US-led Coalition Airstrike Mistakenly Killed 18 SDF Fighters

The strike was requested by the partnered forces that identified the target location as a Daesh defensive position but it turned out to be a SDF forward fighting position.

The US-supported SDF is an alliance of Kurdish and Arab fighters formed in October 2015.

Earlier, at least 15 civilians, including three children and a woman were killed in a village near the city of Raqqa, in another US-led airstrike. 

In March, the US Central Command said that warplanes had killed 21 civilians in nine separate strikes in Iraq and Syria. The officially acknowledged civilian death toll from their strikes since 2014 is only 220. 

However, a 2016 Amnesty International report suggested that 300 civilians were killed in 11 US coalition attacks during the first two years of strikes against Daesh. It called on US authorities to come clean about the full extent of the civilian damage caused by their attacks in Syria.