US forces killed several Islamic State (IS) leaders in Syria during a helicopter operation and airstrike conducted between Wednesday evening and Thursday in northeastern Syria, the command said. US military for the Middle East (Centcom).
It took place in an enclave held by auxiliary forces of the Syrian regime, near the town of Qamichli controlled by Kurdish forces allied with American troops, according to concordant sources.
The American command then indicated in a second press release that it had killed two other leaders of the jihadist group during an airstrike in northern Syria.
This second attack would have, according to Centcom, made it possible to kill “both Abu-Hashum al-Umawi (…) and another senior IS official”, without affecting civilians.
"This strike will weaken the ability of the IS to destabilize the region and to strike our forces and our partners", commented the boss of the American command in the region, General Michael Kurilla.
A first since 2011
Among the targets of the American operation, there was in particular Rakan Wahid al-Shamri, “an IS official known to facilitate the smuggling of weapons and the clandestine transport of fighters”, specified Centcom.
“The targeted individual was killed and one of his companions injured.
Two other companions were arrested,” confirmed the command, without specifying the nationality of the dead official.
No American soldiers and no civilians were killed or injured in the operation, according to the same source.
In Damascus, Syrian state television reported a helicopter operation by "US occupation forces" in which one person was killed.
She gave no further details.
This is the first time since the start of the war in Syria in 2011 that US troops have carried out a helicopter operation in an area under the control of Bashar al-Assad's regime, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. (OSDH).
sleeper cells
After a meteoric rise in power in 2014 in Iraq and neighboring Syria and the conquest of vast territories, the IS saw its self-proclaimed "caliphate" crumble under the impact of successive offensives.
He was defeated in 2017 in Iraq and in 2019 in Syria.
But the extremist group continues to carry out attacks in these two countries.
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The United States continues to target IS leaders.
Hundreds of American soldiers are deployed in northeastern Syria as part of an anti-jihadist coalition, which continues to fight with its Kurdish allies from the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), the sleeper cells of the IS.
In July, they announced that they had killed a senior IS official in a drone strike in northwestern Syria.
In June, they reported the capture of an IS leader in a helicopter operation in northern Syria.
ISIS leader Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi was killed in a US raid in 2019 and his successor, Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurachi, was eliminated in February 2022 in a US special forces operation in the northwestern Syria, a region largely controlled by jihadists.
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