17 jihadists and five civilians killed in US incursion into Syria

Beirut: 17 jihadists and five civilians were killed in a raid in which the US military targeted leaders of the Al-Qaeda network in northwestern Syria on Thursday, according to a new issue of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights on Friday.

And the US Central Command (Sentcom) announced in a statement that “US forces launched an attack on a group of senior Al-Qaeda officials in Syria who were meeting” in Idlib, near the Turkish border.

He believed that “eliminating these leaders of Al Qaeda in Syria will reduce the terrorist organization’s ability to plan and carry out attacks that threaten US citizens, our partners and innocent civilians.”

The statement did not specify how many people were killed in the raid.

For its part, the Syrian Observatory recorded the death of 17 jihadists, including 11 leaders, in addition to five civilians, as a result of the air attack, which targeted a dinner held in a tent inside a farm in the village of Jakara in the Salqin area near the Turkish border.

Among the dead were five jihadists of non-Syrian nationalities, according to the Observatory, and it was unable to determine their nationalities.

The director of the observatory, Rami Abd al-Rahman, told AFP that “leaders who defected from Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, opposing the Russian-Turkish truce agreements with other jihadists close to the Guardians of Religion Organization” were present. in the dinner.

The al Qaeda-linked “Guardians of Religion” organization, which was established in 2018 and includes hundreds of fighters, is active in Idlib. It is fighting alongside the Al-Sham Liberation Headquarters (formerly Al-Nusra), which currently controls about half of the Idlib area and borders limited areas of the Hama, Aleppo and Latakia governorates.

A ceasefire has been established in areas in and around Idlib since March 6, which Russia and Turkey declared three months after a massive attack launched by Damascus, with the support of Moscow, that pushed out nearly a million people. to flee.

US forces have repeatedly targeted jihadist leaders and their gatherings in Idlib, the most recent of which was a mid-September raid that killed a Tunisian leader of the Guardians of Religion Organization.

The raid came on Thursday hours after a source familiar with the beheading of French history professor Samuel Batee, after showing cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, announced that the perpetrator, a Russian refugee of Chechen origin, had been in contact with a Russian-speaking jihadist in Syria.

The newspaper “Le Parisien” reported on Thursday that the person suspected of having been in contact with the killer is in Idlib, according to his IP address.