US general admits US airstrike killed 100s of civilians in Mosul

A high-ranking US commander has admitted that there was a “fair chance” that a coalition airstrike in western Mosul killed a large number of Iraqi civilians.

“We probably had a role in those casualties,” said Lieutenant General Stephen Townsend while talking to reporters on Tuesday.

He noted that the reason for the high number of casualties was Daesh’s repulsive practice of using civilians as human shields.

On March 17, Iraq’s Kurdish-language Rudaw television network reported that 237 people had been killed in US-led coalition airstrikes on a Daesh-held neighborhood in western Mosul.

“The enemy had a hand in this,” he added, stressing that “It sure looks like” the civilians has been forced to gather in the building by the terrorists. “What I don’t know is why they [the civilians] gathered there by the enemy?”
Despite admitting to the US’s involvement in the incident, Townsend noted that the munitions used by US-led coalition forces in densely-populated urban areas were not designed to cause such a level of destruction.

Last week, a senior Iraqi military official announced that a US-led coalition airstrike on a Daesh truck carrying explosives resulted in the civilian deaths in Mosul incident.

On Monday, the Pentagon announced that it was analyzing over 700 video feeds from airstrikes on west Mosul following the increasing number of reports of civilian causalities.