US will step up air strikes to 'annihilate' Isis and citizen casualties are inevitable, warns Defence Secretary

Pentagon chief James Mattis has said that the US is “accelerating the tempo” of the fight against Isis, and that civilian deaths should be anticipated as a “fact of life”. While US forces operating in Syria and Iraq do “do everything humanly possible” to prevent the loss of innocent life, “Civilian casualties are a fact of life in this sort of situation,“ General Mattis told CBS’ Face the Nation on Sunday. The interview comes after new figures from war monitor the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights found that the last four-week period was the deadliest for Syrian civilians on record since the US-led coalition bombing campaign began in 2014.