In the Amnesty and Airwars’s joint April 2019 report “War in Raqqa: Rhetoric versus Reality”, one civilian was reportedly killed in alleged Coalition artillery strikes in Raqqa. Although Airwars assesses single sourced incidents as “weak”, researchers have assessed this incident “fair” due to the depth of material provided by Amnesty.

The report stated that “Mahmud A’Qader Aama, 22, was killed by an airstrike while fetching water from a well, together with some 35 other civilians who were also fetching water. The air strike targeted the gathering of people fetching water.”

There are no details however of the 35 other victims.

A witness of the strike, Walid, told Amnesty in a testimony that, “It was very dangerous to fetch water. The Coalition planes often bombed the people gathered at the wells. Didn’t they know that we had no other way of getting water? There was no running water in the city; only wells.”

Google Earth shows on 2017/07/07-2017/07/19 damage to a nearby building. However on the 2017/08/19-2017/08/25 more damage can be seen as on the 2017/09/06-2017/09/19.

In July 2019 the Coalition announced that it had assessed this allegation of civilian harm to be non-credible. Their monthly civilian casualty report noted: “After a review of available information it was assessed that no Coalition actions were conducted in the geographical area that corresponds to the report of civilian casualties.”