Beirut, Lebanon- US-backed fighters on Thursday gave the Islamic State group 48 hours to leave the battleground Syrian town of Manbij, after US-led air strikes nearby reportedly killed dozens of civilians.
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A local military council allied to the SDF, which has captured part of Manbij after weeks of fighting, has set Isis fighters a 48-hour deadline beginning Thursday to leave the city.
The US-backed opposition umbrella group the Syrian National Coalition (SNC) has issued a statement today calling for the US to immediately suspend all airstrikes against Syria for the duration of investigations into this week’s airstrikes around the city of Manbij.
On Monday, 21 people were also killed by USA -led coalition aircraft on Manbij’s northern Hazawneh quarter.
“This initiative is the last remaining chance for besieged members of Daesh (IS) to leave the town”.
Then, “a split second later”, the news site reports, “precision airpower explodes five targets simultaneously, blasting a series of buildings linked to the violent extremists.”Manbij is an ISIS hub and lies on a key supply route to the Islamic State group’s de facto capital of Raqqa”. ISIS has controlled Manbij since 2014, but the city is now under siege by a group of Kurdish militants backed by the United States. The rebels are also battling the army and its militia allies around the city of Aleppo, where around 300,000 people living in rebel-held neighborhoods have been cut off since pro-government forces seized the last road out of the city.
Stephen O’Brien, the U.N.’s emergency relief coordinator, said he is “gravely alarmed” by developments in eastern Aleppo.
“While the United Nations and our partners still have some stocks to respond to humanitarian needs, food in east Aleppo is expected to run out by the middle of next month”, he said.
The head of delegation for the International Committee of the Red Cross in Syria described the situation as “devastating and overwhelming”, with heavy and indiscriminate shelling and an “untold numbers of civilian casualties”.
“A coalition of Syrian opposition groups is calling on the USA -led coalition fighting the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) to suspend airstrikes pending an investigation into reports that dozens of civilians were killed this week”.
As discussions on the air strikes were continuing, at least 43 civilians, including 11 children, were killed in the bombardment of several rebel-held areas across Syria on July 21, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitor said.
“They blatantly call it “collateral damage” when it is the lives of the Syrian people which are being lost here,” he said to RT.
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“We were able to kind of check to see, yes, everybody’s holding a weapon or everybody’s manning a machine gun or looks like Daesh and we were able to then go in and strike those portions of convoys”, he said in justifying the strikes.
