US-led coalition strikes ‘kill 26 civilians in east Syria’

US-led coalition air strikes have killed 26 civilians, including 14 children, in a holdout of the Islamic State group (IS) in eastern Syria, a UK-based activist group has said.

“Twenty-six IS family members, including 14 children and nine women, were killed in coalition air strikes on Friday morning on the town of Hajin,” the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

On Thursday, coalition raids killed another seven civilians in the nearby village of al-Shaafa, Observatory chief Rami Abdurrahman said.

Both Hajin and al-Shaafa are in a last pocket under IS control in the eastern province of Deir Ezzor near the border with Iraq.

A coalition spokesman did not immediately reply for a request for comment, the AFP news agency reported.

The coalition has been backing a Kurdish-Arab alliance fighting IS in the area.

IS overran large swathes of Syria and neighbouring Iraq in 2014, proclaiming a “caliphate” in land it controlled. But the group has since lost most of it to various offensives in both countries.

In Syria, the group has seen its presence reduced to parts of the vast Badia desert and the pocket in Deir Ezzor.

Since 2014, the US-led coalition has acknowledged direct responsibility for more than 1,100 civilian deaths in Syria and Iraq, but rights groups put the number killed much higher.

The Observatory says coalition strikes in Syria alone have killed more than 3,300 civilians.

Deadly Hama attack

Elsewhere in Syria, fighters from Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) killed at least eight Syrian government troops near a planned buffer zone around the country’s last major rebel bastion, the Observatory said on Saturday.

Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham is an alliance led by Syria’s former al-Qaeda branch which is the dominant force in Idlib.

Source: US-led coalition strikes ‘kill 26 civilians in east Syria’ | Middle East Eye