U.S.-led coalition airstrikes killed detainees held by ISIS in the western countryside of Raqqa on Saturday as the radical group defies Kurdish warning to surrender by the end of May, activists said.
The strikes hit an ISIS prison in al-Mansoura town, leaving dozen killed and wounded.
Muhab Hussein, Raqqa-based activist, said the U.S. strikes have also killed two people on Raqqa-Aleppo road
Nouri Mahmoud, spokesman for the powerful Kurdish YPG militia, denied Russia reports over a deal with ISIS to withdraw to Palmyra desert.
The U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces militias are just two miles far from the first neighborhoods of Raqqa from the eastern side; such an advance followed a promise on Thursday that no harm would come to ISIS fighters in Raqqa who turned themselves in by the end of the month.
The SDF, which includes YPG militia, said earlier this month it expects to launch the final assault on Raqqa in early summer. YPG and SDF officials had previously given April start dates for the assault, but these slipped.
The U.S.-led coalition says some 3,000 to 4,000 ISIS fighters are thought to be holed up in Raqqa city where they continue to erect defenses against the anticipated assault.
Between April 23 and May 23 of this year, the U.S.-led had also killed a total of 225 civilians in Syria, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for human Rights said.
Earlier this month, the US military said that coalition air strikes in Iraq and Syria had "unintentionally" killed a total of 352 civilians since 2014.
in the country's strategic southern desert, the regime troops and allied militia have pushed back ISIS militants and U.S-backed opposition fighters, gaining control of a large swath of territory in the country's strategic southern desert, the government-controlled media and a war monitor said Saturday.
With the new advances, the government and allied troops secured an area nearly half the size of neighboring Lebanon. The strategic juncture in the Syrian desert also restores government control over mineral and oil resources. The gains aid government plans to go after ISIS in Deir al-Zor, one of the militants' last major stronghold in Syria. The oil-rich province straddles the border with Iraq and is the group's last gate to the outside world.
The six-year-long Syrian war has allowed ISIS to seize swathes of Syria, where the group faces separate campaigns by the U.S.-backed SDF, the Russian-backed Syrian military, and Free Syrian Army rebels backed by the United States.
More than 470,000 people have been killed and millions more displaced since Syria's conflict broke out in March 2011
