Iraqis demand compensation after US probe into Mosul strike Nations bombing terror group failing to protect civilians: UN
MOSUL: Iraqi officials demanded compensation from the US-led coalition following an investigation into a March 17 airstrike in which the Pentagon acknowledged a US bomb targeting Daesh fighters in Mosul set off a series of explosions that killed more than 100 civilians.
However, several residents of the Mosul neighborhood told the AP on Friday there were no Daesh fighters or explosives inside the house struck by the US bomb.
“We call upon the international community and especially the US to compensate the victims,” said Nuraddin Qablan, the deputy president of the Nineveh provincial council. The US should rebuild the homes of all the victims affected by the strike, he said, “so that the psychological damage will be mitigated.”
Meanwhile, the UN urged all nations bombing terrorist targets in Syria to better distinguish between civilian and military targets.
UN human rights chief Zeid Ra’ad Al-Hussein said “all states” whose air forces are active in the anti-Daesh missions needed “to take much greater care to distinguish between legitimate military targets and civilians.”
Al-Hussein’s spokesman Rupert Colville told reporters in Geneva that identifying the air force responsible for civilian deaths is often difficult given the number of countries in the anti-Daesh coalition and the lack of credible information.
Al-Hussein underscored that civilians were now being hit by both sides in the conflict. “The same civilians who are suffering indiscriminate shelling and summary executions by (Daesh) are also falling victim to the escalating air- strikes,” he said in a statement.
The rights office has also received credible information that Daesh fighters slit the throats of eight people earlier this month who were accused of providing the coalition coordinates to guide strikes, Colville said.
The Pentagon released the March 17 findings Thursday, reporting the airstrike targeted two Daesh snipers in a single building, setting off a series of explosions that killed 105 civilians. The Pentagon report added that another 36 civilians may have been at the building at the time, but “there is insufficient evidence to determine their status or whereabouts at this time.”
Civil protection rescue teams reported recovering more than 200 bodies from the area in the days following the March 17 strike. A number of other houses in the area were also destroyed by clashes between Daesh fighters and US-backed Iraqi forces around the same time, according to residents interviewed by the AP, but the Pentagon investigation looked into the single March 17 airstrike that hit at 8:24 a.m. local time.
Residents of the Al-Jadida neighborhood, interviewed by the AP on Friday countered the Pentagon conclusions that there were two Daesh snipers in the house struck by the bomb and that secondary explosions caused by explosives packed into the house by the extremists were largely responsible for the high civilian death toll.
“There were no explosives in the house, only families,” said Ahmed Abdul Karim, who was sheltering in his own home across from the house hit on March 17. “There were children in the basement and in the garden is where the women were.”
The bombing is the largest single instance of civilian deaths confirmed by the coalition in the nearly three-year-old campaign against Daesh and brings the total number of civilians confirmed killed by the Pentagon in the anti-Daesh fight to 457. Independent monitoring groups put the total number of civilian killed much higher, estimating thousands have been killed in Iraq and Syria since 2014, according to tallies kept by Iraq Body Count and Airwars.