Estimate of deaths since 2014 is far lower than those provided by monitoring groups

The American-led coalition battling Islamic State has said at least 800 civilians have been killed in airstrikes in Iraq and Syria since its campaign began in 2014 – far fewer than the numbers documented by monitoring and human rights groups.

Credible monitoring teams have produced estimates of civilian deaths that go as high as nearly 6,000, raising questions over America’s commitment to protecting civilian lives as it bombed militant strongholds.

The coalition said in a monthly report: “We continue to hold ourselves accountable for actions that may have caused unintentional injury or death to civilians.”

It estimated it had unintentionally killed at least 801 civilians between August 2014 and October 2017. By comparison, the monitoring group Airwars says at least 5,961 civilians have been killed over that time period.

The coalition said it had carried out more than 28,000 strikes and received 1,790 reports of potential civilian casualties since the start of the campaign. It was still assessing 695 of those reports, and said it went to great lengths to avoid such casualties.

Isis’s self-proclaimed caliphate has collapsed in the face of concerted assaults in both Iraq and Syria. Over the past year the militants have lost their two largest cities, Mosul and Raqqa, respectively to Iraqi troops and militias and to Kurdish militias. Other cities and towns have fallen to Syrian government forces and rebels backed by Turkey in northern Syria.

Several episodes of mass civilian casualties in the coalition campaign, as well as reports by human rights groups and a detailed investigation by the New York Times, indicate that the coalition has vastly underestimated the civilian cost of its campaign.

The NYT investigation, which included more than a year of visits to nearly 150 sites of coalition airstrikes, concluded that the strikes had killed up to 31 times more civilians than reported, and described the campaign as possibly the least transparent war in US history.



This year international outrage over airstrikes on a single district of Mosul that led to at least 150 civilian deaths prompted a brief halt in the campaign over the city.

Civilian deaths from US-led strikes on Isis surge under Trump administration Read more

Amnesty International tweeted on Thursday that its own investigations suggested far more civilians were dying as a result of the US-led campaign than the coalition admitted.

In a report released in July, Amnesty said as many as 5,805 civilians may have been killed by Iraqi forces and coalition strikes in the Mosul campaign between 19 February and 19 June this year. The group said the coalition had “failed to take effective precautions to protect civilians”.

A stream of high-casualty airstrikes in the Raqqa campaign also raised questions about American targeting policy, reportedly loosened under the presidency of Donald Trump who had pledged to toughen US policy on attacking Isis hideouts.

Rights groups said the coalition should be more transparent in how it made targeting decisions, because it appeared that on some occasions it had targeted Isis fighters such as snipers on the rooftops of residential buildings, endangering large groups of civilians in an effort to kill a single militant.

Local activists reported two mass-casualty bombings by the coalition in late July and the first week of August. At least 62 people were reportedly killed in airstrikes in residential areas on 26 July. Two days later, 15 members of the same family, including children, were killed.

On 1 August, activists said, about 50 people were killed in the Bousraya neighbourhood after a coalition bombing raid struck a residential building. Several other attacks were reported in the final weeks of the campaign before Isis lost the city.