(Previous Incident Code: I184a)

In what may be the same incident as CI216 or CI218 – or a separate targeted killing operation – the US revealed three weeks after the event that a strike on an ‘ISIL finance emir’ had also killed a woman civilian. Three months later CENTCOM revealed two additional civilian deaths in the event.

General Peter E. Gersten, deputy commander for operations and intelligence for the Coalition, also revealed that US aircraft had detonated a Hellfire missile above the house as a ‘warning’ to civilians inside to leave.

“He was the major distributor of funds to Daesh fighters,” CNN reported Gersten as saying. “We watched him come and go from his house, we watched his supplies, we watched the security that was involved in it. And we also watched occasionally a female and her children in and out of the quarters…We went as far as actually to put a Hellfire on top of the building and air-burst it so it wouldn’t destroy the building, simply knock on the roof to ensure that she and the children were out of the building… And then we proceeded with our operations.”

But the tactic failed according to CNN citing Gersten: “We watched her and observed her leaving the building. And she cleared the building, and we began to process the strike.” But then, he said, she ran back in the building. It was “very difficult for us to watch, and it was within the final seconds of the actual impact,” Gersten recalled.”

In a statement issued July 28th 2016, CENTCOM noted: “On April 5, 2016, in Mosul, Iraq, during a strike on an ISIL financial storage facility, it is assessed that three civilians were killed.”