Report claims that coalition has killed 9,600 civilians in fight with Isil
THE Us-led coalition killed as many as 9,600 civilians in the battle against Isil, a death toll from Western military action “not seen since the Vietnam War”, a monitoring group has said.
The coalition is responsible for more than a third of the estimated 25,000 civilian deaths in Syria and Iraq since launching its offensive against the jihadists in 2014, according to a new report by the Uk-based group Airwars.
Airwars found the West’s heavy use of explosive weapons unintentionally inflicted large numbers of casualties, despite the “precise” nature of many of those bombs. The figure is 10 times higher than the one given by the coalition, leading experts to describe it as the least transparent military campaign in United States history.
When discussing the battles against Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil), the coalition described a target-selection process grounded in meticulously gathered intelligence. However, Airwars claims in its report that the size of ammunition used may have undermined key benefits of so-called smart bomb technologies, especially in densely populated areas.
In the most widely covered civilian casualty incident, in the Iraqi city of Mosul on March 17, a coalition air strike killed at least 105 civilians. A 500lb bomb was dropped on a building in an attempt to target Isil snipers on the roof, but families had been hiding in lower levels. Isil was known to be using civilians as human shields and to shoot anyone who tried to flee.
The coalition has sought to downplay the number of civilian casualties, so far publicly admitting to only 883.