The US-led coalition killed more Syrian civilians than ISIS or Russian forces in March, according to figures by a human rights organisation.
The number of civilian deaths from US air strikes across the region soared when Russia scaled back its operation during that period.
The Independent reports:
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The Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR), found Isis killed 119 civilians in Syria in March, including 19 children and 7 women, with Russian forces believed to have killed 224 civilians in the same month, including 51 children and 42 women.
The SNHR found the international coalition forces, led by the US, killed 260 civilians, including 70 children and 34 women.
In the same month, reports of civilian deaths from US air strikes across Syria and Iraq soared to an all-time high, according to Airwars, a British monitoring group, which found there were 1,472 casualties linked to US air strikes in March.
While on the campaign trail in 2015, Donald Trump pledged to “bomb the s**t” out of Isis if he became President, and coalition warplanes have dramatically increased their strikes against Isis in both Mosul and Raqqa, while the number of US troops on the ground has also increased.
At the same time, Russia has scaled down its campaign following a partial ceasefire in December 2016.
Syrian regime forces killed 417 civilians including 61 children and 46 women, the SNHR found.
The SNHR, which monitors Syrian casualties of all the parties, acknowledges the real number of civilians killed in the conflict could be much higher, however, because of the difficulties in keeping track of victims.
The Syrian Government and Isis do not publish, reveal, or record their victims and many people are killed on battlefronts and not inside cities, making it more difficult to keep track of numbers.
The SNHR report said: “From our perspective, the statistics published by some groups on this category of victims are fictitious and are not based on any actual data.
“Therefore, the report only includes civilian victims who were killed by all parties and compares them.”
