Alwaght- Syria harshly slammed US repeated airstrikes in the Arab country, calling on the United Nations and the international body’s Security Council to prevent the Washington-led coalition form killing Syrian civilians and destroying the country's infrastructure.
In two letters to UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres and the head of UN Security Council on Sunday, Syria's Foreign Ministry lambasted the US-led coalition's airstrikes in Syria's northern city of Raqqah, which killed at least 43 people in the Jomeili neighborhood.
The ministry said the "crimes" committed by the so-called military alliance are no way less than those perpetrated by the ISIS terrorist group against the Syrian civilians. It also said, in the pair of letters, that the airstrikes directly target country's infrastructure, "including bridges, oil and gas wells, dams, electricity and water plants, and public and private buildings."
On Friday, the US-led military coalition, technically known as Operation Inherent Resolve, announced that its airstrikes had killed 484 civilians in Syria and Iraq, another Arab country in which it carries out airstrikes against purported ISIS targets.
But Airwars, a journalist-led transparency project that monitors and assesses civilian casualties from international airstrikes in Iraq, Syria and Libya, estimated that the toll was 7 times higher. The group found that at least 3,100 civilians were killed in American-led airstrikes from August 2014 to March 2017.
Much of the increase in the Airwars data coincided with the operations to retake Mosul, Iraq, the ISIS's largest stronghold, and Raqqa, Syria, the group’s de facto capital.
The Syrian Foreign Ministry further said the real goal of the US-led coalition "are totally in contradiction with" its declared claims of eliminating ISIS terrorists and curbing other terror outfits in the West Asian country, adding that fighting ISIS does not require targeting civilians, infrastructure and the Syrian army troops and their positions.
It also demanded that the world body prevent some of its member states, particularly the United States, from repeatedly flouting international law and to stop them from further violating Syria's sovereignty and undermining its independence.
In this file photo released by the US Air Force fighter jets fly over northern Iraq to carry out airstrikes in Syria.
The letters also said what the "illegal" military coalition was conducting was a sheer violation of the international humanitarian law, human rights laws, and the goals and principles of the UN Charter. The letters insistently called on the UN Security Council to strongly condemn the so-called alliance.
The coalition's report on casualties also showed that the total number of dead civilians increased by more than a third as another report last month acknowledged 352 civilian deaths.
However, the coalition's death toll is dwarfed by what independent monitors reveal about civilian casualties caused by the airstrikes.
The US-led coalition has repeatedly been accused of targeting and killing civilians. It has also been largely incapable of fulfilling its declared aim of destroying ISIS.
Syria has been gripped by foreign-backed militancy since March 2011. In August last year, United Nations Special Envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura estimated that to date over 400,000 people had been killed in the conflict.
