U.S.-led coalition has stepped up its aerial campaign on Raqqa city in suppoart of Kurdish militia days before launching major offensive to expel ISIS from the de facto capital of the caliphate.
Local monitoring group, Raqaa Is being Slaughtered Silently said coalition warplanes have also dropped leaflets demanding civilians ti fleed the icty, such a demand means the inventible death, military source told Zamna al-Wasl.
In its turn, Amaq, ISIS news agency, said Sunday that 17 civilians were killed in the U.S artillery bombardment.
On Saturday, U.S.-led airstrikes killed detainees held by ISIS in al-Mansoura town in the western countryside.
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.
Nouri Mahmoud, spokesman for the powerful Kurdish YPG militia, denied Russia reports over a deal with ISIS to withdraw to Palmyra desert.
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.
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 regime 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
