More than 1,600 civilians were killed in four months during the US-led international anti-jihadist coalition offensive against the Islamic State (IS) group in the Syrian city of Raqqa in 2017, Amnesty International reported on Thursday. . Former de facto capital of the self-proclaimed "caliphate" in 2014 by the IS, the city of Raqqa, in eastern Syria, was destroyed at nearly 80% during a major offensive conducted in 2017 by the international coalition to dislodge jihadists.
"Many aerial bombardments were not accurate and tens of thousands of artillery shells were fired indiscriminately" during the offensive, Donatella Rovera, Amnesty International's crisis management advisor, said on Thursday. Amnesty conducted this investigation in collaboration with Airwars, an NGO that lists the civilian victims of all aerial bombardments around the world.
States called to their responsibilities
Their results are the result of months of field research and data analysis, including more than two million satellite images scrutinized by 3,000 volunteers associated with the project, launched in November by Amnesty. The authors of this unprecedented investigation urged the major coalition countries, including the United States, the United Kingdom and France, to be more transparent and to take up their responsibilities. "Amnesty International and Airwars are calling on coalition forces to stop denying the shocking scale of civilian deaths and the destruction that their raid on Raqa has caused," the report said. "The coalition has admitted to being responsible for the deaths of 159 civilians, about 10 percent of the total number of victims," Amnesty said.
According to Donatella Rovera, the high toll of civilian casualties is particularly related to intelligence flaws. In many cases, residential buildings were targeted, killing entire families who lived or were sheltered there, for lack of sufficient upstream supervision. The presence of civilians in these buildings would have been "detected" "if there had been adequate surveillance of these buildings," she told AFP.