WASHINGTON -- A U.S. airstrike in March killed more than 100 Iraqi civilians by inadvertently setting off a large amount of explosives that Islamic State fighters had placed in a building in Mosul, according to a military investigation made public Thursday. The investigation concluded that the U.S. strike in the Al-Jadida district inadvertently triggered explosives placed in the building by Islamic State fighters, causing the building to collapse. "The secondary explosion triggered a rapid failure of the structure which killed the two ISIS snipers, 101 civilians sheltered in the bottom floors of the structure and four civilians in the neighboring structure to the west," said US Air Force Brigadier General Matt Isler, the lead investigator. Neither coalition nor Iraqi forces knew that the civilians were in the building, nor did they know that ISIL, also known as ISIS, had placed explosives in the building that triggered a secondary explosion, the Pentagon said in a statement. A two-month investigation into one of the worst civilian casualty events in decades found that a U.S. military airstrike in Iraq inadvertently set off explosives that ripped through a sprawling apartment block and killed at least 105 civilians. The U.S.-led command has previously said 396 civilians have been killed in the more than two-year campaign against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, though some independent estimates run much higher.
The United States military reports that their investigation found 105 civilians were killed and 36 people are still missing from the bombing of a Mosul building on March 17.