Air strikes by US-led forces have killed 553 Islamist fighters and 32 civilians during a month-long campaign in Syria, a monitoring group that tracks the violence said yesterday.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the vast majority of the deaths, 464, were militants from Islamic State (IS), formerly known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, which has seized large areas of Syria and neighboring Iraq.
The attacks also killed 57 members of the al-Qaeda-affiliated Nusra Front, the Observatory said. Six of the civilians were children and five were women, it added.
US Central Command spokesman Colonel Patrick Ryder on Saturday said that Washington took “reports of civilian casualties or damage to civilian facilities seriously and we have a process to investigate each allegation.”
Close to 200,000 people have been killed in Syria’s three-year civil war, according to the UN.
Coalition strikes have hit the Syrian provinces of Aleppo, Deir al-Zor, Idlib, Raqqa and al-Hassakah, the Observatory said.
Meanwhile, Iraqi Kurdish lawmakers on Wednesday agreed to send much-needed reinforcements to fellow Kurds battling to stop the key Syrian border town of Kobane from falling into the hands of IS.
The approval came as Turkey criticized US air drops of ammunition and weapons to Kobane’s Kurdish defenders, with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan saying some of the deliveries had fallen into the wrong hands.
Backed by air strikes from a US-led coalition, Kurdish militia have been defending Kobane against a fierce IS offensive for more than a month.
The town on the Turkish border has become a crucial battleground in the fight against IS, an extremist Sunni Muslim group that has seized control of large parts of Syria and Iraq.
Turkey said this week it would allow Iraqi Kurd peshmerga fighters to travel to relieve Kobane’s defenders, and the Iraqi region’s parliament approved the move on Wednesday.
“The Kurdistan parliament decided to send forces to Kobane with the aim of supporting the fighters there and protecting Kobane,” speaker Yusef Mohammed Sadeq said.
Mustafa Qader, responsible for the peshmerga, said a decision would be made in the coming days about the number to be sent.
He did not say when the forces would arrive in Syria, but did say “they will remain there until they are no longer needed.”
Iraqi Kurdistan has its own borders, government and security forces, which have played a leading role in northern Iraq in combatting IS.
After initially losing ground, the Kobane Kurds have fought back hard, with the US military saying they had halted the IS advance and held most of the town.
They got a boost this week by the first US air drop of weapons and other supplies.
Fighting continued in Kobane, with at least six US-led air strikes reported to have hit IS positions.
Most of the coalition raids have focused on Iraq, and Washington said a dozen air strikes had helped fend off an IS assault on the country’s strategic Mosul dam.
Meanwhile, Syria claimed to have destroyed two of three jet fighters reportedly seized by IS fighters. The militants were reported to have taken the MiG-21s and MiG-23s from military airports now under IS control in the northern provinces of Aleppo and Raqa.
They “were flying three old planes, but our aircraft immediately took off and destroyed two of them as they were landing. The third plane was hidden” by the militants, Syrian state media quoted Syrian Minister of Information Omran al-Zohbi as saying.
Zohbi downplayed the threat from the remaining plane, saying it was “unusable” and that Syrian forces would eventually destroy it.
On Wednesday, John Allen, who is coordinating the US-led campaign against the jihadist group, said Britain could join the US “shoulder to shoulder” in operations against Islamic State militants in Iraq and Syria.
Speaking after meeting the British foreign secretary, he told the BBC “we were shoulder to shoulder in Iraq, we were shoulder to shoulder in Afghanistan.”
Asked whether this meant that Britain would be involved in Syria as well as Iraq, Allen said: “Well they will support us I think in the strategy... That’s a conversation we’re having right now.”
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