Syria: At least 1,600 civilians killed by US coalition in Raqqa, probe finds | Middle East Eye
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A US-led military coalition killed thousands of civilians in Raqqa during its “indiscriminate” bombing campaign against the Islamic State group (IS) in Syria, an investigation released on Thursday has found.
In a new joint report, the Airwars monitoring group and human rights advocate Amnesty International said the US-led coalition was responsible for the deaths of at least 1,600 civilians during its bombardment of northeastern Syria.
Both groups used open source data, which included thousands of social media posts and other material, to build a database of more than 1,600 civilians reportedly killed in coalition strikes between June to October 2017.
The organisations said they had gathered the names of more than 1,000 victims. Amnesty added that it had managed to directly verify 641 of these names on the ground in Raqqa, the eastern Syrian city IS was headquartered in.
The groups noted one incident where four families had been “wiped out in an instant” after the US-led coalition bombed a Raqqa neighbourhood on 25 September 2017.
