“We are concerned that the US-led alliance appears to have relaxed some of their rules concerning civilian casualties”.
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Speaking to ARA News, the British volunteer in the SDF ranks said the US-led coalition can not be accused of killing civilians, “only the militant Islamic State group is to blame for the civilian casualties in Manbij city”.
“We think this is a big deal”, Colonel Christopher Garver, a spokesman for Operation Inherent Resolve, told Pentagon reporters in a video briefing from Baghdad on Wednesday, ABC reported.
The U.S. Central Command said in a statement that it initiated an assessment after reports that Thursday’s airstrikes near Manbij may have resulted in civilian casualties. It said another 13 people were killed in the strikes, but that it was unclear if they were IS fighters or civilians.
Almousa says most of the villagers fled before IS retook the extremists retook al-Bouweir but the men who remained were killed.
The Observatory and local residents said strikes on July 19 had killed dozens of civilians, including children. Al Qaeda’s Syrian branch was left reeling on Friday after its military chief was killed in an apparent army air strike, adding to confusion over the future path of the most powerful group opposing both President Bashar al-Assad and Islamic State.
“It’s going to take a lot to go through, then start connecting the dots”, he said.
Syrian activists say the Islamic State group has captured a village in northern Syria from a US -backed, Kurdish-led fighters and killed 24 civilians there.
The U.S. -backed Syrian Democratic Forces, made up of mostly Kurdish fighters, have reached the outskirts of Manbij but now face dug-in Islamic State fighters.
“And there, we’re already beginning to gain and exploit intelligence that’s helping us map their network of foreign fighters”, Carter 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.
But in a statement released Wednesday, the USA -led anti-ISIS coalition claimed 360 ISIS targets in Syria and Iraq had been destroyed by both manned aircraft and drones between July 19 and 25 alone.
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The SDF forces have advanced to the city’s outskirts and have given ISIS two 48-hour deadlines to leave the city, in order to prevent civilian casualties.
