Six civilians, including a child, were among at least 22 people killed in US airstrikes on the Islamic State group’s de facto Syrian capital on Saturday and yesterday, a monitor said.
The rest of the dead in the raids on the city of Raqa were fighters from the Islamic State group, formerly known as the Islamic Sate of Iraq and the Levant, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
Dozens of people were also wounded.
The US-led coalition, which launched an air war against the Islaimic State in Syria in September last year, said it had carried out “significant” air strikes against Raqa.
“The significant air strikes tonight were executed to deny DAESH the ability to move military capabilities throughout Syria and into Iraq,” coalition spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Gilleran said, using an Arabic-language acronym for the Islamic State group. “This was one of the largest deliberate engagements we have conducted to date in Syria and it will have debilitating effects on Daesh’s ability to move from Raqa.”
Coalition forces “successfully engaged multiple targets” throughout Raqa, the statement said, destroying Islamic State structures and transit routes.
The strikes “have severely constricted terrorist freedom of movement,” it added.
Washington is leading a coalition fighting Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, where the extremist group has proclaimed an Islamic “caliphate” in territory under its control.
The group emerged in Syria in 2013, and now controls around half the country’s territory, although much of the land it holds is unpopulated desert.
More than 230,000 people have been killed in Syria since the conflict began in March 2011.
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