Such operations by US forces are rare in the northwestern regions of Syria. (File)
Al Humayrah, Syria:
US coalition forces say they have captured a senior The bomb maker of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria during a raid before dawn on Thursday, according to eyewitnesses, saw troops on a helicopter plunging into a separate house, witnesses said. established in northwestern Syria held by rebels.
A war monitor and AFP reporter said two military helicopters landed within minutes, and several shots were fired, in a village in the area controlled by rebel groups. Turkey backs control.
“The person arrested was an experienced bomb maker and operations executive who became one of the top leaders of Daesh’s Syrian branch,” the US-led coalition fighting the group jihad in Syria and Iraq, using another name for ISIS, said.
The coalition did not name the target in the statement, but a coalition official told AFP the man arrested was Hani Ahmed Al-Kurdi, the ISIS leader in Raqa when it was the de facto capital of IS in Syria. .
Such operations by US forces are rare in areas of northwestern Syria, which are controlled by Turkish-backed rebels and non-IS jihadist groups.
An earlier special forces raid in early February resulted in the death of group leader Abu Ibrahim al-Qurashi, who detonated a bomb vest to avoid capture.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a UK-based war-monitoring group with an extensive network of sources on the ground, could not confirm the identity of the IS agent captured on Thursday.
Observatory head Rami Abdel Rahman told AFP that two military helicopters landed at Al-Humayrah and took off seven minutes later, adding that only a few shots had been fired.
“The US operation was quick and smooth, and it took place in the village of Al-Humayrah, northeast of Aleppo and 4 kilometers (2.5 miles) from the Turkish border,” he said.
‘No civilians were harmed’
The union says that “the mission is meticulously planned to minimize the risk of collateral damage, particularly any possible harm to civilians.
“No civilians were harmed during the operation nor was there any damage to coalition aircraft or property.”
Mohamed Youssef, a local witness to the raid, said it targeted a house on the outskirts of the village where evacuees from the Syrian city of Aleppo were living.
He reported busy activity in the sky while he was active at night.
“About eight planes flew for over an hour and a half,” he said. “As they were leaving, we went to the house and found tied up women and children in a nearby field.”
He said the women told them that the coalition had arrested “a man named Fawaz”.
Other residents told AFP that about four men and six women had lived in the house, but they did not know if they were a family and they did not blend in with the rest of the village.
Other witnesses told AFP that a group of pro-Turkish Syrians arrested two other men after the operation.
Hideout in the desert
After IS lost its last swathe of territory following a military offensive by the US-led coalition in March 2019, the remnants of IS in Syria mostly retreated to the desert.
ISIS cells have since ambushed Kurdish-led forces and the Syrian government or allied forces, also carrying out similar attacks in Iraq.
However, the group’s top leaders often hide in areas controlled by other forces.
Qurashi’s infamous predecessor, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, was killed in a US special forces raid in northwestern Syria, far from an ISIS active area.
Little is known about the new leader Abu Hasan al-Hashemi al-Qurashi, the jihadist group’s third leader since its founding.
Media coverage of his arrest in Istanbul last month has never been confirmed, with a Turkish official only telling AFP that a senior but unidentified ISIS member has been detained. .
Observers have long feared the rise of ISIS in the squalid enclave that straddles the Iraq-Syria border and forms the heart of the group’s once-supportive state.
However, with the coalition’s continued pressure on its leadership and financial resources, the jihadist group still has no fixed position in either country and the intensity of its attacks has largely unchanged since 2019.
(Except for the title, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from an aggregated feed.)
