US-led airstrikes kill over dozen civilians in northern Syria

A so-called monitoring group says more than a dozen civilians have lost their lives when the US-led coalition purportedly fighting the Daesh Takfiri terrorist group carried out a string of aerial attacks against an area in Syria’s militant-held northern province of Raqqah.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said (SOHR) said on Wednesday that the airstrikes targeted the village of al-Baruda, located about 15 kilometers west of the provincial capital city of Raqqah, leaving at least 16 civilians dead.

The Britain-based monitoring group added that five young siblings were among those killed in the aerial raids.

On May 15, a US-led airstrike targeted the city of Abu Kamal in Syria’s eastern province of Dayr al-Zawr near the border with Iraq. Nearly two dozen civilians lost their lives as a result of the attack.

The SOHR noted that some of those killed in the strike were civilians displaced from both Raqqah province and neighboring Iraq.

The development came less than two days after a US-led aerial attack in Raqqah killed 12 women.

The observatory said the strike had hit vehicles carrying farm workers home from fields in the east of the embattled Syrian province.

The US-led coalition has been conducting airstrikes against what are said to be Daesh targets inside Syria since September 2014 without any authorization from the Damascus government or a UN mandate. 

The city of Raqqah, which lies on the northern bank of the Euphrates River, was overrun by Daesh terrorists in March 2013, and was proclaimed the center for most of the Takfiris’ administrative and control tasks the next year.

SS