Iraqi Kurdish leader vows to take Sinjar from Islamic State

Addressing the military response by the worldwide coalition of States, led by the United States, he said that civilians living in ISIL-controlled territory are mainly residing in urban areas where numerous coalition air strikes have been performed.

U.S. Central Command has acknowledged only that U.S.-led airstrikes in the vicinity of Harem, Syria, against the Khorasan group of veteran Al-Qaeda operatives “likely led to the deaths of two noncombatant children”.

The coalition made no immediate comment on the report.

The United States has been conducting air strikes against IS in Iraq since last August and in Syria since September.

The challenges of reporting on the ground and the use of alleged incidents as propaganda by various warring parties makes confirming cases of civilian deaths hard.

Sahr Muhamadally, from the Center for Civilians in Conflict, said: “All allegations of civilian harm, including from open sources, should be investigated by the coalition and processes should be in place to acknowledge and assist those harmed”.

The United States considers it “absolutely important to protect the lives of civilians on the ground”, he said.

The group said the number of civilian casualties could exceed 591 – far more than the two deaths acknowledged thus far by the coalition, which has only 10 active investigations of alleged civilian deaths.

Even the highest estimates of civilian deaths in global air strikes are dwarfed by numbers believed killed by Syrian regime barrel bombings and Iraqi government air strikes, and by armed groups including Isis and Jabhat al Nusra.

One of the attacks investigated was on Fadhiliya, Iraq, on 4 April.

In a press briefing shortly after the strike, Hesterman said the coalition used a “fairly small weapon on a known IED building in an industrial area”, but that this had hit a “massive amount of Daesh [Isis] high explosives”. It does not offer policy prescriptions.

“It’s to basically guarantee … to the best of our ability that the people entering [Islamic State] have not come to spy or to harm the Muslims”, she said.

“The coalition’s war against ISIL has inevitably caused civilian casualties, certainly far more than the two deaths Centcom presently admits to”, the group said.

Syrian Kurdish fighters and their allies have wrested most of the northern Syria border from the Islamic State group, and the plan announced this week for a U.S.-Turkish “safe zone” is expected to cement those gains.

In Iraq, the U.S.-led coalition includes France, Britain, Belgium, Netherlands, Australia, Denmark and Canada.

Worldwide NGOs point out that coalition air strikes are significantly safer for civilians than those carried out by either the Assad regime or the Iraqi military.

It added that the same air strikes also caused at least 48 suspected “friendly fire” deaths.

According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a British-based watchdog group, Islamic State militants have been raiding Internet cafes in search of anyone suspected of disseminating information about the extremist group. A Pentagon spokesman at the time said there was no information to indicate there were civilians in the village.

It claims 57 specific strikes had killed at least 459 civilians in the war-torn countries.

For Yazidis, a minority community in Iraq, and a religious group that has under a million members in the world, being killed and driven from their ancestral Iraqi land is a death sentence.

Caption: A plume of smoke rises after an airstrike by the U.S.-led coalition against Islamic State group positions in an eastern neighborhood of Ramadi, Iraq, May 9, 2015.

Massoud Barzani also said Sinjar will remain a Kurdish province under the Iraqi federal government.