27 civilians killed in US-led raids in Syria’s Raqa
beirut — US-led coalition strikes on Sunday killed 27 civilians in part of Syria’s Raqa city held by the Daesh group, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitor said.
Seven children were among the dead in the strikes that “hit the densely-populated Al Badu area in the centre of the city,” Observatory director Rami Abdel Rahman said on Monday.
Once a militant stronghold, more than half of Raqa city has fallen to the Syrian Democratic Forces, an alliance of Kurdish and Arab fighters that entered the city in June. The SDF is heavily backed by the US-led coalition, which has regularly launched air strikes against the militants that have reportedly killed scores of civilians.
According to the Britain-based Observatory, at least 125 civilians have been killed in a week of USled strikes on Raqa city, including those who died on Sunday.
“There are civilians killed each day in coalition strikes... The closer the fighting gets to the denselypopulated city centre, the more civilian deaths there are,” Abdel Rahman said.
The coalition, which operates in both Syria and neighbouring Iraq, says it takes all possible measures to avoid civilian casualties. In August, it acknowledged the deaths of 624 civilians in its strikes in Syria and Iraq since 2014, but rights groups say the number is much higher.
Meanwhile, three Syrian opposition camps met in Riyadh on Monday to try to forge a unified front for what the UN hopes will be a substantive round of peace negotiations in October.
The High Negotiations Committee held an hours-long meeting in a Riyadh compound with delegations from two other moderate camps, the so-called Cairo and Moscow groupings. —