Just 30 minutes before we reached his house, Yusuf Ahmed received a phone call with the news his brother and his young family had been killed in an air strike in the next neighbourhood.

Abdulsalam Ahmed, his wife and two girls, had been hiding in the basement when the coalition plane’s load hit.

“The army was just about to reach them, they were hours from freedom,” Mr Ahmed said, his eyes red and his voice shaking.

He had spent the past few weeks worrying he and his relatives would be killed by Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil), not by those trying to rescue them.