Despite US President Donald Trump’s
announcement that he will withdraw US troops from Syria, American
strikes in the east of the country have increased.
This was revealed Thursday by an investigation conducted by Al Jazeera
and The Intercept, which found that there are about 50,000 to 60,000
people stuck in eastern Syria – which is dominated by Daesh – living
under these US attacks.
An activist, who refused to give his name, was reported saying: “The
civilians in these areas have no place to go or hide from the US
bombardment of their villages.” He added that the residents have been
harmed at the hands of the Syrian government, the US and Daesh alike.
In the wake of international controversy and news that Daesh was not
fully defeated in Syria, Trump declined to give a timeline for the US
troops’ withdrawal from Syria, instead saying this would take place
“over a period of time”. It remains unclear whether US airstrikes will
continue once the troops leave.
Describing the US strikes, a Daesh fighter said: “They just like to
disrupt and mess everything up […] They bombed the places where they
sell gasoline, or they sell cooking oil, or where they filter the water —
they bomb all these places. They bomb everything just to make your life
horrible.”
The fighter added: “No building is empty here,” referring to the
remaining Daesh-controlled villages in Deir Ez-Zour. The Intercept said
that fighters and civilians in the villages have reportedly been
describing the US bombing campaign as a scorched-earth policy.
Meanwhile, the US-led international coalition in Syria admitted on
Thursday that it had killed 11 civilians from one family, including a
child in Deir Ez-Zour, Anadolu Agency reported.
On Sunday, the US military admitted that it had killed 1,139 civilians
in Iraq and Syria since the start of its campaign against Daesh in 2014.
This figure is significantly smaller than the estimates of civilian
casualties made by monitoring groups, with one group – Airwars – saying
that between 7,308 and 11,629 civilians have been killed.
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