US-led Syria air raid kills scores of relatives of ISIL fighters

BEIRUT // Dozens of relatives of ISIL fighters were killed on Friday in the latest US-led strikes on Syria, hours after the United Nations urged states striking the extremist group to protect civilians.

Bombing raids by the US-led coalition have hit ISIL positions across Iraq and Syria since the group claimed responsibility for the bombing of a concert in Manchester, England, on Monday.

Scores of civilians, many of them families of ISIL members, have been killed in bombing raids in recent days on the eastern Syrian town of Mayadeen, held by ISIL since 2014.

Early on Friday, at least 80 relatives of ISIL fighters were killed in the bombardment, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

“The toll includes 33 children. They were families seeking refuge in the town’s municipal building,” said Observatory head Rami Abdel Rahman.

“This is the highest toll for relatives of ISIL members in Syria,” he said.

Coalition strikes on the town killed 37 civilians on Thursday night after 15 had been killed on Wednesday, according to the Britain-based Observatory.

The US military on Friday confirmed that it had struck “near Mayadeen” on Wednesday and Thursday, but said it was “still assessing the results of those strikes”, according to Pentagon spokesman Eric Pahon.

The US military claims it takes every precaution to avoid hitting civilians, but the UN on Friday urged parties bombing ISIL to do more.

UN human rights chief Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein said “all states” whose air forces are active in the anti-ISIL missions needed “to take much greater care to distinguish between legitimate military targets and civilians”.

The Observatory gathered its information from civilian and medical sources on the ground in Mayadeen.

The town has taken an influx of displaced families from ISIL-held territory in Iraq and Syria, including its bastion, Raqqa.

It is in Syria’s oil-rich east near the border with Iraq — a region considered a prize by many of ISIL’s enemies, including the Syrian army.

Troops loyal to president Bashar Al Assad have been waging a multi-pronged offensive east to reach the border territory.

They scored a key victory this week by linking the capital Damascus to the Unesco World Heritage city of Palmyra in central Syria.

It was the first time the government was in full control of the Damascus-Palmyra motorway since 2014, according to Mr Abdel Rahman.

With backing from Russian air strikes, government fighters “pushed ISIL fighters out of desert territory amounting to more than 1,000 square kilometres,” he said on Friday.

A decades-old ally of Damascus, Moscow has been carrying out air strikes in support of Mr Al Assad’s troops since September 2015 — a year after the American-led coalition began targeting ISIL in Syria.

The coalition is now backing twin ground offensives against ISIL’s last main bastion cities — Raqqa in Syria and Mosul in neighbouring Iraq.

The 68-member coalition began bombing ISIL in Iraq in the summer of 2014, and expanded operations to Syria on September 23 that year.

On Thursday, a Pentagon investigation concluded that 105 civilians died in an air raid on an ISIL weapons cache in Mosul in March.

Before the revelation, the US military had said coalition air strikes in Iraq and Syria had “unintentionally” killed 352 civilians since 2014.

Human rights groups put the number much higher, and the Observatory this week reported the highest monthly civilian death toll for the coalition’s operations in Syria.

It said between April 23 and May 23, coalition strikes killed 225 civilians in Syria, including dozens of children.

Reports of civilian casualties in the air campaign have swelled in recent days.

On May 20, US defence secretary Jim Mattis said US president Donald Trump had instructed the Pentagon to “annihilate” ISIL in Syria in a bid to prevent escaped foreign fighters from returning home.

The president has “directed a tactical shift from shoving ISIS out of safe locations in an attrition fight to surrounding the enemy in their strongholds so we can annihilate ISIS,” Mr Mattis said, using an acronym for ISIL.

But the Pentagon has denied that its rules of engagement have changed and insists that the coalition continues to strike only “military-appropriate targets”.

* Agence France-Presse