The official death toll of the US-led aerial bombing campaign in Syria and Iraq has reached 484, while activists claim the figure is several times higher.

The toll was confirmed in a statement released by Operation Inherent Resolve, the US military’s operational name for the military intervention against the ISIL Takfiri group in Iraq and Syria.

“To date, based on information available, CJTF-OIR [Combined Joint Task Force] assesses that, it is more likely than not, at least 484 civilians have been unintentionally killed by Coalition strikes since the start of Operation Inherent Resolve,” the statement which was released on Friday read.

According to the coalition, in the period between August 2014 and April 2017, a total of 21,035 airstrikes were carried out against Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL). This figure breaks down into 44,330 separate engagements.

“Although the Coalition takes extraordinary efforts to strike military targets in a manner that minimizes the risk of civilian casualties, in some incidents casualties are unavoidable. Sixteen reports were assessed to be credible resulting in the unintentional death of 132 civilians,” the statement added.

The new report effectively upped the total civilian death toll by more than a third, as last month’s report acknowledged 352 civilian deaths.

The incident which contributed the most to the drastic increase in the official death toll was an airstrike carried out on March 17. A separate probe was launched into the incident, during which “101 civilians sheltered in the bottom floors of the structure, and four civilians in a neighboring structure were killed.”

Source: Agencies