Mass grave of over 1,500 victims slain in US-led strikes found in Syria’s Raqqah

Syrian government forces have discovered a mass grave containing the bodies of more than 1,500 people, who lost their lives when the US-led coalition purportedly fighting the Daesh Takfiri terrorist group carried out airstrikes against Syria's northern province of Raqqah that served as the former de facto capital of the Daesh Takfiri terrorist group.

Head of Raqqah Medical Association, Jamal al-Isa, told the pro-government and Arabic-language al-Watan newspaper on Wednesday that the discovery was made in the Panorama district of the city, located about 455 kilometers (283 miles) northeast of the capital Damascus.

"Every day, more crimes are being uncovered which were perpetrated by the Daesh terrorist group and the illegal US-led military alliance in Raqqah," Isa added.

He added that the US-led coalition conducted blind bombardment on the northwestern Syrian city after Daesh terrorists withdrew, and destroyed 85 percent of it.

Speaking at the United Nations Security Council meeting in New York City on October 26, Syrian Ambassador to the UN Bashar al-Ja'afari said the US-led coalition “is targeting anything in Syria but not terror groups.”

“We are surprised that the UN Special Envoy to Syria (Staffan de Mistura) has ignored the crimes of this coalition against Syrian people. The illegal US-led international coalition continues to perpetrate crimes in Syria, the last of which was in the villages of al-Sousa and al-Bubadran, where 62 civilians lost their lives,” the Syrian UN ambassador pointed out.

The US-led coalition has been conducting airstrikes against what are said to be Daesh targets inside Syria since September 2014 without any authorization from the Damascus government or a UN mandate.

The military alliance has repeatedly been accused of targeting and killing civilians. It has also been largely incapable of achieving its declared goal of destroying Daesh.

The so-called Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) – a US-backed group of Kurdish and Arab forces – said on October 20, 2017 that it had “liberated” Raqqah after driving out Daesh terrorists from the city, which served as Daesh's de facto capital in the war-ravaged Arab country. 

The US-backed forces later said the political future of the city and the province of the same name would be determined “within the framework of a decentralized, federal, democratic Syria.”

SDF spokesman Talal Silo said that the group would hand over the control of Raqqah to what he called “the Raqqah Civil Council.”

Syrian Minister of National Reconciliation Affairs Ali Haidar reacted by saying that Raqqah’s future could only be discussed “as part of the final political structure of the Syrian state.”

The so-called Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) has, meanwhile, said that the SDF’s purported operations in Raqqah have killed civilians and damaged infrastructure in the city.

“When you’re killing around 1,200 civilians — nearly half of them women and children — and destroying 80 percent of the city, that’s not liberating Raqqah,” Rami Abdel Rahman, the head of the SOHR, told Arab News daily newspaper.

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