US President Joe Biden announced on Thursday that the leader of the terrorist group Islamic State (IS), Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurashi, died during an overnight raid by US military commandos in north-west Syria’s Idlib province.
Biden said al-Qurashi detonated an explosive vest he was wearing as US forces approached, killing himself and his family, “in a final act of desperate cowardice.”
The US had “removed a major terrorist threat to the world,” Biden said in a White House speech, adding that no soldiers had been harmed during the operation.
Little is publicly known about al-Qurashi, who has led the extremist group since the death of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who also killed himself in 2019 as US special forces were closing in on him.
At least 13 people, including four children, were killed in the US operation, which was mounted early Thursday in an area in north-western Syria where militants are active, a war monitor reported earlier.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights added that a US-led military coalition carried out airstrikes under the cover of darkness and conducted a land-borne operation during which a firefight took place.
There have been growing fears of an IS resurgence in Syria.
On January 20, IS militants attacked a prison run by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) with the support of the US in the city of al-Hassakeh in north-eastern Syria, in a brazen operation aimed at freeing imprisoned IS members.
Thursday’s US raid took place in the Syrian area of Atmeh near the Turkish border, the observatory said. Residents in the area reported hearing heavy gunfire and explosions in the early hours.
Residents told a dpa photographer on the scene that the fighting lasted around three hours.
Al-Qurashi was discovered just a few kilometres from where al-Baghdadi was killed in October 2019.
According to locals, the house targeted in Thursday’s raid belonged to a man from Aleppo in northern Syria, who they said was living with his wife and children.
The locals also claimed they had never considered there to have been anything suspicious about the house.
A US-led coalition is fighting IS in war-torn Syria.
IS took control of large swathes of neighbouring Iraq in mid-2014. Shortly afterwards, the hardline jihadists proclaimed an Islamic caliphate that also included regions in Syria.
The radical militia has been declared militarily defeated in both countries, but it remains active and has repeatedly unleashed attacks.
NB: Weedah Hamzah wrote this article for Washington/Beirut (dpa)
