MOSUL, Iraq _ The U.S.-led military coalition fighting to dislodge the Islamic State from the Iraqi city of Mosul said Saturday it may have been responsible for an airstrike that killed more than 200 civilians in the western part of the city.
The U.S. Central Command, which oversees military operations in the Middle East, said in a statement Saturday that an initial review of the strike showed that the coalition carried out an attack at the request of Iraqi security forces on March 17 at a location in West Mosul "corresponding to allegations of civilian casualties."
The admission comes days after journalists from Western media, including the Los Angeles Times, visited the village of Jadidah inside Mosul and saw dozens of bodies being pulled from the rubble of a large building.
The coalition "takes all allegations of civilian casualties seriously and a formal Civilian Casualty Credibility Assessment has been opened to determine the facts surrounding this strike and the validity of the allegation of civilian casualties," the Central Command's statement said.
The fact it has taken the U.S.-led coalition more than a week to determine whether it could be at fault in an airstrike believed to have killed so many people underscores the pounding Mosul is taking as the bombing campaign ramps up.
Hundreds of artillery shells, ground-based rockets and precision-guided bombs strike targets around the densely populated city each week, raising questions about whether the Trump administration has relaxed the written rules of engagement in the more than 2-year-old war against the Islamic State.
Civilian casualty claims have also increased in both Iraq and Syria.
Col. John Thomas, spokesman for the Central Command, said the rules of engagement have not been changed and the military maintains tight restrictions to ensure that civilians are not inadvertently harmed. But the U.S.-led coalition and its ground partners in Iraq and Syria are closing in on the Islamic State's last strongholds, where the militants mix among the locals in heavily populated areas. This is a departure from the early phases of the campaign when the militants would drive through the desert flying black flags, making themselves easy identifiable targets.
The airstrike, if confirmed, would mark the deadliest civilian casualty incident by far since the U.S. military began it involvement in mid-2014. The credibility assessment, in which the military gathers and analyzes an array of information that is both classified and public, is expected to take two to three weeks.
The inquiry will also examine whether an accumulation of airstrikes in the area may have degraded the structural integrity of the building before it fell or the Islamic State detonated an explosion after the air strike to bring the building down.
"This sort of assessment is really complex," Thomas said. "It gets especially difficult to determine what happened in certain areas of the city where the streets are so narrow that large vehicles cannot get through."
Another possibility is that an airstrike hit or triggered an Islamic State suicide car bomb. The militants have deployed such mobile bombs, in which a driver will blow himself up in the face of advancing Iraqi forces.
Mosul Eye, a local blog, reported one was detonated in the village on Saturday, killing 40.
