Reports: U.S. Air Strike Mistakenly Kills 56 Syrian Civilians

A strike by U.S. jets killed nearly 60 civilians on July 19 after mistaking them for ISIS fighters, reports The Telegraph.

Before being killed, eight families were fleeing their village of Tokhar in order to escape fighting between ISIS and the U.S.-backed rebels known as the Syria Democratic Forces, according to the reports.

According to The Telegraph:

Pictures of the aftermath of the dawn strikes on the Isil-controlled village of Tokhar near Manbij in northern Syria showed the bodies of children as young as three under piles of rubble.

…In a separate incident on Sunday, the [Syrian] Observatory [for Human Rights] reported that coalition airstrikes killed six civilians in Manbij, “including a woman with four of her children and an old man.”

Rebels and many residents say Russia's bombing campaign has been even more indiscriminate and accuse the Russians of deliberately hitting hospitals, schools and infrastructure in opposition-held areas, something Moscow denies.

Photojournalist Christiaan Triebert obtained rare footage of an earlier airstrike near Manbij. This strike occurred July 5.

Very clear footage (rare) of a CJTF airstrike north of #Manbij on July 5, 2016. Geolocation: https://t.co/w70f6hO506 pic.twitter.com/JFlAKDj2yh

— Christiaan Triebert (@trbrtc) July 18, 2016

The July 19 strikes comes just a couple of weeks after the Obama administration released its heavily contested data on the death toll of its drone program. According to peace activist Kathy Kelly:

From 2009 through 2015 — in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and Libya — the Obama administration admits that its drone strikes have killed between 64 and 116 civilians. These numbers are only a small fraction of even the most conservative estimates made by credible independent reporters and researchers over the same period. With U.S. definitions of a "combatant" constantly in flux, many of the 2,372 to 2,581 "combatants" the government reports killed over the same period will have certainly been civilian casualties.

The Tokhar airstrike, carried out by jets and not drones, adds to the death toll of innocents who have perished because of U.S. military action in the Middle East. They join the victims of the secretive drone program, as well as other U.S. “collateral damage” in bombings like the one in Kunduz, Afghanistan that incinerated a hospital with patients and medical staff still inside.