DAMASCUS (Dispatches) – About 15 civilians have been killed in a U.S.-led coalition airstrike on the city of Hajin in Syria’s Dayr al-Zawr province as it  used white phosphorus in the region, reports say.
The Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA) reported the U.S.-led coalition's airstrikes on several targets in Syria's Dayr al-Zawr province over the last few weeks.
"The coalition used shells with white phosphorus, prohibited by international conventions, during an air strike on the New Market area in Hajin in the east of Dayr al-Zawr province," the agency reported, citing local sources.
Local sources, requesting not to be named, told Syria’s official news agency SANA that U.S.-led military aircraft carried out a bombing attack on al-Souq al- Jadeed commercial district in the town of Hajin, located some 110 kilometers east of the provincial capital city of Dayr al-Zawr, on Monday afternoon, using the internationally-banned chemical agent.
Late last month, Syrian Ambassador to the United Nations Bashar al-Ja'afari confirmed at a UN Security Council meeting that the U.S.-led alliance had used white phosphorus bombs against the same Syrian town.
On October 13, SANA also reported that the U.S.-led coalition had dropped internationally-banned white phosphorus bombs on Hajin.
On September 8, two F-15 warplanes of the U.S. Air Force targeted the same Syrian town with white phosphorous bombs.
In June last year, Human Rights Watch (HRW) warned that the U.S.-led coalition was deploying white phosphorous bombs in both Iraq and Syria.
The U.S.-led coalition has been conducting airstrikes against what are said to be Daesh targets inside Syria since September 2014 without any authorization from the Damascus government or a UN mandate.
The military alliance has repeatedly been accused of targeting and killing civilians. It has also been largely incapable of achieving its declared goal of destroying Daesh.
The Syrian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Expatriates, in two separate letters addressed to United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres and the rotating president of the UN Security Council Ma Zhaoxu on Thursday, asked the United Nations Security Council to conduct an "international investigation” into crimes perpetrated against ordinary Syrians by the US-led coalition.
The letters added that the US-led coalition was using internationally banned weapons, including white phosphorus bombs, in bombing residential neighborhoods in Raqqah, Dayr al-Zawr, Aleppo and Hasakah provinces.