ANSD : Air strike kills 10 civilians in Syria: activist group

FRI 26 - 4 - 2024

Date: Jun 13, 2018
Source: The Daily Star

Air strike kills 10 civilians in Syria: activist group

_{Agence France Presse}
BEIRUT: An air raid on a village in northeast Syria held by the militant group Daesh (ISIS) killed at least 10 civilians including three children on Tuesday, a Britain-based activist group said.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the strikes on Tal al-Shair in the northeastern province of Hassakeh were carried out by the U.S.-led coalition fighting Daesh in Syria and neighboring Iraq since 2014.

There was no immediate confirmation from the coalition of the strike, the latest in a series of raids to have reportedly caused civilian casualties in the area in past weeks.

Tal al-Shair lies in a small pocket still held by IS fighters near the Iraqi border in the south of Hassakeh, where a Kurdish-Arab alliance backed by the coalition has been battling the militants in recent days.

According to the Observatory, a coalition air strike last week killed 11 civilians in the same Daesh-held area, and another 12 lost their lives in coalition raids on June 1.

The coalition told AFP it was carrying out an investigation into the June 1 allegation.

Earlier this month, it admitted to nine more civilians deaths, bringing to 892 the total number of civilians it acknowledges to have killed since it intervened in Iraq and Syria.

Other activist groups like the Observatory and Airwars say the toll is much higher.

The Britain-based Observatory, which relies on sources inside Syria, says it determines whose planes carried out strikes according to type, location, flight patterns and munitions involved.

Daesh has lost most of the cross-border caliphate it declared in 2014.

In Syria it was pushed back by separate offensives -- one by Russia-backed regime troops and another by the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces alliance.

But the militants still hold slithers of eastern Syria and have a presence in the vast Badiya desert running from the centre of the country to the border with Iraq.

More than 350,000 people have been killed in Syria's war since it started in 2011 with a brutal crackdown on anti-government protests.

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