Local Editor
Airstrikes carried out by a US-led coalition purporting to fight Daesh have killed at least 15 civilians, including three children, in northeastern Syria, a monitoring group says.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the strikes hit four Daesh-controlled villages in Hasakah Province on Thursday, killing the civilians. It said the death toll could rise.
The group also said that US-led airstrikes had also killed another eight civilians in a village in the same province on Wednesday. Separately, 15 civilians had been killed in US-led strikes on the town of al-Shadadi on Tuesday. With the Thursday fatalities, the group said, the US-led coalition was now responsible for a total of 38 civilian deaths in Hasakah only since Tuesday.
The US-led coalition has been conducting air raids against what are said to be the Daesh terrorists inside Syria since September 2014 without any authorization from Damascus or a UN mandate. The coalition has repeatedly been accused of targeting and killing civilians. It has also been largely incapable of fulfilling its declared aim of destroying Daesh.
Syria has been beset by crisis since March 2011, when an assortment of militants receiving backing from various foreign countries began an armed militancy against the government. According to a recent estimate by the Syrian Center for Policy Research, the foreign-backed militancy in Syria has claimed the lives of over 470,000 people, injured 1.9 million others, and displaced nearly half of the country’s pre-war population of about 23 million within or beyond its borders.
Source: Agencies
