A recent report by London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) revealed that the U.S.-led coalition killed 2,832 civilians in Syria, mostly in the northeastern Raqqa province, including 861 children and 617 women, since Sept. 23, 2014, the date it intervened in the Syrian civil war.
The monitoring group published the report on the fourth anniversary of U.S-led anti-Daesh coalition's intervention in Syria.
Respectively 249, 398, 1,753 and 432 civilians were killed in the four years of its involvement. While 1,856 civilians were killed after Donald Trump became the president of the U.S., the coalition caused death of 976 civilians during Barack Obama's tenure in the White House.
The U.S-led coalition was formed with participation of numerous countries in 2014 under the pretext of hindering Daesh's advance in Syrian and Iraqi territories.
Washington firstly launched a surveillance mission in Syria against Daesh in September 2014, and conducted its first raids in the same month with other coalition forces.
The U.S. often faces accusations of civilian massacres especially during air raids, which have been mostly denied by coalition officials. The U.S. became a deliberate combatant in Syria with a missile strike on the Shayrat Airbase in April 2017 after Bashar Assad's regime used chemical weapons on civilians.
The Pentagon had also begun to support the Syrian wing of PKK terrorist organization - the People's Protection Units (YPG) - within this framework, which caused tension with its NATO ally, Turkey.The U.S. government has long supported the YPG terrorist group with a vast amount of military equipment and heavy armaments to fight Daesh. Turkey insistently said that a terror group cannot be used in a fight to defeat another terrorist group.
Despite Ankara's concerns, former U.S. President Barack Obama initiated a support program, which so far has sent nearly 5,000 truckloads and 2,000 planeloads of weapons to the group. This has been continued by the Trump administration.According to the report, Raqqa is the province where most civilians were killed in four years. While 1,133 civilians lost their lives in Raqqa due to coalition-led attacks, another 782 were killed in Aleppo, 447 in Deir ez-Zor, 218 in Hasakah, 126 in Idlib, 121 in Homs and five civilians were killed in Daraa.
The YPG - backed by U.S. air support - captured Raqqa in October 2017. The operation, especially the air raids by the coalition forces, caused massive devastation in the province, destroying a substantial part of the civilian settlements in the city center.
The attacks, in which more than five civilians are killed, are defined as a massacre in the report. Accordingly, the coalition committed at least 156 massacres in Syria.
At least 170 attacks of the U.S.-led coalition have been targeted civilian centers across Syria, the SOHR report revealed.
Meanwhile, Russia's envoy to the United Nations, Vassily Nebenzia, said in a press statement on Saturday that Washington is manipulating the situation in Idlib to conceal its presence in Syria.
