Scores feared dead after Iraq airstrikes

The U.N. had already weighed in on the strike before Lavrov’s comments. The party that fails to distinguish their forces (by looking like civilians, hiding in civilian buildings, using civilian vehicles) is at fault when their failure causes civilian casualties.

“Disproportionate attacks and indiscriminate attacks violate global humanitarian law and can constitute war crimes”, Ms Rovera said.

The Mosul judicial council has called for declaring Mosul a disaster zone. The US has not practiced the “double-tap” procedure Israel used, but the Iraqis did drop hundreds of thousands of leaflets over Mosul urging people to flee.

She called on the Iraqi government and the US-led coalition to launch an investigation into “disproportionate” and “indiscriminate” attacks which resulted into “the appalling civilian death toll”.

Reports on the numbers of civilian dead and wounded have varied but Mosul municipality chief, Abdul Sattar al-Habbo, who is supervising the rescue, said 240 bodies had been pulled from the rubble of collapsed buildings. We are from the Jabour, Dulaim and Tai families. While the investigation is predicted to take between two to three weeks, it has been reported that if the building collapse is found to be the result of the US -led strike, it would mark the deadliest civilian casualty incident since the USA became involved in 2014. Human rights groups criticized the Saudi-led coalition for indiscriminately bombing residential areas, including hospitals and schools.

General Saadi said he had demanded that the coalition pause its air campaign to assess what happened and to take stricter measures to prevent more civilian victims. The U.S. acknowledged to having carried out as many as 19 airstrikes on IS buildings in Raqqa on that day.

“Dust, shattered glass, and powder were the only things my wife, myself, and three kids were feeling”, said one Jadida resident, Abu Ayman. Some American military officials had also chafed at what they viewed as long and onerous White House procedures for approving strikes under the Obama administration. The series of bomblets do not all detonate, making it risky for civilians long after a strike takes place. That effort involves an unspecified number of American military advisers, supported by Marine Corps artillery and USA warplanes.

Dozens more are thought to remain buried in what could turn out to be the single most deadly incident for civilians in the war against the Islamic State (IS) group.

Iraq’s elite Counter-Terrorism Service, which is fighting in districts to the west of the Old City, made some advances last week. Once the fight is over, the Shiite-led Iraqi government will face the stiff political challenge of stabilizing a multiethnic city that includes hundreds of thousands of Sunnis; that will be all the more hard if the pro-government forces have inflicted heavy casualties. In Yemen, the Saudi-led coalition backs the government embattled in a civil war against Houthi rebels who are supported by Iran.

A bipartisan group of USA senators vocally opposed the strikes in Yemen.

Iraqi forces hit militant positions on Sunday with helicopter strikes and exchanged heavy gun and rocket fire around al Nuri mosque in west Mosul, where the Islamic State leader declared his caliphate almost three years ago. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., in an October statement after the coalition bombed a funeral party in Yemen. That would almost double USA forces in the middle of that civil war.