22 February 2018•Update: 22 February 2018
By Safvan Allahverdi
WASHINGTON
The U.S.-led coalition has confirmed only 10 unintentional civilian casualties last month in its operations against Daesh militants in Iraq and Syria, its combined command said Thursday.
According to its monthly civilian casualty report, in the month of January, Combined Joint Task Force – Operation Inherent Resolve (CJTF-OIR) received a total of 195 civilian casualty reports resulting from Coalition strikes against Daesh.
The command said during the same period, it completed the assessment of 116 reports and 102 of these were determined to be non-credible, 10 were assessed to be duplicates of previous reports and four were assessed to be credible, resulting in 10 unintentional civilian deaths.
Additionally, it claimed at least 841 civilians have been "unintentionally" killed by Coalition strikes since the start of Operation Inherent Resolve and 485 reports are still open.
The Coalition said on its website that the U.S. has conducted 29,070 air strikes between August 2014, when anti-Daesh operations began, and January this year and it found only 218 reliable civilian death reports out of a total of 2,015.
However, the numbers of civilians who were killed in U.S.-led coalition attacks are estimated to be around 6,000, according to many online platforms that prepare civilian casualty reports based on independent local resources.
In the same reports, it is claimed that the number of civilian casualties caused by Coalition attacks totaled at least 30 in December and at least 90 in January.
In one of the bloodiest attacks on civilians, the Coalition carried out airstrikes last year on a mosque in the village of Al-Jina, located west of Aleppo city towards the border with Idlib province, killing 58 civilians during the night prayer.
The U.S. immediately claimed that people who gathered at the mosque were Al-Qaida linked terrorists. Later on, however, it turned out that those who were killed were a community who eschewed radical views.
