U.S. commandos capture six officials
WASHINGTON>> For the second time in just more than a week, U. S. Special Operations forces carried out helicopter raids against the Islamic State group in eastern Syria, this time capturing six operatives including a senior official who the military said was involved in plotting and enabling terrorist attacks.
The U. S. Central Command, which oversees U.S. troops in Syria, said in a statement Tuesday that the main target of three predawn raids over the past 48 hours was a senior Islamic State Syria provincial official known as al-zubaydi.
On Dec. 11, helicopterborne U. S. commandos swooped in on another Islamic State official, known as Anas, killing himand an associate in a nearly threehour gunbattle in eastern Syria, the military said.
In this week’s assault, personnel from the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic
Forces, or SDF, the U. S. counterterrorism partner in northeastern Syria, accompanied the U.S. troops, the military said.
“These partnered operations reaffirm CENTCOM’S steadfast commitment to the region and the enduring defeat of ISIS,” Gen. Michael E. Kurilla, the head of the command, said in a statement, using an alternative name for the Islamic State. “The capture of these ISIS operatives will disrupt the terrorist organization’s ability to further plot and carry out destabilizing attacks.”
The recent raids represent the latest in a string of setbacks this year for the Islamic State’s core leadership in Iraq and Syria, the most serious since the end of the jihadis’ so- called caliphate more than three years ago.
Late last month, the Islamic State announced that its overall leader, whose identity has remained shrouded in mystery, had been killed in battle in Syria less than ninemonths after taking charge of the terrorist organization.
Outside the Middle East, the group has experienced mixed success. Its branch in Afghanistan, which carried out a deadly attack against American troops in Kabul in August 2021, is locked in a stalemate with the Taliban government. But Islamic State fighters have struck highly symbolic targets in Afghanistan, including Russian and Chinese interests.
Islamic State fighters, along with al- Qaida cells, are gaining strength in West Africa, with the violence now threatening countries such as Ghana, Togo and Benin. “I’m very preoccupied and worried about this trend of terrorism spreading south,” President Mohamed Bazoum of Niger said in an interview in Washington last week.
Overall, though, Colin P. Clarke, a counterterrorism analyst at the Soufan Group, a security consulting firm based in New York, said the Islamic State “will continue to present a threat, but that threat has been reduced significantly.”
No Americans were injured in the raids this week, officials said. An initial assessment indicated that no civilians were killed or injured, the military statement said.
Rami Abdul Rahman, an official with the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a group in Britain that tracks the conflict through contacts in Syria, said the raids were conducted between Deir el-zour and Hasaka in the country’s east.
The fact that the Pentagon sent commandos to kill or capture the Islamic State officials, rather than use a less risky drone operation, indicated their significance.
The United States has worked for years with the Syrian Democratic Forces to fight the Islamic State in Syria, and several hundred U.S. forces remain in territory the group controls in northeastern Syria near the Turkish border.