At least 15 civilians have been killed and dozens wounded in air strikes by the US-led coalition in Syria, amid setbacks to attempts by the USA to partner with Russian Federation against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) group.
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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”.
Activists said that Islamic State militants recaptured the nearby village of al-Bouweir on Thursday and killed 24 civilians.
Syrian opposition groups and monitors said a strike on July 19 likely killed more than 100 people including entire families near the city of Manbij in Syria’s Aleppo province.
The bombings came a week after air strikes, also blamed by Syrian activists on United States aircraft, killed at least 56 civilians in IS-held territory in northern Syria.
“These are textbooks on how to control the lives of everybody that’s inside it, how everyone should live their lives, and how if you don’t live your life that way, you’re an enemy of the so-called, self-proclaimed state”, Garver said.
“This is a complicated situation, and we will continue to apply the rigor that we always do in terms of minimizing the risk to civilians, but we are supporting (SDF) forces because this is a critical moment in this campaign”, Cook said.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported heavy civilian casualties during several days of airstrikes last week around the village of Tokhar near the city of Manbij on several days last week.
A US-led coalition’s probe found credible allegations about an airstrike that caused civilian deaths near Manbij, Syria, a Pentagon spokesman said Wednesday. Salal said the real death toll could be in the hundreds.
Human rights groups said last week that US -led airstrikes in and around the ISIS-controlled city of Manbij have killed more than 100 and wounded dozens more since June.
The source, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to fears of reprisal attacks, said the airstrike directly targeted a concentration of civilians in the main market of the village; Daesh militants were said to be nowhere near the attack site.
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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”.
