Today, the AFP is reporting that coalition airstrikes in the Syrian town of Meyadeen killed 80 people, 33 of whom were civilians. They’re being described as “relatives of ISIS fighters”.
A US-led coalition air strike on the eastern Syrian town of Mayadeen early Friday killed at least 80 relatives of Islamic State group fighters, a monitoring group told AFP.
“The toll includes 33 children. They were families seeking refuge in the town’s municipal building,” said Rami Abdel Rahman, head of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
“This is the highest toll for relatives of IS members in Syria,” Abdel Rahman told AFP. — Daily Mail
During the presidential campaign, Donald Trump said:
“The other thing with the terrorists is you have to take out their families, when you get these terrorists, you have to take out their families. They care about their lives, don’t kid yourself. When they say they don’t care about their lives, you have to take out their families,” Trump said.
Trump said he would “knock the hell out of” ISIS, and criticized the U.S. for “fighting a very politically correct war.”
Intentionally targeting civilians, including “families of terrorists”, is a war crime.
Yesterday, the Pentagon’s investigation confirmed what we suspected back in March, a US airstrike had caused a building collapse which killed over 130+ civilians.
A U.S.-led airstrike carried out on a building in Mosul in March detonated a cache of Islamic State explosives, killing more than 100 Iraqi civilians, the Pentagon said Thursday.
An unclassified summary of the U.S. military investigation into the March 17 incident determined that the 500-pound bomb used in the strike set off additional explosives that were placed in the building by the Islamic State, causing the collapse of the structure.
The blast killed two Islamic State snipers and 105 civilians, including four in an adjacent house in western Mosul’s al-Jadida district, the summary said. Thirty-six additional civilians who were allegedly killed could not be accounted for, because of “insufficient evidence to determine their status or whereabouts.” In the days after the strike, some reports said that more than 200 bodies were pulled from the rubble. — WaPo
The investigation also debunked the spin Gen. Townsend gave a week after that strike, when he claimed civilians had been intentionally positioned to serve as shields. Prior to that, coalition forces had claimed a car bomb took out the building. Since there was no car-bomb crater, that explanation was quickly challenged by reporters:
In addition to determining the cause of the building collapse, the investigation also determined that the mass of people killed in the strike had been invited to take shelter on the building’s lower floors by a neighbor. The Islamic State also warned them to leave, according to locals interviewed during the investigation. This account is at odds with what the U.S.-led coalition’s top officer suggested 11 days after the strike, during a Pentagon news briefing. At the time, Gen. Stephen Townsend said that it appeared that the civilians were herded there by the Islamic State and were being used as shields. — WaPo
Meanwhile, Airwars and Foreign Policy have confirmed that the US’s coalition partners have killed at least 80 civilians in airstrikes. But none of the coalition partners will acknowledge this.
Cross-posted to NotMeUs.org | @subirgrewal