US air strike targets ‘Jihadi John’ in Syria
WASHINGTON (AFP) — The US military conducted an air strike in Syria Thursday targeting “Jihadi John,” the masked Islamic State (IS) militant with a British accent seen in grisly videos executing Western hostages, the Pentagon said.
Spokesman Peter Cook did not specify whether Mohammed Emwazi had been killed, saying in a statement that “we are assessing the results of tonight’s operation and will provide additional information as and where appropriate.”
The Pentagon said the air strike took place in Raqa, the Islamic State group’s de facto Syrian capital.
“Emwazi, a British citizen, participated in the videos showing the murders of US journalists Steven Sotloff and James Foley, US aid worker Abdul-Rahman Kassig, British aid workers David Haines and Alan Henning, Japanese journalist Kenji Goto, and a number of other hostages,” the Pentagon said.
CNN and the Washington Post, citing officials, reported that Emwazi was targeted by a drone.
Word of the US action comes as Iraqi Kurdish forces backed by US-led air strikes blocked a key IS group supply line with Syria in the battle to retake the town of Sinjar from the jihadists.
A permanent cut in the supply line would hamper IS’s ability to move fighters and supplies between northern Iraq and Syria, where the jihadists hold significant territory and have declared a “caliphate.”
Emwazi, a London computer programmer, was born in Kuwait to a stateless family of Iraqi origin. His parents moved to Britain in 1993 after their hopes of obtaining Kuwaiti citizenship were quashed.
“Jihadi John” was six years old when his family moved to London. He grew up in North Kensington, a leafy middleclass area where a network of Islamist extremists was uncovered in recent years.
As a child, he was a fan of Manchester United football club and the band S Club 7, according to a 1996 school year book published by The
Sun tabloid. He later went on to study information technology at the University of Westminster.