At least 170 civilians have been killed in a week of heavy aerial bombing in Raqqa city as U.S. allies face resistance inside the eastern and western neighborhoods of the de facto capital of the Islamic State, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
42 people, including 18 children and 12 women lost their lives in the U.S. airstrikes on Monday, the Britain-based monitor said.
Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently said about 40 people were also killed on Tuesday in Raqqa in the US strikes amid deliberate blackout for daily death.
Raqqa-based activist Ahmed Shalabi said the U.S.-led airstrikes, in support of Kurdish-led forces, have destroyed large parts of al-Bado neighborhood, killing at least 40 civilians.
The coalition warplanes conducted more than 50 raids, Shalabi added where about 200,000 people still trapped in the city.
The local monitoring group that tracks war in Raqqa said the International coalition airstrikes have killed at least 946 people since the third phase of Raqqa offensive announced in June.
At least 21 worshipers were killed on Saturday when U.S. airstrikes struck a mosque at the Syrian-Iraqi border, local activists said.
The U.S. strikes hit the ISIS-held village of al-Jazza’ In the southern countryside of Hasaka city, two days since similar strikes killed 15 family members near the area, according to activists.
Last week, the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces spokesman said that the U.S. military will remain in northern Syria long after the jihadists are defeated, predicting enduring ties with the Kurdish-dominated region.
The SDF, an alliance of militias dominated by the Kurdish YPG, believes the United States has a "strategic interest" in staying on, SDF spokesman Talal Silo told Reuters.
"They have a strategy policy for decades to come. There will be military, economic and political agreements in the long term between the leadership of the northern areas (of Syria) ... and the U.S. administration," Silo said.
Meanwhile, the next round of talks between Russia, Turkey and Iran on settling the Syrian civil conflict has been pushed back from late August to mid-September, Kazakh Foreign Minister Kairat Abdrakhmanov said Tuesday.
Kazakhstan hosts the talks which have in the past few months focused on establishing de-escalation zones in Syria.
"According to the information we have received from Russia, the guarantor states, namely Russia, Turkey and Iran plan to hold a technical meeting before the end of August where they will agree on the agenda and exact dates of the next Astana meeting," Abdrakhmanov told reporters.
"A preliminary plan is for mid-September."
At the most recent Astana meeting in July, the three nations failed to finalise an agreement on creating four de-escalation zones in Syria after Ankara raised objections.
