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Amnesty to Expand Probe of U.S.-Led Campaign in Syria's Raqqa
 [An Nahar] ...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling Allaharound with every other sentence, but to hear the pols talk they're not reallyMoslems.... bully boyz from their self-styled capital of Raqqa but left the Syrian city in ruins. The London-based rights group said the new phase of its investigation enables thousands of online activists, using satellite imagery of the city, to map out the destruction over the four-month campaign, which ended in October 2017. The U.N estimates that more than 10,000 buildings were destroyedâ or 80 percent of the city. Amnesty's Strike Tracker campaign, in partnership with Airwars, would help narrow down when and where coalition air and artillery strikes destroyed buildings. Amnesty hopes to compel the U.S-led coalition to accept greater responsibility for the destruction and conduct its own investigation into the deaths of hundreds of civilians. The coalition says it worked to avoid civilian casualties in Raqqa. Col. Sean Ryan, a front man for the coalition, said it is "always willing to review if new evidence is reported." In an earlier phase of Amnesty's investigation inside Raqqa, the group provided new evidence that compelled the coalition to acknowledge 77 civilian deaths. In total, the coalition has acknowledged 104 civilian deaths from the hard-fought campaign. "With bodies still being recovered from the wreckage and mass graves more than a year later, this is just the tip of the iceberg," said Milena Marin, senior adviser on Amnesty's Crisis Response team. Posted by: Fred 2018-11-22 |
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