US drone targets IS terrorist ‘Jihadi John’
The US military on Thursday said it had targeted Islamic State’s Mohammed Emwazi, better known as Jihadi John, in an airstrike on the outfit’s Syrian stronghold of Raqqa. But officials, including US secretary of state John Kerry and UK prime minister David Cameron, have said they are not able to confirm as yet the outcome of the strike.
The US military on Thursday said it had targeted Islamic State’s Mohammed Emwazi, better known as Jihadi John, in an airstrike on the outfit’s Syrian stronghold of Raqqa.
But officials, including US secretary of state John Kerry and UK prime minister David Cameron, have said they are not able to confirm as yet the outcome of the strike.
“We are still assessing the results of this strike, but the terrorists associated with Daesh (Arabic name of IS) need to know this: Your days are numbered, and you will be defeated,” Kerry said in Tunisia.
In London, Cameron said, “We have been working, with the United States, literally around the clock to track him down… Emwazi is a barbaric murderer.”
But an unidentified defence official told The New York Times on Friday: “We think we got him.” Emwazi’s vehicle was hit by a Reaper drone carrying surface-to-air Hellfire missiles. He was graveling with one other man, who remains unidentified.
Emwazi, a 27-year-old British citizen, was the masked man seen in videos of the murder of US journalists Steven Sotloff and James Foley, US aid worker Abdul-Rahman Kassig, British aid workers David Haines and Alan Henning and Japanese journalist Kenji Goto.
The terrorist, who first came to international attention in the video on the killing of American journalist Foley in August 2014, grew up in Britain where his family had moved from Kuwait in 1996, fearing prosecution.
Emwazi is understood to have studied computer science. He was later a part of a group called the “North London Boys”, and travelled to countries engulfed in conflict such as Somalia and Syria. He was on the radar of British intelligence, and had been on a terror watch list since 2009.