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05-04-2023
WASHINGTON/ DAMASCUS: The US military says a senior leader of the jihadist group Islamic State (IS) who was responsible for planning attacks in Europe has been killed in a strike in Syria.
Khalid Aydd Ahmad al-Jabouri died in an undisclosed location on Monday, according to US Central Command.
No civilians were said to have been killed or injured in the attack.
First responders said a man was killed in a drone strike on Monday in opposition-held north-western Syria.
The White Helmets organization tweeted that an unidentified drone fired a missile at the man on the outskirts of the town of Kili, in Idlib province.
“Our teams responded and took the injured person to Bab Al-Hawa Hospital, where he died,” it added.
Pro-opposition Step News cited local sources as identifying the man as Khalid Abdullah al-Khulaif and saying that he was likely to have been a senior jihadist from the eastern province of Deir al-Zour.
Enab Baladi, another pro-opposition outlet, reported that the man had arrived in the area 10 days earlier and that he had been speaking on a mobile phone when he was targeted with a Hellfire missile.
US Central Command said the death of Khalid al-Jabouri would temporarily disrupt the ability of IS to plot external attacks. It did not mention any attacks or thwarted attacks that he was alleged to have planned.
“(IS) continues to represent a threat to the region and beyond,” its commander, Gen Michael Kurilla, said. “Though 
degraded, the group remains able to conduct operations within the region with a desire to strike beyond the Middle East.”
The US-led multinational coalition against IS has carried out a series of strikes in northern Syria in recent months targeting senior members of IS and Hurras al-Din, which is believed to be al-Qaeda’s Syria branch.
IS once held 88,000 sq km (34,000 sq miles) of territory stretching from western Syria to eastern Iraq and imposed its brutal rule on almost eight million people.
It was driven from its last piece of territory in 2019, but the UN warned last month that the threat posed by the group and its affiliates was high and increased in particular in conflict zones and neighboring countries.
IS is estimated to have 5,000 to 7,000 members and supporters spread between Iraq and Syria, roughly half of whom are fighters.
The fighters are based mostly in rural areas and continue to carry out hit-and-run attacks, ambushes and roadside bombings.
Late last year, Islamic State announced it had appointed a previously unknown figure- Abu al-Hussein al-Husseini al-Quraishi as its leader after the previous leader was killed in southern Syria.
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 some 10 days ago.
Some 900 US troops remain in Syria, most in the Kurdish-administered northeast, as part of a US-led coalition battling remnants of ISIS, who remain active in both Syria and neighboring Iraq, operating out of hideouts in desert and mountain area.
ISIS has claimed a number of deadly attack in Europe in recent years, including a November 2015 attack in Paris and its suburbs that killed 130 people and another attack in the French city of Nice in July 2016 that killed 86 people. (Int’l Monitoring Desk)
