60 killed in US strike on prison run by Daesh

beirut — US-led coalition air strikes killed nearly 60 people at a Syrian prison run by the Daesh group, a monitor said Tuesday, as Washington insisted the militants remain its only target.

The coalition has been hitting Daesh in Syria and Iraq since mid-2014 but has also been involved in recent confrontations with President Bashar Al Assad’s forces, raising fears of the United States being drawn into Syria’s civil war.

Monday’s strikes hit an Daeshrun jail in Syria’s Mayadeen at dawn, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based war monitor.

Observatory chief Rami Abdel Rahman told the strikes killed 42 prisoners and 15 militants in Mayadeen, a large town in the eastern province of Deir Ezzor.

Most of Deir Ezzor province is controlled by the militants and it has been the target of air strikes by both the coalition and the Syrian army and its Russian ally.

The US-led coalition said last week that it had killed IS’s top cleric Turki Binali in a May 31 strike on Mayadeen.

The militants, who seized control of large parts of Syria and Iraq three years ago, are under pressure in both countries.

United States-backed forces are pushing to oust them from their last major urban strongholds, Raqa in Syria and Mosul in Iraq.

But Washington’s involvement in Syria has also become increasingly complex. —