Woods says the group has cataloged the names of 74 civilians – including children – killed last week, identifying them through five separate sources as local residents.
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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”.
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.
“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 material – an estimated 10,000 documents and several terabytes of data – was recovered in recent weeks by Arab and Kurdish forces fighting to retake Manbij, a strategic border town Islamic State uses to move fighters and supplies in and out of Syria.
Coalition air strikes in support of the Manbij offensive killed at least 56 civilians on 19 July.
This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed.
The spokesman said the coalition has initiated the formal investigation.
“This is unlike any other organization that we’ve fought before”, he said, “and with this sort of totalitarian attempt to control everything, it poses a significant threat not just to the people inside, but everybody that they want to expand out to, as well”.
Woods is encouraged that the Pentagon has quickly acknowledged the reports of the deaths, but says it’s often six-months before a military probe is completed. The town is near the city of Manbij, which has been a major target of USA strikes over the past two months.
At least 28 more civilians were killed in the latest incident, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, including women and children.
At the moment, the main coalition effort is centered on recapturing the Manbij pocket in northern Syria, the last jihadist-held territory bordering Turkey.
He added that “this administration, the United States government takes all measures during the targeting process to avoid or minimalizing civilian casualties”.
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The Pentagon has acknowledged killing 55 civilians in its almost two-year bombing campaign against the Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria.
