– 2016-02-17 00:39:35
US Air Strike Hits Syrian Bakery, Kills 15 Civilians
Jason Ditz / Anti-War.com
(February 16, 2016) — An early dawn US air raid against the Syrian city of Shadadi ended with airstrikes hitting the city’s bakery, and killing 15 civilians who were lining up outside to buy bread just before the bakery opened, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
Shadadi is considered a strategically important city for ISIS, as it is along the Iraq-Syria border and is used as a logistics hub for ISIS forces operating between the two fronts. There were reportedly strikes around the outskirts of Shadadi, but the only casualties reported were the civilians at the bakery.
It was unclear why the bakery was attacked, and the US isn’t commenting yet, though historically when the US attacks ISIS-held towns they focus on places with a lot of people, assuming they’re “command” structures. In this case, it was a purely civilian target.
This is the latest in a growing number of civilian deaths in attacks on ISIS-held towns, as the US-led coalition as well as the Russian military both pick up their air war against northern Syria. Though the US regularly faults Russia over the civilians killed in their strikes, they rarely touch on the substantial civilian toll of their own strikes.
Air Strikes Kill 15 People in Syria’s Northeastern City
Mariam Karouny / Reuters
BEIRUT (February 16, 2016) — US-led air strikes killed at least 15 people on Tuesday when they hit a bakery in the city of Shadadi in northeastern Syria near the border with Iraq, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
Rami Abdulrahman, who runs the British-based monitoring group, said all of those killed were civilians who gathered outside the bakery at dawn to buy bread. “They carried out several air strikes inside Shadadi and around it. But the 15 were killed because of a strike on the bakery inside the city,” he said.
Al-Shadadi is a logistics hub for the Islamic State group, located on a network of highways and whose capture would isolate Raqqa, the defacto capital of the hardline group. Reuters could not independently confirm the report.
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