US-led coalition killed 1,600 civilians in Raqqa, says Amnesty International
Monitors conclude 18-month investigation into 2017 bombing of Syrian territory then held by Islamic State
Beirut — The US-backed assault to drive Islamic State (IS) from its Syrian capital Raqqa in 2017 killed more than 1,600 civilians, 10 times the toll the coalition itself has acknowledged, Amnesty International and the monitoring group Airwars says.
Amnesty and Airwars, a London-based group set up in 2014 to monitor the impact of the US-led campaign against IS, spent 18 months researching civilian deaths including two months on the ground in Raqqa, they said. “Our conclusive finding after all this is that the US-led coalition’s military offensive (US, UK and French forces) directly caused more than 1,600 civilian deaths in Raqqa,” they said. They said the cases they had documented probably amounted to violations of international humanitarian law and called for coalition members to create a fund to compensate victims and their families. The coalition said in response to the report that it takes “all reasonable measures to minimise civilian casualties” and that there are still o...
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