A US-led coalition has captured a senior member of the ISIL (ISIS) group in northwest Syria, the SANA state news agency and a war monitor have reported, while another Syrian security source and Syria’s state-owned Al-Ekhbariya said the man targeted was killed as he tried to escape.
It was not immediately clear on Tuesday if the man might be ISIL’s supreme leader. Two years ago, ISIL announced that a man called Abu Hafs al-Hashimi al-Qurashi was named as its new leader after Turkish authorities killed his predecessor. The United States military did not respond to a request for comment by The Associated Press news agency.
The operation that included landing troops from helicopters occurred before dawn in Atmeh town near the Turkish border, and an ISIL commander known as Abu Hafs al-Qurashi, an Iraqi citizen, was taken away while another Iraqi citizen was killed, according to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR).
SOHR said the man captured had a French-speaking woman with him, and it was not immediately clear if she was taken by the US forces or by Syrian security forces who later cordoned off the area.
Syrian state TV on Wednesday quoted an unnamed security official as saying the Iraqi man targeted in the operation is known as Ali, adding that his real name is Salah Noman. The report said that Noman was living in an apartment with his wife, son and mother. It said he was killed in the raid. There was no immediate clarification about the difference in names reported by state media and the war monitor.
It was the second known raid in northern Syria by US troops since longtime leader Bashar al-Assad was ousted in December. The government led by President Ahmed al-Sharaa, which replaced him, has pledged to prevent a resurgence of ISIL and is part of an anti-ISIL alliance that includes the US-led coalition fighting the group.
In late July, the US Central Command (CENTCOM) said its forces killed a senior ISIL leader and his two sons affiliated with the group in Syria’s Aleppo region, the US military has said. CENTCOM said at the time that it “conducted a raid resulting in the death of senior ISIS Leader, Dhiya’ Zawba Muslih al-Hardani, and his two adult ISIS-affiliated sons, Abdallah Dhiya al-Hardani and Abd al-Rahman Dhiya Zawba al-Hardani”.
In late May, ISIL claimed responsibility for an attack on the Syrian army, representing the armed group’s first strike at government forces since the fall of al-Assad, according to analysts.
In a statement regarding that attack, ISIL said its fighters had planted an explosive device that struck a “vehicle of the apostate regime” in southern Syria.
ISIL, which views the new government in Damascus led by al-Sharaa as illegitimate, has mainly concentrated its activities against Kurdish forces in the north.
At its peak, ISIL ruled an area half the size of the United Kingdom, spanning across Iraq and Syria, with Raqqa in the latter being the capital of the armed group’s self-declared “caliphate”.
The group was notorious for its brutality, carrying out massacres of Syrians and Iraqis and beheading of foreign captives. ISIL’s massacres included those of thousands of the Yazidi people and the group also enslaved thousands of Yazidi women. The Yazidis, a long-persecuted group whose faith is rooted in Zoroastrianism, are still recovering from the horrors of ISIL’s onslaught on their community in Iraq’s Sinjar district in 2014.
ISIL was defeated in Iraq in 2017 and in Syria two years later, but its fighters and cadres of militants still carry out deadly attacks in both countries and elsewhere, including in Africa and Afghanistan.
A deadly attack on Mar Elias Church in Damascus in June killed at least 25 people, after a man with a rifle entered the church and shot at worshippers, before detonating a suicide bomb.
The Syrian Interior Ministry blamed ISIL for the attack, though another group called Saraya Ansar al-Sunna later claimed it.
