Bodies pile up as US-backed forces battle Islamic State in Syria’s Raqqa
Like Mosul, the house-to-house battle for Raqqa weighs most heavily on starving and bombed out civilians
When Abu Ahmad stepped out of his house in Raqqa after a night of heavy air strikes, he found several of his neighbours lying dead in the street.
“I went out the next morning just to inspect,” he said. “I swear to God, cats were eating the corpses.”
“We couldn’t do anything with the dead bodies,” he said in a series of voice messages from the city, the global headquarters of Islamic State. “They were just abandoned. We informed the hospital.”
The US-led coalition battling to defeat the ultra-hardline militants in Raqqa says it goes to great lengths to avoid civilian casualties.
Abu Ahmad said air and artillery attacks were relentless, leaving most people holed up inside, unable to bury the dead and paralysed by fear of the warplanes and shelling by US-backed forces fighting on the ground.
