On June 6, the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces announced the beginning of a military campaign to liberate the northern Syrian city of Raqqa from the Islamic State. In an interview at the time, the commander of the force, which is known as SDF, highlighted the critical role that the U.S.-led anti-ISIS coalition would play in the fight to take back the city. “The coalition has a big role in the success of the operations,” the commander said. “In addition to warplanes, there are coalition forces working side by side with the SDF.” Nearly three months later, the battle for Raqqa is still raging, and more and more civilians are dying from U.S. airstrikes. A relatively small number of ISIS militants are fighting to the death to defend their putative capital, while an estimated 160,000 civilians are trapped in dire circumstances, caught between the armed factions on the ground and bombarded by U.S. airstrikes and artillery barrages. Activists inside Raqqa who spoke to The Intercept by phone earlier this month described an increasingly desperate situation. (Their names are being withheld for their safety.) Despite the bombardment Syrian activist groups like Sound and Picture are continuing to work documenting abuses in the ISIS-held city.

“The airplanes are heavily striking the city, and many of the places they are targeting are empty of ISIS fighters and full of civilians,” an anti-ISIS Syrian activist from Raqqa told The Intercept. “The number of civilians being killed today is much more than the ISIS members. “It’s a miracle to find any open grocery shop, the shelling is very intensive, and the ISIS snipers are very professional and target anyone they see outside,” the activist said. “The medical situation is even worse — people need medicine but many supplies were moved out of Raqqa earlier by ISIS, and the hospitals are forced to offer medical services only to ISIS fighters.” A second activist described the death of his father in a strike in June: “The planes hit the street where he was walking to go home. There were no ISIS members or headquarters in that street, my father was only 50 meters from home. I wished that he had hurried home that night, but he was too old and it took him time.” Many similar stories are told in a report released last week by Amnesty International. The report, titled “I Won’t Forget This Carnage,” documents in detail the growing civilian death toll from airstrikes and shelling in and around the city. The monitoring group AirWars estimates that between 725 to 993 civilians have been killed by coalition attacks since the assault on Raqqa began this June, with deadly incidents occurring daily. As the battle moves into the heart of the city, coalition airstrikes and artillery fire — often called in by SDF fighters on the ground — have been blamed for attacks that have resulted in civilian deaths. The threat to civilians is compounded by the fact that ISIS is known to hide out in civilian areas, effectively using local populations as human shields. The transition to urban combat was expected to lead to an increase in civilian deaths, but the reported use of munitions with a wide impact radius and inadequate U.S. reporting on its own strikes has led to allegations of reckless disregard for civilian lives. “We have seen incidents in which entire families have been wiped out. The scale of things is increasing significantly,” said Alex Hopkins, a researcher at AirWars. There has been a “worrying increase in the rate of mass casualty incidents” in recent weeks, he said, with disproportionate numbers of children being reported killed in U.S. strikes.

Photo: Syrian Network for Human Rights