US air campaign to beat ISIS in Syria killed 3,300 civilians
▶ Coalition ready to reassess figures as UK-based monitor challenges findings
Air strikes by the US-led coalition to defeat ISIS have killed more than 3,300 civilians in Syria, according to a monitoring group.
In the four years since the coalition began its bombing campaign against the extremist group there, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said air attacks killed 3,331 civilians.
That included 826 children and 615 women, the UK-based group said.
That number is significantly higher than the one given by the coalition, which has admitted to unintentionally causing the deaths of 1,061 civilians in Iraq and Syria.
ISIS swept across Syria and Iraq in 2014, capturing large areas of territory in an offensive that caught the international community by surprise. The terrorists took control of major cities in both countries, including Mosul and Raqqa, ruling more than 10 million people at its peak.
In August of that year, ISIS fighters overran the town of Sinjar and threatened a genocide of the Yazidi people.
The United States began an air campaign to stop that and the next month widened its operations to include targets in Syria.
Since then, ISIS has been reduced to pockets of territory in Syria, and is reverting to guerrilla operations.
The fight to recapture urban areas under ISIS control involved air strikes in densely populated urban areas.
Airwars, which describes itself as “a collaborative, notfor-profit transparency project aimed both at tracking and archiving international military actions in conflict zones such as Iraq, Syria and Libya”, estimates that at least 6,575 civilians have been killed in about 30,000 coalition air strikes in Iraq and Syria since the campaign began.
Responding to the Syrian Observatory report yesterday, coalition spokesman Col Sean Ryan said: “Any civilian death is a tragedy and the coalition makes every effort to avoid civilian deaths in the battlefield, and to minimise the impact of our operations on civilian populations and infrastructures.” Commenting on the discrepancy between independent monitors and the coalition’s figures, Col Ryan said: “The coalition is not claiming to provide exact numbers, but saying it is based on the best available evidence, and we are acknowledging ‘at least’ a certain number of civilian casualties caused by coalition strikes.
“The coalition has been clear we are willing to work with anyone on allegations, and we will re-open and re-assess past cases based on new or compelling evidence.”
In a report into the Raqqa campaign released in June, Amnesty International said an investigation had revealed “prima facie evidence that several coalition attacks which killed and injured civilians violated international humanitarian law”.
An estimated 2,000 civilians were killed in the fight, in which Kurdish-led forces relied heavily on US air power.
Amnesty also criticised the coalition’s reporting of its strikes in Raqqa and Mosul as “woefully inadequate” for not providing accurate strike locations, which means they cannot be properly investigated.