US denies Syria mosque raid
Forty-two killed in air strike that was aimed at Al Qaeda
BEIRUT // The US military says it carried out an air raid in northern Syria against an Al Qaeda target, but denies deliberately hitting a mosque where 42 people were killed, according to an independent monitor.
The US-led coalition has been bombing extremist groups in Syria for several years. Hundreds of civilians have been unintentionally killed in the country and in neighbouring Iraq.
“We did not target a mosque, but the building that we did target, which was where the meeting took place, is about 15 metres from a mosque that is still standing,” said Col John Thomas, spokesman for US central command (Centcom). But his assessment of the state of mosque appeared to be at odds with what happened at the scene, where rescue workers struggled to pull survivors and bodies from the rubble.
“US forces conducted an air raid on an Al Qaeda meeting on March 16 in Idlib, Syria, killing several terrorists,” Centcom said.
It later explained that the precise location of the strike was unclear but that it was the same one that was widely reported to have hit the village mosque in Al Jineh, in Aleppo province, about 30 kilometres from Aleppo city.
“We are going to look into any allegations of civilian casualties in relation to this strike,” said Col Thomas, when asked about reports from the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. Rami Abdel Rahman, the head of the Observatory, an anti-Syrian government monitoring service based in Britain, said: “The raids by unidentified warplanes targeted a mosque in Aleppo province during evening prayers, killing 42 people, most of them civilians.” More than 100 people were wounded, and many were still trapped under the rubble of the mosque, he said.
The village was held by rebel groups but there were no extremist factions present. Dozens of villagers were unaccounted for. Village resident Abu Muhammed said he heard “powerful explosions” when the mosque was hit. “It was right after prayers, at a time when there are usually religious lessons for men going on in it,” he said.
“I saw 15 bodies and lots of body parts in the debris when I arrived. We couldn’t even recognise some of the bodies.”
Rescuers were beginning to leave the wreckage but rushed back when they heard moaning from beneath the debris.
Video footage published by Halab Today, an online media group covering news in Aleppo, showed rubble where the mosque stood. A ceasefire was brokered by rebel backer Turkey and government ally Russia last December, but violence has continued across much of Syria.
The Observatory, which relies on a network of sources in Syria for its information, says it determines whose planes carry out raids according to type, location, flight patterns and munitions used. But the skies over Aleppo province were busy, with Syrian regime and Russian warplanes and US- led coalition aircraft carrying out raids. Russia began a military intervention in Syria in September 2015, and had dismissed allegations of civilian deaths in its strikes.
The US- led coalition, meanwhile, has been bombing militant groups in Syria since 2014.
This month, the coalition said at least 220 civilians had been unintentionally killed in its air raids since 2014. Critics said the real number was much higher.