ALEPPO, Syria, Aug. 23 (UPI) — A human rights monitoring group says it has documented more than 200 civilians killed in the U.S.-led coalition bombing campaign in Syria since it began last September.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britian-based group that utilizes a network of sources on the ground monitoring Syria’s civil war, reports at least 206 civilians — including more than 100 women and children — perished during airstrikes on oil facilities, buildings and vehicles in the country’s Hasakah, Deir Ezzor, Raqqa, Aleppo and Idlib provinces.
The coalition, known as Operation Inherent Resolve, formed last summer in response to the Islamic State seizing large swaths of territory in Syria and Iraq.
Led by the United States, the coalition’s members are separated in groups: Australia, Denmark, France, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom bomb IS targets in Iraq, while Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates strike IS positions in Syria. Canada and Jordan, alongside U.S. forces, conduct strikes in both nations.
SOHR documented the deaths of 3,414 people in coalition bombing in Syria since September 2014, including 3,061 IS militants and 136 fighters with the Nusra Front, al-Qaida’s Syrian affiliate.
U.S. officials have previously said the coalition killed at least 15,000 IS militants with more than 5,500 airstrikes in Iraq and Syria since August 2014.
On Friday U.S. officials said the coalition killed Fadhil Ahmad al-Hayali, the second command in IS behind Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, during an airstrike in Iraq on Aug. 18.
SOHR condemned the killing of civilians by coalition forces and called a halt to military operations in civilian areas. It also accused the international community of turning a “deaf ear” to the pleas of the Syrian people in “establishing the state of democracy, justice, equality and freedom as well as sentencing those who have killed them and violated their rights.”
SOHR reported in June that more than 230,000 people have been killed in Syria’s civil war since it began in 2011, while United Nations humanitarian official Stephen O’Brien earlier this month put the figure at 250,000.
