US-led coalition in Iraq reveals 53 more civilian casualties

The US-led coalition fighting the Islamic State group in Syria and Iraq has acknowledged the deaths of an additional 53 civilians, bringing the official toll to 1,114. 

The coalition said in a statement on Thursday that it had conducted a total of 30,008 strikes between August 2014 and the end of August 2018.

Officials said they had examined 60 civilian casualty reports last month, and found eight of them to be "credible," resulting in the 53 deaths.

"In each of eight incidents, the investigation assessed that although all feasible precautions were taken and the decision to strike complied with the law of armed conflict, unintended civilian casualties regrettably occurred," the coalition said.

In the deadliest of the incidents, in May 2017, a strike on IS positions and a bomb factory in Mosul, Iraq resulted in the unintentional deaths of 20 civilians.

Monitoring group Airwars says the number of civilian deaths acknowledged by the US-led coalition is well below the true toll of the bombing campaign, estimating that at least 6,575 civilians have been killed.

IS swept across large parts of Syria and neighbouring Iraq in 2014, declaring a cross-border "caliphate" in areas they controlled.

Syrian and Iraqi forces have since driven IS from nearly all the territory it once held, except for a small presence in the remote desert areas along the border.

The US-led operations to fight IS in Iraq and Syria have largely wound down after the militants were forced out from more than 98 percent of territory they once held.