Admin l Tuesday, April 18, 2017
ALEPPO, Syria – Human Rights Watch has criticised the March 16, 2017 U.S attack on Omar Ibn Al-Khatab mosque in Syria, saying that the U.S acted without taking precaution.
At least 38 people were killed when U.S missiles hit the mosque in Western Aleppo, Syria.
But in a statement, Human Rights Watch said it has found out that statements by US military authorities after the attack indicate that the U.S failed to understand that the targeted building was a mosque and that prayer was about to begin, and that a religious lecture was taking place at the time of the attack.
“The US seems to have gotten several things fundamentally wrong in this attack, and dozens of civilians paid the price,” said Ole Solvang, deputy emergencies director at Human Rights Watch. “The US authorities need to figure out what went wrong, start doing their homework before they launch attacks, and make sure it doesn’t happen again.”
Human Rights Watch said it interviewed by phone 14 people with firsthand knowledge of the attack, including four who were in the mosque at the time of the attack.
“In carrying out the investigation, Human Rights Watch used some of the research provided by the open source investigative group Bellingcat, which analyzed video footage and photographs from the attack, and Forensic Architecture, which created models of the mosque and a reconstruction of the attack”,Human Rights Watch said.
According to the report, at about 7 p.m. on March 16, US aircraft attacked a location southwest of al-Jinah, a village in western Aleppo province.
“US military authorities have acknowledged that they carried out the strike, saying that they targeted a meeting of al-Qaeda members”, the Human Right Watch said.
