The US said it carried out an air strike in Syria against an Al-Qaeda meeting but denied hitting a mosque where a monitor said on Friday 46 people were killed. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said most of the dead in the Thursday evening raid on the village of Al-Jineh in the northern province of Aleppo were civilians. In Washington, the Pentagon insisted a mosque was not hit but rather a nearby building with "dozens" of Al-Qaeda members inside, "several" of whom were killed.
"The mosque is still standing and relatively unscathed," Pentagon spokesman Navy Captain Jeff Davis said. "The building we targeted was adjacent" and the strike "clearly hit the intended target".
He showed a black-and-white image of what appeared to be an old mosque with a flattened building a short distance away.
Davis did not say what that destroyed building's purpose had been or whether it could have been somehow connected to the old mosque in Al-Jineh.
The US has been bombing jihadists in war-torn Syria as part of an international coalition since 2014, with hundreds of civilians unintentionally killed in the country and in neighbouring Iraq.
The US Central Command said Friday it would "look into any allegations of civilian casualties in relation to this strike", which was carried out unilaterally by the United States.
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