoted by the agency.
USA investigators are unlikely to visit the scene of the destruction, which has been the setting for a gruelling fight between Isis and the US’s Syrian Arab and Kurdish proxy forces since May 21st.
The Observatory and local residents said strikes on July 19 had killed dozens of civilians, including children.
Spokesman for the U.S.-led military coalition says digital information is ‘a big deal’.
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The group’s president, Anas al-Abdeh, said civilian casualties could heighten a sense of desperation among Syrians and provide a recruiting tool for extremist groups like IS. “The rest of the dead bodies are charred, or have been reduced to shreds”, Adnan al-Housen, an activist from Manbij, told the Guardian.
