(Previous Incident Code: S832)

Five civilians including four from the same family died and several more were injured in what appears to have been an artillery bombardment, according to local sources. Multiple reports said that the Thalji building on 23 February Street was hit by shells.

Most sources referred to “shelling” and “artillery” but didn’t name the culprit. While some laid the blame with the SDF, the Coalition has confirmed to Airwars that only it was conducting artillery strikes on the city in this period. Officials later accepted responsibility for two deaths in the near vicinity that day.

According to Mohammed Ottoman, “two artillery shells landed yesterday evening on the Thalji building on 23 February Street, east of Saif al-Dawla junction. Four people, three of them from the same family, were killed.”

According to the Amnesty and Airwars’s joint April 2019 report “War in Raqqa: Rhetoric versus Reality”, “An air strike, apparently from a drone killed the four family members [who were] on the roof of a seven story building feeding their birds when drone missile struck”.

According to Amnesty the building previously identified by Airwars as the targeted building is incorrect. The victims parents and Munaf’s wife and baby were in that apartment on the 3rd floor when the father saw the drone strike and told his wife “the boys have gone”.

In April 2019, the Coalition admitted to killing two civilians. The report submitted to Amnesty International stated: “On 10 June 2017, Coalition self-reported that while conducting a strike against enemy combatants, 2 civilians were unfortunately killed due to proximity to the strike.”

Amna – mother of the victim – said in a testimony that “While the children were up on the roof we were on the balcony and saw a drone and then saw a flash and my husband screamed ‘oh my God, the children have gone’. They were all killed.”