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Strike in Syria hit militants, not civilians - US general

March 29, 2017 at 12:02 am

Smoke rises from airstrikes carried out by the Assad Regime in Syria on 15 February 2017. ( Hamza Adnan/Anadolu Agency )

The top US general in Iraq told reporters on Tuesday that a strike near the Daesh-held Syrian city of Raqqa last week appears to have killed dozens of militants and not civilians.

Last week the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said an air strike that hit a school sheltering displaced people killed at least 33 people, adding it believed the strike was carried out by the US-led coalition fighting Daesh in the area.

Read: 42 killed in airstrike on mosque near Aleppo in Syria

“I would tell you that we haven’t completed our assessment of that event yet, but my initial read is (it is) not credible,” Lieutenant General Stephen Townsend told reporters at a Pentagon via teleconference.

I think that was a clean strike

“We had multiple corroborating intelligence sources from various types of intelligence that told us the enemy was using that school and we observed it and we saw what we expected to see,” Townsend said, adding that it appeared to have hit about 30 Daesh militants.