The US-led international coalition against the Islamic State (IS) jihadist group said in a statement this Thursday the arrest of one of the leaders of this terrorist organization at an unspecified location in Syria during a military operation initially on the matter this Thursday morning. The text does not reveal the identity of the suspected terrorist, but highlights that he is “a veteran bomb maker and trainer who became one of the group’s key leaders in Syria.”
A spokesman for the Syrian rebel group Syrian National Army (SNA), which is backed by Turkey, told Reuters that coalition forces carried out the attack using gunships in the village of Al Humaira, located south of the Syrian-Turkish border. “This is the first operation in areas under SNA control where US helicopters land,” said this spokesman, identified by the news agency as Major Youssef Hamoud.
Hamoud said US-made Chinook and Black Hawk helicopters were involved in the raid, although he said the circumstances of the operation were not yet clear. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a UK-based organization with an extensive network of operatives on the ground, has confirmed that coalition anti-Islamic State helicopters took part in an operation in north-west Syria at dawn.
“About nine international coalition planes flew low over the Al Sajor line in rural areas of northeast Aleppo and gunfire was heard in those areas amid reports of an operation in the Al Haimar area,” the NGO said in a statement. According to this observatory, the helicopters took off from the Kobane area in the hands of the Kurdish-Syrian allies of the international coalition and flew towards the areas in Aleppo province controlled by the Turkish-backed militias. Later, members of the international coalition landed in Al Humaira, where a shootout broke out with several people taking refuge in houses in that city.
The US-led coalition against the terrorist organization continues to respond with attacks on the terrorist organization, which has not ceased its insurgent activities since its military defeat three years ago. Earlier in the year, the jihadist formation carried out its largest operation in Syria since its defeat in March 2019, with a riot at a prison holding thousands of the group’s prisoners that left nearly half a thousand dead in Syria’s northeast of the country.
This Thursday’s operation commemorates that in February by Washington’s special forces in Syria’s Idlib province, controlled by the jihadist group Hayat Tahrir al Sham (Organization for the Liberation of the Levant), which led to the death of Supreme Leader of the Islamic State Abu Ibrahim al Hashemi al Quraishi. This leader had taken over the leadership of the organization since the death of its founder, Abubaker al-Baghdadi, who was killed by explosives during a US invasion in 2019, also in Idlib province bordering Aleppo.
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This operation by international forces comes in the context of Turkey’s threat to launch a new offensive in northern Syria, aimed primarily at Washington-aligned Kurdish militias in the Arab country. The Syrian Democratic Forces (FSD), the Kurdish-led coalition responsible for security in much of the country’s north-east, have accused Turkey of supporting Islamic State to advance its own interests.
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