U.S. Announces Deaths of Two Islamic State Chiefs

Early in the morning, “a helicopter airstrike was successfully carried out in eastern Syria,” killing “two leaders of the Islamic State organization,” the Centcom statement said, quoted by the AFP news agency. One of them was identified by the name of Anas and was the leader of a group in Syria, “who was involved in the planning of bloody operations” in eastern Syrian territory. The statement gave no details about the second jihadist leader killed. The US military carried out the operation in cooperation with soldiers of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF, whose majority of members are Kurds) in Al Zor, a town in the province of Deir Ezzor, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an organization of activists based in London with sources in the interior of the country. When these two individuals refused to surrender, according to the observatory’s account, the helicopters of the US forces “attacked their location with heavy machine guns, killing both”, in what is the first joint operation between the US and the SDF since the beginning two weeks ago of the last Turkish offensive against these militias. that Ankara denounces as a terrorist group, while Washington perceives them as an essential ally against jihadism, recapitulated the news agency Europa Press.The IS had announced on November 30 the death of its leader, the Iraqi Abu Hassan al Hashimi al Qurashi, although it did not specify the circumstances. Hundreds of U.S. troops are deployed in northeastern Syria as part of the coalition against IS, which was defeated in Iraq in 2017 and in Syria in 2019.

Original source in Spanish