The US military yesterday said it had carried out a strike in Syria killing a senior Islamic State group (IS) official responsible for planning attacks in Europe.
The strike in northwestern Syria on Monday killed senior Islamic State leader Khalid Aydd Ahmad al-Jabouri, US Central Command (CENTCOM) said.
It said he was “responsible for planning [IS] attacks into Europe.” The statement did not specify the location of the strike and added that “no civilians were killed or injured.”
“Though degraded,” the extremist group, which was ousted from its last territory in Syria in 2019, “remains able to conduct operations within the region with a desire to strike beyond the Middle East,” CENTCOM Commander General Michael Kurilla said.
Jabouri also “developed the leadership structure for IS” and his death would “temporarily disrupt the organization’s ability to plot external attacks,” CENTCOM said.
IS has claimed a number of deadly attacks in Europe in recent years, including a November 2015 attack in Paris and its suburbs that killed 130 people and another in the French city of Nice in July 2016 that killed 86 people.
The same year, three suicide attacks in Belgium killed more than 30 people. In August 2017, attacks claimed by IS in Barcelona and elsewhere in Spain killed 16 people.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based monitor of the more than decade-old conflict in Syria, said Jabouri was killed in a US drone strike in the Idlib region of the northwest, an area run by jihadists.
It said he was killed while speaking on a telephone as he walked in the open near where he was staying.
The Observatory said that Jabouri, who was posing as a Syrian, had sought refuge in the area about 10 days ago.
Kurilla said that IS, despite no longer controlling any territory in either Syria or Iraq, “continues to represent a threat to the region and beyond.”
“CENTCOM remains committed to the enduring defeat” of the Islamic State group, Kurilla said.
About 900 US troops remain in Syria, most in the Kurdish-administered northeast, as part of a US-led coalition battling remnants of IS, who remain active in Syria and Iraq, operating out of hideouts in desert and mountain area.
In October 2019, Washington announced it had killed IS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in an operation in northwestern Syria.
His two successors have also been killed: the first during a US operation in northwestern Syria, the second in an operation by former Syrian rebels in the country’s south.
In February this year, a US helicopter raid killed IS commander Hamza al-Homsi, who oversaw the jihadists’ operations in northeastern Syria. Four US military personnel were wounded in the operation.
James Watson — the Nobel laureate co-credited with the pivotal discovery of DNA’s double-helix structure, but whose career was later tainted by his repeated racist remarks — has died, his former lab said on Friday. He was 97. The eminent biologist died on Thursday in hospice care on Long Island in New York, announced the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, where he was based for much of his career. Watson became among the 20th century’s most storied scientists for his 1953 breakthrough discovery of the double helix with researcher partner Francis Crick. Along with Crick and Maurice Wilkins, he shared the
China’s Shenzhou-20 crewed spacecraft has delayed its return mission to Earth after the vessel was possibly hit by tiny bits of space debris, the country’s human spaceflight agency said yesterday, an unusual situation that could disrupt the operation of the country’s space station Tiangong. An impact analysis and risk assessment are underway, the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) said in a statement, without providing a new schedule for the return mission, which was originally set to land in northern China yesterday. The delay highlights the danger to space travel posed by increasing amounts of debris, such as discarded launch vehicles or vessel
RUBBER STAMP? The latest legislative session was the most productive in the number of bills passed, but critics attributed it to a lack of dissenting voices On their last day at work, Hong Kong’s lawmakers — the first batch chosen under Beijing’s mantra of “patriots administering Hong Kong” — posed for group pictures, celebrating a job well done after four years of opposition-free politics. However, despite their smiles, about one-third of the Legislative Council will not seek another term in next month’s election, with the self-described non-establishment figure Tik Chi-yuen (狄志遠) being among those bowing out. “It used to be that [the legislature] had the benefit of free expression... Now it is more uniform. There are multiple voices, but they are not diverse enough,” Tik said, comparing it
TOWERING FIGURE: To Republicans she was emblematic of the excesses of the liberal elite, but lawmakers admired her ability to corral her caucus through difficult votes Nancy Pelosi, a towering figure in US politics, a leading foe of US President Donald Trump and the first woman to serve as US House of Representatives speaker, on Thursday announced that she would step down at the next election. Admired as a master strategist with a no-nonsense leadership style that delivered for her party, the 85-year-old Democrat shepherded historic legislation through the US Congress as she navigated a bitter partisan divide. In later years, she was a fierce adversary of Trump, twice leading his impeachment and stunning Washington in 2020 when she ripped up a copy of his speech to the
RSS