At least 35 civilians were killed by US-led airstrikes in Syria on Thursday evening, according to state media. The UN’s human rights chief has called on all sides to take greater care to protect civilian lives in the war-torn country.
The airstrikes in Deir-ez-Zor province hit the market in the city of Mayadeen, as well as a four-story building that was completely destroyed, Sana news agency reported.
According to the news agency, at least 35 civilians were killed, most of whom were women and children. Injuries have also been reported.
A spokesman for the US-led coalition confirmed that its forces did conduct airstrikes near Mayadeen on Thursday and Friday, while telling RT that they are in the process of assessing the results.
The US-led coalition "are very much pushed by the advance of the Syrian army and its allies, including Russia and Iran, and they need to clear the way for the forces that they support as quickly as possible," Ammar Waqqaf, director of Gnosos, a UK think-tank that focuses on crises in the Middle East told RT.
He warned that “we are actually expecting more deaths like that and more reckless bombings."
Waqqaf said, ”because the US and its coalition partners seem to be desperate to clear the way, they are not checking their intelligence more diligently,” adding, that the cost of civilian lives "to this sort of enterprise is raising by the day.”
Meanwhile, the UN’s high commissioner for human rights has called on all forces operating in Syria to be more careful to correctly distinguish between legitimate military targets and civilians when conducting airstrikes against Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL).
“The rising toll of civilian deaths and injuries already caused by airstrikes in Deir-ez-Zor and Al-Raqqa suggests that insufficient precautions may have been taken in the attacks,” Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein said in a Friday statement, as quoted by Reuters.
Hussein was referring to airstrikes carried out in mid-May that he said killed nearly two dozen farmworkers – most women – in a village in eastern Raqqa, as well as at least 59 civilians in residential areas of Deir al-Zor.
The UN human rights chief went on to describe some of the atrocities committed by IS in the region, noting that “scant attention is being paid by the outside world to the appalling predicament of the civilians trapped in these areas.”
Hussein’s comments came just one day after a Pentagon investigation admitted that more than 100 civilians had been killed in a US airstrike in Iraq in March, but largely placed the blame on IS.
According to the probe, the airstrike on a building in Mosul’s al-Jadida neighborhood triggered secondary explosions from devices planted by IS fighters.
The investigation also states that the episode began when two IS snipers began firing at troops from Iraq’s Counterterrorism Service, prompting the US-led coalition to respond with the airstrike.
The US-led coalition has increased the number of bombs dropped on IS by about 50 percent this year, according to statistics from the US Air Forces Central Command.
The figures show that a total of 14,192 rockets, bombs, and other munitions were dropped in the first four months of 2017, up from 9,442 during the same period in 2016.
The increased number of airstrikes “can be attributed to the increased pace of operations in both Iraq and Syria as we target and destroy ISIS,” Lieutenant Colonel Damien Pickart, a spokesman for Air Force Central Command said on Tuesday, as quoted by USA Today.