Strikes on IS city, focus of international campaign, kill 8

A new wave of airstrikes targeting the Syrian city of Raqqa, the headquarters of the extremist Islamic State group and the focus of an international military campaign, killed at least eight people, including five children, Syrian opposition groups said on Friday.

The strikes came as France’s foreign minister, Laurent Fabius, declared that destroying the IS headquarters and “neutralising and eradicating” the extremist group is the main objective of the international campaign.

It wasn’t immediately clear who carried out the latest airstrikes. The city in northeastern Syria is the group’s de facto capital and has become the focus of international airstrikes in the wake of the Paris terror attacks and the bombing of a Russian jetliner over Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. IS has said it was behind both the Paris attacks and the downing of the Russian passenger plane. A Raqqa-based activist group that reports on IS, known as Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently, said on Friday that most of the casualties in the latest aerial bombardment occurred when warplanes targeted the city’s Heten School. The school, like others in Raqqa, has been taken over by IS.