Beirut: US-led coalition targeting a village in northern Syria held by Daesh killed 28 civilians, including seven children, Syrian activists said on Friday.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said an aircraft belonging to the coalition struck the village of Al Ghandour late on Thursday previous night.
Observatory’s chief Rami Abdul Rahman said another 13 people were killed in the strikes but that he could not say if they were Daesh fighters or civilians. Al Ghandour is 24 kilometres northwest of the town of Manbij, a key hub in the extremist group’s Syria network and a supply route to Daesh’s de facto capital of Raqqa.
The international coalition had no immediate comment on the casualty figures reported by the Observatory. The bombings came a week after air strikes, also blamed by Syrian activists on US aircraft, killed at least 56 civilians in Daesh-held territory in northern Syria.
The Manbij area has seen extensive battles between Daesh extremists and US-backed Kurdish-led fighters, who have been advancing under the cover of air strikes by the US-led coalition. The town is encircled by the Kurdish-led forces.
The Kurdish-led forces were able to evacuate another 1,000 civilians from Manbij on Thursday, according to Mustafa Bali, a local media activist living in the town of Kobani or Ain Al Arab.
“There has been a lot of pressure on the militants in Manbij,” said Bali.
Late Thursday, the US Central Command, which is responsible for US forces in the Middle East, said in a statement that the American-backed coalition had conducted air strikes in the area of Manbij during the past 24 hours and that it was looking into whether an air strike had resulted in civilian casualties.
It was not clear if the Manbij-area strikes that CENTCOM cited involved strikes on Al Ghandour.
