War casualties ‘underestimated’

"It's high time the US authorities came clean about the full extent of the civilian damage." Lynn Maalouf, Amnesty International

SYRIA: The United States-led coalition fighting Islamic State militants has not taken enough precautions to avoid civilian casualties in Syria and has underestimated the impact of its operations on civilians, Amnesty International says.

‘‘It’s high time the US authorities came clean about the full extent of the civilian damage caused by coalition attacks in Syria,’’ Lynn Maalouf, deputy director for research at Amnesty International’s Beirut regional office, said sterday.

‘‘We fear the US-led coalition is significantly underestimating the harm caused to civilians in its operations in Syria.’’

Amnesty said as many as 300 civilians had been killed in 11 attacks conducted by the coalition since September 2014.

‘‘Analysis of available evidence suggests that in each of these cases, coalition forces failed to take adequate precautions to minimise harm to civilians and damage to civilian objects,’’ Maalouf said. ’’Some of these attacks may constitute disproportionate or otherwise indiscriminate attacks.’’

The Pentagon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In July the Pentagon disclosed that air strikes against militant targets in Iraq and Syria had killed 14 civilians between July 28 last year and April 29 this year.

The US military has in the past made similar disclosures of civilian deaths in its air strikes against militant groups in Iraq and Syria. The disclosures typically follow investigations lasting weeks or months to determine the veracity of reports of civilian deaths.

Meanwhile, Russia said yesterday it would extend a moratorium on air strikes on Aleppo into a ninth day, but a monitor and a civil defence official said that rebel-held parts of the divided city had been struck in recent days.

Defence ministry spokesman Major-General Igor Konashenkov said Russian and Syrian planes had not even approached, let alone bombed, the devastated city since last Wednes, when Russia suspended air strikes ahead of a pause in hostilities.

planes from Syria and Russia, which has been Damascus’s most powerful ally in its six-year-old civil war, would continue to stay out of a 10-kilometre zone around Aleppo.

But the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said air strikes had resumed since the lull in fighting ended on Sunday, focusing on major front lines, including in the city’s southwest. There had been no civilian deaths from air strikes inside eastern Aleppo, however.

Ibrahim Abu al-Laith, a civil defence official in eastern Aleppo, also said air strikes and shelling had hit the rebelheld half of the city near front lines in the past week.

‘‘There was artillery shelling ... and there were planes, the city was hit by several strikes,’’ he said.