U.S.-led airstrikes on an Islamic State (ISIS)-held village in Syria have killed dozens of civilians, including many women and children, in what is considered the deadliest attack on civilians since the start of the campaign against ISIS.
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A day later, it said 56 more were killed in an area to the north of the city, including 11 children.
The council is allied to the U.S.-backed Kurdish and Arab alliance known as the Syria Democratic Forces (SDF), which has been fighting Islamic State in northern Syria with the support of air strikes from a U.S.-led coalition.
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President Francois Hollande also said he had no precise information on the French air force’s responsibility for the civilian deaths.
“We have collected more than 100 corpses of Daesh jihadists, and we also destroyed several ISIS machine guns and vehicles”, the official said.
SNC president Anas al-Abdah warned that it would “prove to be a recruitment tool for terrorist organisations”.
“Around Manbij, the Syrian Arab Coalition (SAC – Arab groups within the SDF), which is leading that fight, is being very slow and deliberate in that fight to protect civilians which we know are inside”.
“We are aware of reports alleging civilian casualties in the area”, a statement from the USA war command said on Wednesday.
Smoke rises from the Syrian city of Kobani following an airstrike by the US-led coalition in November 2014.
Syrian activists online urged people around the world to take to the streets to protest the deaths under the banner “Manbij is being exterminated”. Ahmed Mohammed, an activist with the group who is from Manbij, said witnesses in the village told him that the warplanes conducted four strikes and dropped between eight and 10 bombs early Tuesday.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights called the aerial bombing campaign near the Syrian city Manbij a “massacre”.
Overall, the USA military has confirmed 36 civilian deaths from its airstrikes since summer 2015, a figure independent observers consider too low to be credible, considering the daily barrage of air-delivered U.S. ordnance for almost two years. 56 civilians were reported killed at the time by the Syrian Observatory, though the final toll kept being revised upward, and could now be around 200.
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Progress into Manbij city has been slow.
