Archive photo © Kai Pfaffenbach / Reuters
More than 30 Iraqi soldiers have been killed and 20 more injured in an airstrike carried out by the US military, an Iraqi said in a statement cited by Sputnik.
“30 Iraqi servicemen from the 55th brigade of the Iraqi Army have been killed and 20 injured after an airstrike carried out by US aviation in the town of Al-Naimiya, Fallujah province,” Hakim al-Zamili, the head of the Parliamentary Security and Defense Committee, said in a statement cited by Sputnik.
The death toll may rise as many Iraqi soldiers were heavily injured in the attack, the official said.
Al-Zamili said he called upon the Iraqi prime minister “to carry out an immediate investigation into the airstrike on the 55th brigade that earlier achieved success in battling” Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS) militants.
According to the official, Iraq is going to go to court over the alleged airstrike.
Earlier, the Russian Defense Ministry said four Western coalition warplanes had been spotted over the Deir ez-Zor area in Syria on December 6, when a Syrian Army camp came under attack.
An airstrike on a field camp of the 168th Brigade of the 7th Division of the Syrian Army left four servicemen dead and 12 injured. It also destroyed three APCs and four vehicles bearing 12.7mm heavy machine guns.
The information about two pairs of warplanes, members of the US-led international anti-ISIS coalition, which were operating in the Deir ez-Zor area on the day of the attack, was announced by Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov.
“If they were not involved in that airstrike, than why are the Pentagon’s representatives, as leaders of the anti-ISIS coalition, hushing up the presence of their allies’ aircraft in the Deir ez-Zor region on December 6? Isn’t it because the [anti-ISIS] coalition air force gets all the information on Islamic State targets in Syria from the Pentagon?” he asked.
The US has been bombing IS positions in Iraq since August 2014. However, according to Iraq’s former PM Nouri al-Maliki, this campaign has been “unbelievably” ineffective in fighting the terror group.
Source: RT