Senior ISIS leader thought to have been killed in Syria raid, says US

US forces believe they have killed a “senior ISIS leader” in Syria, Central Command said yesterday.

Washington could not confirm the killing but claimed its operation resulted in the “probable death” of an unidentified ISIS member and two other armed people.

The early-morning helicopter-borne raid in the north of Syria went after an ISIS member “responsible for planning terror attacks in the Middle East and Europe”, Centcom said.

“Extensive planning went into this operation to ensure its successful execution,” it added.

A Centcom representative told The National that US forces have DNA samples for verification and that confirmation of death details would be released pending that identification.

The US has about 900 troops in Syria in a mission focused on countering Iran- backed militias and preventing the resurgence of ISIS, in partnership with the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces. ISIS is waging a low-level insurgency across northern Iraq and Syria, and often attacks members of the SDF.

Washington has carried out a series of operations against ISIS in recent weeks.

They took place as tensions with Tehran escalated following a drone attack that killed an American contractor at a US base in Hasakah governorate last month.

In recent weeks, Centcom killed senior ISIS leader Khalid Aydd Ahmad Al Jabouri in Syria’s north- west and captured an “attack facilitator” for the group.

“Within Centcom, there’s a sense that there is a critical point in the campaign against ISIS in Syria,” said Charles Lister, a senior fellow at the Washington- based Middle East Institute.

“ISIS’s highest level of leadership has been severely weakened and now is the time to cripple its mid-level operational command structure in Syria to have a truly long-standing effect,” he told The National, discussing the Centcom strategy.

Centcom chief Gen Michael Kurilla told the House armed services committee last month that ISIS would return to power in “one to two years” if the US were to withdraw from its mission in Syria.

“The high intensity of these targeted operations also clearly indicates a solid and actionable line of constant intelligence – in other words, we’ve penetrated key nodes of ISIS’s structure in Syria,” Mr Lister said.

A similar campaign against the leadership of ISIS’s predecessor in Iraq led to a fall in the number of terrorist attacks, but the rate of operations against the group slackened following the US withdrawal in 2011.

That, combined with a dysfunctional political situation in the country, allowed the group to recover.

“Each operation tends to open pathways for more,” Mr Lister said.

The campaign “underlines the extent to which Centcom and the Combined Joint Task Force – Operation Inherent Resolve are keen to sustain that public sense of success and momentum,” he said.