ERBIL, Kurdistan Region – The US-led coalition against ISIS has admitted to bombing the militants in a hospital in Mosul from where they were engaged in a firefight with the coalition-backed Iraqi Security Forces (ISF).
According to a statement published by the official Operation Inherent Resolve website, the incident occurred as the ISF tried to capture the al Salam hospital complex in Mosul’s east.
ISIS, the coalition claimed, “was using the hospital as a base of operations and command and control headquarters.”
On Wednesday, “after Iraqi forces continued to receive heavy and sustained machine gun and rocket propelled grenade fire from ISIL fighters in a building on the hospital complex, they requested immediate support from the Coalition,” the coalition statement said.
“In support of the Iraqi Security Forces, Coalition aircraft conducted a precision strike on the location to target enemy fighters firing on Iraqi forces,” the statement added.
Asked about civilian casualties from the strike, Col. John Dorrian, spokesman of the US-led coalition in Baghdad, told Rudaw “we are not exactly sure.”
“We saw no civilians observed in the area, we are not exactly sure. But we did not observe any civilians in the area and we conducted the strike in the interest of protecting the Iraqi Security Forces from firing that Daesh (ISIS) was doing from that building,” he told Rudaw TV.
The coalition statement concluded by saying the airstrike was carried out in compliance with the Law of Armed Conflict and took “all feasible precautions during the planning and execution” in order “to reduce the risk of harm to non-combatants.”
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