BEIRUT: Syrian state television said on Monday an air strike by a US-led coalition had killed 18 Iraqi refugees at a school in eastern Syria, but the coalition denied it. The state television report said the strike took place in a village in Hasaka province between the Euphrates River and the Iraqi border, an area where a US-led coalition is supporting local fighters against IS.
A spokesman for the coalition, Col Sean Ryan, said the report was false, adding “we are not tracking any coalition strikes today in Hasaka injuring or killing civilians”.
A war monitor, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, said the US-backed fighters had captured the village in fighting, but did not know if civilians had been killed by a strike there.
Last week, the rights group Amnesty International issued a report saying there was evidence the US-led coalition broke international humanitarian law with some of its strikes in Raqqa last year by endangering the lives of civilians.
The coalition rejected that, saying it applies “rigorous standards to our targeting process and takes extraordinary efforts to protect non-combatants”.
Fighting has intensified east of the Euphrates in recent weeks since the Syrian Democratic Forces, an alliance of Kurdish and Arab militias, resumed its campaign against IS.
Backed by the coalition, the SDF took swathes of northern and eastern Syria from IS last year, including the militants’ Syrian capital of Raqqa.
Syria govt expels IS from border town: Syria government forces ousted the IS group from a town near the border with Iraq on Monday after days of clashes to end a deadly incursion there, a monitor said.
On Friday, the militants used at least 10 suicide bombers in their offensive on Albu Kamal, quickly overrunning several of its neighbourhoods, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
It was the biggest attack on the town in the eastern province of Deir Ezzor since the militant group lost it to government forces in November 2017, the Britain-based monitor said.
On Monday, “regime forces and their allies regained control of the whole town of Albu Kamal after expelling IS from its northern and northwestern parts,” Observatory head Rami Abdel Rahman said.
After loyalist forces tried to surround them, the militants fled back into Syria’s vast Badiya desert, which stretches from the country’s centre to the border with Iraq,
he said. — Reuters/AFP
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