Central Command said that they were “aware of the loss of life” and were carrying out “further investigation”, while insisting that all of their strikes against Mosul overnight “comply with the Law of Armed Conflict”. I didn’t know if it was a shelter, I didn’t know we couldn’t go there.
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At least 200 civilians are believed to have been killed following U.S. airstrikes in western Mosul. Estimates of the death toll range from 137 to more than 200 people.
There has been no official announcement by the USA that restrictions created to prevent civilian casualties have been lifted, Alice reports.
“These reported casualty levels are comparable with some of the worst periods of Russian activity in Syria”, Airwars.org said in a statement.
The insurgents have also used civilians as human shields and opened fire on them as they try to escape Islamic State-held neighborhoods, fleeing residents said.
“Dealing with Daesh’s armed targets in the residential areas have become nearly impossible to take place without civilian casualties”, al-Hilali said. Some of the questions the military is asking are: Did the United States strike the buildings that the civilians were allegedly killed in, and if so, why did the U.S. not know civilians were there? USA military officials insisted on Friday that the rules of engagement had not changed. It did not specify which coalition nation carried out the strike.
The March 17 strike claimed at least 137 civilian lives according to residents, which compares in number to the 130 killed in the 2015 terrorist attack in Paris.
On Tuesday, Jasim al-Attiyah, deputy minister of the Iraqi Migration and Displaced Ministry, told Xinhua that the fierce battles brought the total number of civilians who left their homes in Mosul’s both eastern and western sides to 415,000 since the beginning of the military offensive in October to reclaim the IS’s largest stronghold in Iraq.
Videos of the aftermath of the airstrike released Friday show scores of dead bodies being pulled out of a completely destroyed building in western Mosul. Photos emerged of dismembered children and piles of blue body bags.
Iraqi government forces have paused in their push to recapture western Mosul from Islamic State because of the high rate of civilian casualties, a security forces spokesman said. The two explosions leveled the block.
An investigation has been opened “to determine the facts surrounding this strike and the validity of the allegation of civilian casualties”, it added.
“People are stuck between a rock and a hard place”, he said. “Because 400,000 people trapped in the Old City in that situation of panic and penury may inevitably lead to the cork popping somewhere, sometime, presenting us with a fresh outflow of large-scale proportions”, said Bruno Geddo, UNHCR representative in Iraq.
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It also confirmed it would investigate a coalition strike in Raqqa, north-west Syria, in which at least 33 people were killed.
