Pentagon: 352 ‘civilians killed by US-led coalition airstrikes since 2014’
WASHINGTON: At least 352 civilians have been killed in US- led strikes against Daesh targets in Iraq and Syria since the operation began in 2014, the US military said in a statement on Sunday.
The Combined Joint Task Force, in its monthly assessment of civilian casualties from the US coalition’s operations against the militant group, said it was still assessing 42 reports of civilian deaths.
It added that 45 civilians were killed between November 2016 and March 2017.
It reported 80 civilian deaths from August 2014 to the present that had not previously been announced.
The report included 26 deaths from three separate strikes in March.
The military’s official tally is far below those of other outside groups.
Monitoring group Airwars said more than 3,000 civilians have been killed by coalition airstrikes.
Included in Sunday’s tally were 14 civilians killed by a strike in March that set off a secondary explosion, as well as 10 civilians who were killed in a strike on Daesh headquarters the same month.
“We regret the unintentional loss of civilian lives ... and express our deepest sympathies to the families and others affected by these strikes,” the Pentagon said in a statement.
In a separate statement, the Pentagon said a US service member in Iraq was killed on Saturday by an explosive device outside Mosul.
The Pentagon said the service member died from wounds sustained in an “explosive device blast.”
This is the fifth combat death in Iraq since the US launched military operations against Daesh in August 2014.
Daesh began growing in power in Iraq in early 2014 in the country’s west and in the summer of 2014 swept across much of the country’s north.
Since the beginning of the US campaign against Daesh in Iraq, the number of US troops in the country has steadily grown.
There are now more US forces in Iraq than any time since the 2011 US withdrawal, marking an intensifying war as Iraqi forces and the US- led coalition work to push Daesh out of the last pockets of territory the extremists control in Iraq.