US targets British executioner-jihadist
THE US military conducted an airstrike in Syria on Thursday targeting “Jihadi John”, the masked Islamic State militant with a British accent seen in grisly videos executing Western hostages,
Pentagon spokesman Peter Cook did not specify whether Mohammed Emwazi had been killed.
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.
Officials said 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 Islamic State 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.
Dubbed “Jihadi John” by British and US media, he first appeared in a video in August of last year showing the beheading of Foley, a 40year-old American freelance journalist.
“Jihadi John” was six years old when his family moved to London. He grew up in North Kensington, a middleclass area where a network of Islamist extremists was uncovered in recent years.
Emwazi has been connected to a network of extremists known as “The London Boys” trained by alShabaab, al-Qaeda’s East Africa affiliate.
One hostage who fell under Emwazi’s control in the IS group’s hub in Raqa talked of a “cold, sadistic and merciless” killer. — AFP