An unprecedented report by Amnesty International and the monitoring group Airwars revealed that US-backed assault to drive ISIS from the city of Raqqa in 2017 killed more than 1,600 civilians. The report said that many of the cases documented by Amnesty International likely amount to violations of international humanitarian law and warrant further investigation.
In a joint report released on Thursday, Amnesty said that its researchers spent a total of around two months on the ground in Raqqa, carrying out site investigations at more than 200 strike locations and interviewing more than 400 witnesses and survivors.
Amnesty International’s innovative “Strike Trackers” project also identified when each of the more than 11,000 destroyed buildings in Raqqa was hit.
Donatella Rovera, Senior Crisis Response Adviser at Amnesty International, said that the “international coalition forces razed Raqqa, but they cannot erase the truth.”
Amnesty International and Airwars called upon the international coalition forces to “end their denial about the shocking scale of civilian deaths and destruction caused by their offensive in Raqqa.” They also said that the international coalition members must create a fund to ensure that victims and their families receive full reparation and compensation.
The international coalition on late March admitted that more than 1,250 civilians were killed in 34,038 airstrikes it launched against the ISIS extremist group in Iraq and Syria during a more than four-year period. (Source: Syrian Coalition’s Media Department)
