US-led coalition kills Daesh terrorist linked to executions
Abu Al-Umarayn was accused of involvement in beheading of American aid worker Peter Kassig
Daesh fighters in Iraq and Syria since 2014, has announced the killing of an extremist leader linked to Kassig’s death.
At the time of the execution, Daesh 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 pro-regime news agency had earlier on Sunday accused the US-led coalition of firing on Bashar Assad regime’s military positions in remote eastern regions.
“The American coalition forces launched around 8:00 p.m. (1800 GMT) this evening 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 “more than 14 missiles” at a pro-Assad military convoy as it was passing through the desert.
“The group was lost in the middle of the desert around 35 km from the Al-Tanf base,” said the Observatory’s director Rami Abdel Rahman. The US often uses this base to launch its strikes against Daesh terrorists.
Coalition spokesman Sean Ryan denied any strikes targeted Assad’s army.
“False, the strikes were as the report stated and directed at” Daesh, he said.
Kassig founded a humanitarian organization in 2012 that trained some 150 civilians to provide medical aid to people in Syria. His group also gave food, cooking supplies, clothing and medicine to the needy.
He took the name Abdul Rahman after converting to Islam.
His execution was part of a gruesome series of Western hostage beheadings that Daesh filmed and published to shock the world as it attempted to expand across the region. Another hostage held at the time and whose execution was threatened was British journalist John Cantlie.
He later appeared in videos in which he uttered Daesh propaganda but, more than six years after his kidnapping, his fate remains unclear.
The leader of the cell which was responsible for the executions and became known as “The Beatles” was believed to be Mohammed Emwazi, a British terrorist nicknamed “Jihadi John” who was killed in a drone strike in 2015.
After expanding to control a self-styled “caliphate” straddling Syria and Iraq which was larger than Britain, Daesh suffered a string of military setbacks.
The terrorist group has virtually no fixed positions left in Iraq and is now defending a few pockets in desert areas of Syria, including the region where Sunday’s strikes were carried out.
The other is the extremists’ main active front in the Hajjin area of Deir Ezzor province, where coalition-backed Kurdish-led fighters have been struggling to flush out a group of die-hard extremists making a fierce last stand.
The coalition as well as the Syrian regime and its Russian backers have all repeatedly vowed to carry on the fight until achieving a full victory over Daesh
But analysts have warned that fully eradicating the terrorists from those desert hideouts where the state has a very limited footprint could prove almost impossible.