US-led strikes killed 204 civilians in Syria’s Raqqah since March: Monitoring group

A so-called monitoring group says over 200 people, including women and children, have been killed in airstrikes carried out by the so-called US-led military coalition against Syria’s northern city of Raqqah since early March.

The UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said on Friday night that 204 civilians, including 32 children and 34 women, from the city and its surrounding areas, had been killed in the air raids since March 1.

It added that the aerial assaults had also inflicted injuries on dozens of civilians, “some of them had cases of amputation and others had permanent disabilities, while the property of citizens were damaged and destroyed.”

The monitoring group also said the latest casualties had been caused earlier on Friday, when coalition warplanes conducted an airstrike against Hamrat Ghanim village in the eastern countryside of Raqqah. At least five people, including two women, from a single family lost their lives and several other members of the same family sustained injuries in the air raid.

The US-led coalition has been conducting airstrikes against what are said to be Daesh targets inside Syria since September 2014 without any authorization from the Damascus government or a UN mandate.

The city of Raqqah, which lies on the northern bank of the Euphrates River, was overrun by Daesh terrorists in March 2013, and was proclaimed the center for most of the Takfiris’ administrative and control tasks the next year.

The US-led coalition has repeatedly been accused of targeting and killing civilians. It has also been largely incapable of fulfilling its declared aim of destroying Daesh.

Back in February, the monitoring group announced that coalition fighter jets had killed nearly 900 civilians, including 339 children and women, across the Syrian provinces of Raqqah, Hasakah, Aleppo, Idlib and Dayr al-Zawr since 2014.

Syria has been fighting different foreign-sponsored militant and terrorist groups since March 2011. UN Special Envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura estimated last August that more than 400,000 people had been killed in the crisis until then.