Read original article by Betha McKernan on the Independent or read just the key stats below;
- A total of 225 civilians, including 36 women and 44 children, were killed in the period between 23 April to 23 May, the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
- The toll is the highest number of recorded deaths since the international air campaign against Isis began in September 2014.
- “The past month of operations is the highest civilian toll since the coalition began bombing Syria,” Observatory head Rami Abdel Rahman told AFP news agency. “There has been a very big escalation.”
- In March, the US was accused of killing around 300 civilians alone after one strike which hit a mosque in Aleppo province and two incidents in the fight for Isis-controlled neighbourhoods of the Iraqi city of Mosul.
- Earlier this month, the US military said that coalition air strikes in Iraq and Syria had ”unintentionally“ killed 352 civilians since the campaign began, but rights groups have blasted the estimate as too low, saying the US is guilty of not taking “sufficient precautions” to avoid civilian deaths.
- SOHR’s own estimate is that 1,481 people, among them 319 children, have been killed by US-led air operations since 2014.
- The complex Syrian civil war has killed almost 500,000 people, the UN says, and is now in its seventh year.
