Deadly air raid hits refugee shelter near Raqqa: SOHR

Activists say a suspected US-led coalition air raid struck a school sheltering displaced people near ISIL-held Raqqa.

The US-led coalition says its air raids have killed 220 civilians in Iraq and Syria since 2014 [File: EPA]

by Al Jazeera

Dozens of people were killed earlier this week in a suspected US-led coalition air raid that hit a school sheltering displaced people near Raqqa, ISIL’s self-declared capital in Syria, according to a monitoring group.

The UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) said on Wednesday that its activists had counted at least 33 bodies at the site near the village of al-Mansoura, west of Raqqa.

The group, which monitors Syria’s war via a network of contacts on the ground, said it believed the air raid at the school-turned-shelter had been carried out by the US-led coalition fighting ISIL, which stands for Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, and is also known as ISIS.

The air raid took place on Monday night, SOHR head Rami Abdulrahman told the Reuters news agency.

The attack was also reported by the activist-run Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently group, which said dozens of civilians were dead or still missing after the air raid.

The US-led coalition has escalated its aerial campaign against ISIL around Raqqa this month, causing numerous civilian casualties.

Earlier this month, the coalition said its raids in Syria and Iraq had unintentionally killed at least 220 civilians since 2014. But critics say the number is far higher.

Al Jazeera’s Hashem Ahelbarra, reporting from Beirut, said the school in al-Mansoura housed many refugees who had fled the fighting in Raqqa.

“This is an area where the US-led coalition has been launching air strikes to break the defence lines of ISIL in Raqqa,” he said.

“Some say that more than 30 people were killed in the strikes, other suggest that this number could be even higher.”

A spokesman for the US-led coalition has previously said that it does everything it can to avoid civilian casualties and that it investigates those that are reported as a result of its air raids.

The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a Kurdish-led group of militias backed by the US-led coalition, is fighting to isolate Raqqa ahead of an anticipated assault on the city, which the ISIL group has used as a command node to plan attacks abroad.

The head of the YPG militia, the strongest in the SDF, said last week that the offensive to retake Raqqa would begin in early April but a spokesman for the US Pentagon said no decision had yet been made.

Hundreds of thousands of people have been killed and millions more displaced since Syria’s conflict erupted in March 2011 with protests against President Bashar al-Assad.

The conflict has since escalated into a multi-front war that has facilitated the rise of armed groups and drawn in international powers, including the US.