By Kasim Ileri
WASHINGTON (AA) The U.S. military said Wednesday that 24 of its airstrikes in Iraq and Syria have killed 64 civilians and injured eight others in the past year.
“Sometimes civilians bear the brunt of military action but we do all we can to minimize those occurrences even at the cost of sometimes missing the chance to strike valid targets in real time,” U.S. Central Command spokesman Col. John Thomas said in a statement.
The strikes listed occurred between Nov. 20, 2015 and Sept. 10, 2016.
Although Thomas claimed the U.S. military lists the largest number of possible civilian casualties when it investigates allegations against one of its strike, independent sources and rights organizations have compiled numbers of civilian casualties that are nearly three times of U.S. figures.
An Amnesty International report last month said approximately 300 civilians have been killed in 11 U.S.-led coalition airstrikes in the past two years.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an organization collecting information and tracking civilian casualties inside Syrian, recently announced that the number of civilian casualties since September 2014 reached 680, including 169 children and 102 women.
Central Command said investigations were “informed by the military’s own records, combined with an exhaustive review of reports from outside sources from news media reports, non-governmental organizations and other U.S. Government departments and agencies”.
Including the latest disclosure, according to the Pentagon, a total of 119 civilians have been killed in U.S. airstrikes since 2014, and 37 have been injured.
The Air Force has conducted 12,354 airstrikes against Daesh since September 2014 with 6,992 in Iraq and 5,362 in Syria, according to military data.
Records also show that the campaign against Daesh in Iraq and Syria has since cost the U.S. about $9.3 billion.
[Photo: US-led coalition airstrkes against Daesh targets near Nawaran village on 23 October 2016. Phot0grapher: Emrah Yorulmaz/AA]
