The US-led military Coalition must end almost two years of denial about the massive civilian death toll and destruction it unleashed in the Syrian city of Raqqa, Amnesty International and Airwars said.

Collating almost two years of investigations, it gives a brutally vivid account of more than 1,600 civilian lives lost as a direct result of thousands of US, UK and French air strikes and tens of thousands of US artillery strikes in the Coalition’s military campaign in Raqqa from June to October 2017.

"Thousands of civilians were killed or injured in the US-led Coalition’s offensive. Many of the air bombardments were inaccurate and tens of thousands of artillery strikes were indiscriminate, so it is no surprise they killed and injured many hundreds of civilians," said Donatella Rovera, Senior Crisis Response Adviser at Amnesty International.

"Coalition forces razed Raqqa, but they cannot erase the truth. Amnesty International and Airwars call upon the Coalition forces to end their denial about the shocking scale of civilian deaths and destruction caused by their offensive in Raqqa." "The Coalition needs to fully investigate what went wrong at Raqqa and learn from those lessons, to prevent inflicting such tremendous suffering on civilians caught in future military operations," said Chris Woods, Director of Airwars.

US, UK, and French forces launched thousands of air strikes while PYD was shelling into civilian neighborhoods, scores of which resulted in mass civilian casualties.

The civilian deaths occurred as a result of U.S. airstrikes and tens of thousands of artillery shells carried out by the PKK/YPG without any discrimination, according to a report by Amnesty International and Airwars.

The report highlights the targeting of families who have taken shelter in homes.

U.S. and PKK/YPG used MK-Type old bombs that destroyed the entire building instead of small-scale missiles when they bombed Raqqa.

"Planes were bombing and rockets were falling 24 hours a day. You just couldn't breathe," one survivor of the 25 September strike, Ayat Mohammed Jasem, told a TV crew when she returned to her destroyed home more than a year later."I saw my son die, burnt in the rubble in front of me. I've lost everyone who was dear to me. My four children, my husband, my mother, my sister, my whole family. Wasn’t the goal to free the civilians? They were supposed to save us, to save our children."

ILKHA