U.S. President Barack said on Monday he was confident Islamic State militants would be driven out of Iraq and defeated but there would be setbacks along the way.
In a meeting with Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi at the G7 summit in Germany, Obama said the militants’ success in Ramadi would be a short-term tactical one.
Abadi urged the international community to help prevent the group, also known as ISIL, from gleaning profits from oil smuggling.
Meanwhile, a couple and their five children were killed overnight in Syria’s northern Aleppo province in strikes by the US-led coalition fighting Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil), a monitor said on Monday.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a group based in the UK, said the deaths raised to 148 the number of civilians killed in US-led strikes in Syria since they began in September.
The Observatory said the family was killed in a coalition strike on the village of Daly Hassan, in the north-east of Aleppo province.
Their deaths “bring the number of Syrian civilians killed in coalition air strikes since September 23 to 148, including 48 children and 32 women,” the monitor said.
In May, the Observatory reported at least 64 civilians – nearly half of them children – had been killed in US-led air strikes in the village of Birmahle in Aleppo province.
Syria’s US-backed opposition National Coalition urged an investigation into the overnight incident, noting that the available information “lends credence to report that it was a US-led coalition air strike”.
