The US and its allies have been accused of showing little regard for civilians’ lives while attacking the Syrian city that was once the de-facto capital of Islamic State in 2017.
Amnesty International said the US-led coalition’s assault on Raqqa killed hundreds of civilians and reduced sections of the city to rubble.
Researchers for Amnesty interviewed more than 100 residents and visited 42 coalition targets in the city in a two-week period in February.
“When so many civilians are killed in attack after attack, something is clearly wrong,” said Donatella Rovera, one of the researchers who visited the city.
US army colonel Sean Ryan, spokesman for the coalition, called the assertions “grossly inaccurate”.
He said the coalition and allied Syrian forces organised safe passages for residents to flee, but IS militants trapped them inside to use as human shields.
“When you have an enemy that uses non-combatants as collateral damage, it’s very difficult when you fight an enemy like that to completely avoid any casualties,” Col Ryan said.
Benjamin Walsby, another investigator on the Amnesty team, said the coalition should have adjusted its strategy accordingly.
The battle for Raqqa, once a city of 200,000 people, played out over four harrowing months in 2017, with the coalition playing a supporting role as the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces fought street by street.
The coalition unleashed wave after wave of air strikes and shell fire until the last of the militants left Raqqa in October 2017.
Command sergeant John Wayne Troxell, of the US army, said in January that US Marines had fired 30,000 artillery shells on the city.
When the Associated Press visited in April, it found Raqqa in ruins and its streets smelling of rotting bodies.
Civil workers had pulled nearly 500 corpses from the rubble and were still finding more six months after the fighting.
According to the Raqqa Civil Council, which took over the administration of the city, 65% of homes had been destroyed.
IS militants booby-trapped the city, leaving streets and homes too dangerous for immediate reoccupation.
In its monthly casualty reports, the coalition has acknowledged responsibility for 32 civilian deaths in Raqqa between June and October, while saying it is still investigating open cases.
Col Ryan could not say whether officials were interviewing relatives of the deceased as part of their investigations.
Amnesty International’s report said hundreds of civilians were killed, while the Airwars monitoring group said it has evidence of 1,400 fatalities.
They said the coalition rebuffed requests for information.
“It doesn’t matter how precise your strikes are. They are only as precise as the information behind them, and if the information isn’t right you’re going to shoot at the wrong things,” Mr Walsby said, adding that a thorough investigation could build a case for a war crimes trial.
Col Ryan said the coalition was never contacted by Amnesty.
The coalition maintains that it relied on precision weapons and selected targets with the best information available and that it did everything it could to minimise civilian casualties.
“I would put the blame on Isis for destroying the city,” Col Ryan said.
“We liberated the city of Raqqa.
“The city deserves better and we’re going to try to provide that.”
