Officials said three separate airstrikes were conducted on three different militant tactical units in the Manbij area – a stronghold for the Islamic State terror group, also known regionally by the acronyms ISIS and ISIL.
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Five years of conflict have killed more than 250,000 people, created Europe’s biggest refugee crisis since World War II and allowed the Islamic State to carve out its own territory across parts of Syria and neighboring Iraq.
According to the Guardian, the group claims that since the end of May, coalition strikes have killed a total of 104 civilians, including 29 children, 16 women and eight prisoners.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a monitoring group based in the United Kingdom, reported that the air strikes mistakenly identified and targeted the civilians as DAESH terrorists.
“The massacre also resulted in the injury of tens of others, some of them are in risky situations”, the SOHR report added.
The Turkey-based Syrian Institute for Justice said it feared the death toll could be far higher as rescuers continued to pull bodies from the rubble.
The groups condemned the attacks and called on coalition forces to step up efforts to prevent civilian deaths.
General Joe Votel, head of US Central Command, said the Manbij operation was a “very hard fight” with IS jihadists appearing in various locations. “The [SDF] also seized a significant amount of the city during the operation, which provided civilians the opportunity to escape”, the US-led coalition said in a statement on Tuesday.
On Monday, 21 people were killed in raids also believed to have been conducted by USA -led coalition aircraft on Manbij’s northern Hazawneh quarter.
The strikes, on Tuesday morning, targeted the villages of Tokhar and Hoshariyeh.
“This initiative is the last remaining chance for besieged members of Daesh (ISIS) to leave the town”, said the Manbij Military Council, part of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) alliance, using an Arabic acronym for the jihadist group.
The reports and the disparate casualty tolls could not be independently confirmed because the area is inaccessible to independent media.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported that at least 56 civilians were killed in air strikes Tuesday north of the ISIS-held city of Manbij, including 11 children.
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Airwars estimates that the total number of civilians killed in Syria by the US -led coalition is 1,422, at minimum, to date.
