U.S. airstrike in Syria may have caused civilian casualties: military

A strike on the terror group Islamic State (IS) near Raqqah, Syria on Tuesday may have resulted in civilian casualties, the U.S. Central Command (Centcom) said Wednesday.

Reports indicate that what appeared to be a nonmilitary vehicle drove into the target area after the weapon was released from an aircraft, the Centcom said in a news release.

The vehicle's occupants may have been killed, the news release said, without elaborating the details of the strike as well as the number of civilian victims involved.

Its internal assessment of possible civilian casualties in this incident "has been deemed credible," the Centcom said.

The incident will be reviewed at the joint task force level, at which point officials will decide whether an investigation is needed, it said.

The United States has been launching airstrikes either by aircraft or drones against IS targets in Iraq and Syria in recent years, often causing civilian casualties.

The White House released a report last month on the civilian fatalities in U.S. drone strikes from 2009 to 2015, estimating that some 100 civilians were killed during 473 U.S. drone strikes in regions where the United States is not at war.

But human rights groups criticized the report for apparently underestimating the real number of civilian casualties in such strikes. Endi