Senior leader is killed by drone

WASHINGTON — A senior official of al Qaeda was killed Sunday in Syria by a U.S. drone strike, a U.S. official said Wednesday.

The terrorist leader, Abu al-Khayr al-Masri, 59, was the second-ranking official after Ayman al-Zawahri and was a son-in-law of al Qaeda’s founder, Osama bin Laden.

Jihadist social media carried reports of the attack Sunday, including photos of the vehicle purportedly struck by the drone. The strike was said to have taken place in Idlib province in northwest Syria, where the Pentagon stepped up air strikes against top al Qaeda operatives in the last two months, killing several important figures.

Charles Lister, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute and an expert on the war in Syria, said in an email that the death of al-Masri was the most significant blow to al Qaeda’s global network since the killing of Nasir al-Wuhayshi, al Qaeda’s No. 2 official at the time, in a drone strike in Yemen in June 2015.

Al-Masri was “jihadi royalty, meaning his death will almost certainly necessitate some form of response, whether from Syria or elsewhere in the world,” Lister said.

Photographs of the vehicle al-Masri was said to be traveling in when attacked reveal unusual details for such a strike: The vehicle sustained no major explosive damage, but a projectile clearly struck it directly through the car roof. This suggests the precision strike was either a dud or the United States deliberately used an inert warhead to kill its target by highvelocity impact, avoiding possible civilian casualties with an explosive warhead.

An Egyptian, al-Masri was a veteran of jihadist conflicts in Egypt, Bosnia, Afghanistan and Pakistan, and a longtime member of al Qaeda’s highly secretive Shura Council.