The Netherlands Has Admitted that their Aircraft Killed Dozens of Civilians in Iraq

A Dutch F-16 jet serving with the US-led coalition in Iraq killed about 70 people - Islamic State (IS) militants and civilians - in an air strike in 2015, the Dutch defence ministry says.

This is the first time the country has given details of the raid that was directed against a bomb factory in a city north of Iraq, the BBC reports.
The massive secondary explosion, which was unexpected, led to a much higher number of deaths than planned, the Ministry of Defense said.

The Airwars organization, which monitors civilian deaths in military conflicts, said at least 26 children and 22 women were killed in the incident.

The Netherlands claims that some of the dead were Islamic State fighters, but could not pinpoint their links to the terrorist organization.

The Dutch defence ministry also said on Monday that an air strike in the Iraqi city of Mosul on 20 September 2015 killed four civilians. A family home was bombed after faulty intelligence identified it as an IS headquarters, the ministry said, BBC reported.

The US-led coalition against the Islamic State announced in September that it had conducted a total of 34,573 air strikes in Iraq and Syria between August 2014 and August 2019 which killed 1,335 civilians unintentionally, according to official figures from the coalition.

Airways claims that this information is incorrect and between 8214 and 13 125 unarmed people were killed during this period.