Daesh spokesman killed in fresh north Syria raid: SDF official

  • 10/28/2019
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Official with the Kurdish-led SDF said Abu Hassan Al-Muhajir was killed in the village of Ain Al-Baydah near Jarablus Two vehicles hit by airstrikes AIN AL BAYDAH, Syria: The Daesh group’s spokesman was killed Sunday in northern Syria, a top Kurdish official said, hours after the extremists’ leader Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi was announced dead. The official with the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces said Daesh spokesman Abu Hassan Al-Muhajir had been killed, after SDF chief Mazloum Abdi said he had been “targeted” in a fresh raid. “Al-MuHajjir, the right-hand of Baghdadi and the spokesman for IS, was targeted in the village of Ain Al-Baydah near Jarablus, in a coordinated operation between SDF intelligence and the US army,” Abdi said on Twitter. An AFP correspondent in Ain Al-Baydah, which is controlled by Turkey-backed Syrian rebels, said two vehicles where hit by airstrikes: a small pick-up truck and a larger truck carrying a small metal container. He saw two corpses lying outside the first vehicle while a third charred body was in the metal container. He could not identify who was behind the strikes or if they were carried out by warplanes or a drone. The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights confirmed the death of Al-Muhajir, saying he was among five IS members who were killed in a US-led operation backed by the SDF. In a later post on Twitter, SDF spokesman Mustefa Bali said: “We believe Daesh spox.Al-Muhajir was in Jarablus to facilitate Baghdadi’s entry to Euphrates Shield area,” referring to a zone in northern Syria controlled by Turkey’s Syria proxies. “The two US-led operations have effectively disabled top Daesh leadership who were hiding” in northwest Syria. “More still remain hiding in the same area,” Bali said. Earlier on Sunday, Trump said Al-Baghdadi was killed, dying “like a dog,” in a daring, nighttime raid by US special forces deep in northwest Syria. Trump said that US forces killed a “large number” of Daesh militants during the raid, which culminated in Al-Baghdadi cornered in a tunnel, where he detonated a suicide vest. The operation to kill Al-Baghdadi took place near a small village in northwestern Syria called Barisha, more than a 100 kilometers west of Ain Al-Baydah. The Daesh “caliphate” was eradicated in March, nearly five years after it was proclaimed by Al-Baghdadi, largely reducing the militants to scattered sleeper cells. At the time, the Daesh spokesman came out of months of silence to spur on his troops. He had not delivered a speech since March.

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