“At least 23 civilians, among them eight children and six women, were killed Wednesday before dawn by airstrikes carried out by the US-led coalition, targeting a village controlled by Daesh (ISIS or ISIL) on the Eastern banks of the Euphrates river,” the so-called Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said, World News reported.
It added that all of those killed were members of the same family and had taken shelter at the location when they were killed.
The US-led coalition of 68 nations 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 military alliance has repeatedly been accused of targeting and killing civilians. It has also been largely incapable of fulfilling its declared aim of destroying the Daesh Takfiri terrorist group.
Washington has long been accused of colluding with Daesh to provide safe passage and logistic support to the members of the militant group in conflict zones.
United Nations war crimes investigators has reported that the US-led coalition’s aerial back up for the Kurdish forces to take control of Raqqa from ISIL have thus far killed hundreds of civilians and displaced tens of thousands more.
The UN investigators stressed that intensified US-led coalition air raids on ISIL’s strongholds in Raqqa are causing a “staggering loss of civilian life”.
Lama Fakih, deputy Middle East director at Human Rights Watch (HRW) said that “the battle for Raqqa is not just about defeating ISIL, but also about protecting and assisting the civilians who have suffered under ISIL rule for three and a half years.”
“Coalition members and local forces should demonstrate concretely that the lives and rights of hundreds of thousands of civilians in Raqqa are a parallel priority in the offensive,” Fakih added.
Pentagon chief James Mattis had said that the US is “accelerating the tempo” of the fight against ISIL, and that civilian deaths should be anticipated as a “fact of life”.