A year after the United States started bombing Islamic State (IS) group targets in Iraq, a monitoring group has expressed concern over the rising number of civilians killed by coalition airstrikes.

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A six-month investigation into alleged civilian and “friendly fire” deaths from air strikes in Iraq and Syria has identified far more worrying incidents than have been acknowledged by the US-led coalition, with potentially many hundreds of non-combatants killed since the campaign against the IS group began.

The London-based monitoring group Airwars said the coalition’s admission of only two to four ‘likely’ civilian deaths over the course of many months stood in stark contrast to its own projected death toll. The compilation and evaluation of dozens of reports from Iraq and Syria suggest more than 1,000 civilians may have already perished under coalition bombs.

“We speak regularly with the Coalition and CENTCOM [US Central Command] and it’s clear they take the issue seriously, but it has become clear that they are aware of far fewer casualties than has been published in the public record, only around one-third of incidents. This worries us,” Airwars director Chris Woods told FRANCE 24.

Woods said the wide discrepancy in figures indicated a worrying lack of urgency on the part the international coalition in regard to civilian casualties, and risked handing the IS group a powerful propaganda tool.

Worrying trend

The Airwars director added that the situation for civilians trapped between jihadist fighters and coalition jets could get worse.

“Civilian deaths tend to track the intensity of bombing campaigns, and July has been the most intense month yet,” Woods noted. “Unsurprisingly we have seen a spike in the number of alleged civilian deaths last month. The only exception is when occasionally we have one of these mass casualty events.”

Woods, who has a history of casualties reporting as a former BBC journalist and at the head of the award-winning Drones Project, said two suspected coalition strikes had stood out in worrying fashion.

The first was a likely coalition air strike on Ber Mahli, Syria in April 2015 in which around 60 civilians died. Almost all of the victims have been named, according to Woods. The second was two months ago in Hawijah, Iraq where 70 other non-combatants are thought to have died.

Asked if IS militants had tried to exaggerate or falsely inflate the number of civilians who have died in coalition airstrikes, Woods said there was clear evidence the Islamist group “jumped” on such incidents “to make propaganda for themselves”.

He pointed in particular to one event in which six female agricultural workers were allegedly killed in a coalition air strike on a Syrian checkpoint. The only source of the report came from IS group fighters themselves.

“We treated that event very carefully, explaining the lack of corroborating sources, but have also included that event in our report,” said Woods.

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