Share

U.S. military: Air strikes killed 14 civilians in Iraq, Syria

The US-led coalition has been conducting airstrikes against what are said to be the Daesh terrorists inside Syria since September 2014 without any authorization from Damascus or a United Nations mandate.

Advertisement

Antonov said Friday that the humanitarian corridors would allow people to enter Aleppo as well as to leave the northern Syrian city. He said civilians who leave the city risk being shot by government snipers or being detained due to their opposition sympathies.

The UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said coalition aircraft struck the village of Al-Ghandour last night. The group, which relies on a network of activists in Syria, says the hospital was no longer operational.

The Observatory said an Islamist militant was believed to have been killed in the attack.

The Observatory did not specify if the raid was carried out by the Syrian regime or Russian warplanes.

Garver said he’s not surprised at the amount of ISIL activity in the region. Save the Children said the maternity hospital is the only such facility in the area, with the next unit 40 miles away.

As the USA -led coalition and Syrian fighters continue the battle to retake the city of Manbij in Syria, captured information reveals the Islamic State of Iraq and The Levant’s thought processes and plans, Combined Joint Task Force-Operation Inherent Resolve spokesman Army Col. Christopher Garver told Pentagon reporters today. The coalition has conducted more than 520 airstrikes in support of the SAC push to reclaim Manbij from Islamic State fighters.

“Airstrikes by worldwide coalition fighter jets after midnight (Thursday morning) on the town of Ghandoura killed at least 15 civilians and wounded dozens”, said the monitoring group’s head, Rami Abdel Rahman.

The worldwide coalition had no immediate comment on the casualty figures.

In another case on April 29, a USA airstrike targeting Neil Prakash, an Islamic State member in Mosul, Iraq, struck and killed three civilians on the road and one civilian on an adjacent compound, the military said.

But Cook vowed the air war would continue in Manbij, a key city that sits along a supply route between the terrorists’ de facto capital of Raqqa and the outside world through Turkey.

It was unclear if the Al-Ghandour attacks involved an air strike reported yesterday by US Central Command, which is responsible for US forces in the Middle East.

U.S. 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.

Advertisement

“We declare the complete cancellation of all operations under the name of Jabhat al-Nusra, and the formation of a new group operating under the name Jabhat Fath al-Sham noting that this new organisation has no affiliation to any external entity”, the group’s leader Abu Mohammed al-Jolani said in an exclusive video obtained by Al Jazeera.

Smoke and flame rise after what fighters of the Syria Democratic Forces said were U.S.-led air strikes on the mills of Manbij where Islamic State militants are positioned in Aleppo Governorate Syria