Iraqi air strike targeting ISIL ‘killed civilians’

Iraqi parliament speaker Salim Al Jabouri called the sir strike a crime and demanded a government inquiry into it.

BAGHDAD // Iraq’s parliament speaker said an air strike targeting the ISIL-held town of Qaim near the Syrian border killed and wounded dozens of civilians, and the Iraqi government should be held responsible.

“The air strike hit unarmed civilians in shopping centres in Qaim and caused the killing and wounding of dozens of them,” speaker Salim Al Jabouri said on Wednesday, calling the incident a “crime” and demanding a government inquiry to punish the perpetrators.

He did not provide a specific casualty figure but hospital sources and local parliamentarians said three air strikes killed dozens of civilians – including 12 women and 19 children – on Wednesday in a market district of Qaim, close to the border with Syria.

The government said fighter jets targeted ISIL militants in two houses in Qaim but denied civilians were present. Col John Dorrian, a spokesman for the US-led coalition battling ISIL, said on Twitter that it did not conduct any strikes in the area at the time.

Another Sunni lawmaker, Mohammed Al Karboli, said the fighter jets targeted three markets in Qaim during rush hour, killing and wounding 80 people. He did not cite his sources.

The ISIL-linked Aamaq news agency released a nearly two-minute-long video late Wednesday purporting to show the aftermath of the air strike.

The footage shows several bearded men rushing toward a scene where dozens of cars were on fire and some buildings appeared damaged. Several bodies of children and adults, some burned, can be seen lying on the ground.

The authenticity of the video could not be verified. The Iraqi government called it a fabrication.

The defence ministry’s media office said jets carried out separate strikes on two homes where up to 65 ISIL fighters had gathered, based on “accurate intelligence from our sources in the region.”

Qaim, located about 320 kilometres west of Baghdad, is among a number of small towns in the western Anbar province still ruled by the extremists.

Iraqi forces have pushed ISIL out of most of Anbar over the past year, and are now waging a major offensive in the northern city of Mosul, the militant group’s last major urban bastion in the country.

On Wedensday, Iraqi troops who seized a hospital deep inside Mosul believed to be used as an ISIL military base have retreated after a fierce counter-attack, giving up some of their biggest gains in a hard-fought seven-week campaign to recapture the city.

The soldiers seized Salam hospital, less than 1.5km from the Tigris river running through central Mosul, on Tuesday but pulled back the next day after they were hit by six suicide car bombs and “heavy enemy fire”, according to the US-led coalition supporting Iraqi forces.

At Iraq’s request, coalition warplanes also struck a building inside the hospital complex from which the militants were firing machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades, it said.

Tuesday’s rapid advance into the Wahda neighbourhood where the hospital is located marked a change of tactics after a month of gruelling fighting in east Mosul, in which the army has sought to capture and clear neighbourhoods block by block.

The soldiers are part of a US-backed 100,000-strong coalition of Iraqi forces including the army, federal police, Kurdish peshmerga fighters and mainly Shiite Popular Mobilisation forces battling to crush ISIL in Mosul.

Defeating the militants in their Iraq stronghold would mark a major step in rolling back the caliphate declared by the extremists in parts of Syria and Iraq when they took over Mosul in mid-2014.

But with two years to dig themselves into northern Iraq’s largest city, retreating fighters have waged a lethal defence, deploying hundreds of suicide car bombers, mortar barrages and snipers against the advancing soldiers and exploiting a network of tunnels to ambush them in residential areas.

* Associated Press and Reuters