It’s been barely a month since I returned from the Syrian city of Raqqa. What I saw there shocked me. Witnessing the colossal and devastating impact of bombs, shells and rockets is nothing new to me as a reporter, but Raqqa was something else.

During my time in the city, I recall one afternoon standing on the bullet-pocked balcony of a flat belonging to a local man called Khalil al-Khalil.

“Look around you,” he insisted with a sweep of his arm, as we gazed out across the surrounding streets.

Everywhere, crumbling shell smashed tower blocks stretched as far as we could see and the charred burnt out carapaces of cars lay in the streets.

“So far we have received no help and the outside world seems to have forgotten us, but the people of Raqqa are rich in their character and we will rebuild the city that is our home, of that I’m certain,” Mr Khalil told me, his voice exuding the sort of determination that will be needed to undertake the daunting task he suggests.

Today Raqqa is all but unrecognisable even to its citizens, some of whom like Mr al-Khalil have returned from across Syria and beyond to try resurrecting their lives and businesses.

Many cities of course have been destroyed in the wars in Iraq and Syria since 2011, but the destruction is worse in Raqqa than anywhere else. An estimated 11,000 buildings are destroyed or severely damaged, and the remains of countless bodies still lie under its canyons of ruins their stench drifting on the breeze.

While recently accompanying the Civil Defence Unit volunteers tasked with recovering these remains, the team members told me that currently they still had 6,000 open reports of corpses and body parts that needed responding to.

Raqqa was of course the self-proclaimed capital of the Islamic State (IS) group’s caliphate. It was here that the jihadists carried out their grisly repertoire of hangings, beheadings, torture and sexual slavery.

Given that this was their base and hub, the city bore the brunt of air and artillery strikes by the US and its allies including Britain and France. Throughout this military campaign this coalition force consistently claimed that they precisely targeted IS fighters and positions during the five-month siege that destroyed swathes of the city.

But this week a newly released report entitled “War of Annihilation,”based on an investigation by human rights group, Amnesty International (AI), comprehensively contradicts such assertions, suggesting the coalition’s campaign of bombardment probably breached international humanitarian law and potentially amount to war crimes.

The report, details the loss of civilian life in Raqqa, based on interviews with 112 civilians at the sites of 42 coalition airstrikes, and its conclusions are damning to say the least

“The coalition's claims that its precision air campaign allowed it to bomb IS out of Raqqa while causing very few civilian casualties do not stand up to scrutiny,” said Amnesty's senior crisis response adviser, Donatella Rovera.

“On the ground in Raqqa we witnessed a level of destruction comparable to anything we have seen in decades of covering the impact of wars,”Ms Rovera added.

In further comments she went on to quote senior US military officer as saying that “more artillery shells were launched into Raqqa than anywhere since the end of the Vietnam War”.

A spokesman for the US-led coalition meanwhile, slammed Amnesty’s report, saying that the rights group never approached the Pentagon about its findings and was out of line for suggesting the coalition has violated international law.

“They are literally judging us guilty until proven innocent, that’s a bold rhetorical move by an organisation that fails to check the public record or consult the accused,” Col. Thomas Veale told reporters at the Pentagon via a video briefing from Baghdad.

That the battle to liberate Raqqa, Codenamed the Wrath of Euphrates,was a no quarter military campaign is beyond doubt. That much was clear from the outset when then US Secretary of Defence James Mattis announced the acceleration of operations against IS in May 2017.

“Our intention is that the foreign fighters do not survive the fight to return home to North Africa, to Europe, to America, to Asia, to Africa. We are not going to allow them to do so. We are going to stop them there and take apart the caliphate,” Mattis said at the time.

That Raqqa was taken apart in that process is also beyond doubt. According to independent research groups that track American and Russian airstrikes in Syria, US aircraft and artillery bombarded Raqqa with an estimated 20,000 munitions during the five month operation. This is more than was dropped in all of Afghanistan in the whole of 2017.

For now the controversy surrounding the coalition’s actions and Amnesty’s findings is sure to go on. It will be little consolation of course to those Syrians who lost family and loved ones in Raqqa.

But while little can be done for the dead, much can be done for those who survived and right now are struggling to rebuild their lives.

The US-led coalition, Britain included, help wreck the city, but there is precious little evidence that they are willing to take responsibility for putting it back together.

Eight months on the city has no running water or electricity, and there is virtually no help with the dangerous and pressing task of defusing the countless unexploded devices and ordnance around the city that continues to kill and maim civilians.

The volunteer Civil Defence Unit that I accompanied were sometimes scouring the rubble for body parts wearing nothing but thin surgical gloves, while such is the shortages they facethat even the body bags used for their grisly collection are recycled after emptying.

Right now there is humanitarian imperative to help the people of Raqqa. There is one other good reason too why they should not be ignored. For while IS might have been ousted from the city, their cadres still lurk ready and willing to exploit anger and frustration. Wrecking Raqqa was the easy part. Putting peoples lives back together is more difficult. Right now there it not a moment to lose.