Twelve civilians died and six more were wounded in Coalition air or artillery strikes on Raqqa, according to local media. The action was later confirmed to be a British airstrike.
In February 2019, the Coalition accepted responsibility for the event, noting: “Coalition aircraft engaged ISIS fighters utilizing a mortar system in a building used as a defensive fighting position. Regrettably, 12 civilians were unintentionally killed and six were unintentionally injured as a result of the blast.”
Multiple sources blamed Coalition air and/or artillery strikes for the death of ten civilians and injury of more. Raqqa Truth said that six were wounded in addition to ten killed.
According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, the Coalition struck the “Ferdus Furnace area and other areas in the city”. It put the death toll at 12.
Zakaria has been removed from this incident as the Amnesty and Airwars’s joint April 2019 report “War in Raqqa: Rhetoric versus Reality” reported that he died on October 11th with his nephew while riding a motorbike.
The February 2019 assessment appears to be a reassessment of a March 2018 decision in which the Coalition originally confirmed one death – though we currently cannot be sure that this was referring to this incident.
The Coalition provided Airwars with the location of this incident, accurate to within a 100 metre box.
In March 2020, Airwars and the BBC published an investigation revealing that the UK was refusing to accept responsibility for civilian harm in this and two other events – despite confirming that the RAF had conducted the strikes.
Senior MoD officials revealed that they were insisting upon ‘hard facts’ when determining casualties – an almost impossible bar to surmount, and at odds with the US-led Coalition’s own ‘balance of probabilities’ approach.