Hostage killer taken out

Senior militant died in US-led Syria coalition strike, says army spokesman

US-led war planes target Islamic State leader involved in the executions of an American aid worker and other Western captives.

Beirut: The US-led coalition against the Islamic State (IS) group says it has killed a senior militant involved in the executions of an American aid worker and other Western hostages.

Abu al-Umarayn was accused of involvement in the November 2014 beheading of Peter Kassig, a former US ranger who was doing volunteer humanitarian work when captured in 2013.

“He was killed and more information will be available after a full assessment,” Sean Ryan, spokes- man for the US-led coalition, said in a statement issued yesterday after the Sunday strikes.

“Al-Umarayn had given indications of posing an imminent threat to coalition forces and he was involved in the killing of American citizen and former US Army Ranger Peter Kassig,” he said.

Ryan said al-Umarayn had also been involved in the execution of several other prisoners.

It is the first time the coalition, which has been hunting down IS fighters in Iraq and Syria since 2014, has announced the killing of a militant leader linked to Kassig’s death.

At the time of the execution, IS released a video showing Kassig’s severed head but did not publish footage of the decapitation, as it had done for other hostages.

Syria’s Sana news agency had earlier on Sunday accused the US-led coalition of firing on Syrian army positions in remote eastern regions.

“The American coalition forces launched at around 8pm this evening (Sunday) several missiles against some positions of our forces in the Ghorab mountains south of Sukhna,” it said.

Quoting a military source, it said the bombardment had caused only material damage.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said coalition forces fired “over 14 missiles” at a Syrian army convoy passing through the desert.

“The group was lost in the middle of the desert around 35 km from the Al-Tanf base,” the Observatory’s director Rami Abdel Rahman said.

The United States often uses this base to launch strikes against IS.

Coalition spokesman Sean Ryan denied that any strikes targeted the Syrian army.

“False. The strikes were as the report stated and directed at Isis,” he said, using another acronym for IS.

Kassig founded a humanitarian organisation in 2012 that trained some 150 civilians to provide medical aid to people in Syria.

His execution was part of a series of Western hostage beheadings that IS filmed and published to shock the world as it attempted to expand across the region. — AFP