US airstrike kills Syria’s Qaeda spokesman as army pushes anti-ISIL advance

Beirut // US air strikes killed several members of Jabhat Al Nusra including its spokesman and regime forces retook a strategic town from ISIL in the latest setbacks for extremists in the country.

Abu Firas Al Suri, whose real name was Radwan Nammous, fought against Soviet forces in Afghanistan where he met Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and the founding father of global extremism, Abdullah Azzam, before returning to Syria in 2011.

Suri was meeting with other leading extremist fighters from Al Qaeda’s Syria branch in Kafar Jales in northwestern Syria when the raids struck on Sunday.

The Pentagon confirmed the US military carried out the strike, resulting in several enemy fighters being killed.

He “was an old time Al Qaeda member ... He was brought in from Yemen as an ideological counterweight” for rival group ISIL, said Pieter Van Ostaeyen, a historian and monitor of extremist movements.

“His death indeed is a blow for Al Nusra. However, that will not change a lot on the operational level,” he added.

Aymenn Jawad Al Tamimi, a research fellow at the Middle East Forum, a US think tank, said Suri “was a very senior member of Al Nusra, but organisations like Al Nusra aren’t debilitated because they lose a single senior leader”, he said.

According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, Suri, his son and at least 20 militants from Al Nusra, Jund Al Aqsa and other fighters from Uzbekistan were killed in strikes on positions in Idlib province.

Seven were high-ranking extremists, the Britain-based Observatory said, adding that the Syrian air force had likely carried out the strikes.

A temporary ceasefire between government forces and rebels has largely held since February 27, but it does not cover Al Nusra and ISIL.

The break has, in fact, allowed Russia and the US-led coalition that has been bombing ISIL in Syria to concentrate on their fight against the extremists.

Al Nusra has generally kept a low profile since the truce brokered by the United States and Russia came into force.

But on Friday, the Al Qaeda affiliate and allied rebels pushed regime loyalists out of Al Eis, a strategic town in the northern province of Aleppo, killing 12 members of the Lebanese Shiite Hizbollah movement.

“It was Al Nusra’s biggest operation since the ceasefire began,” Observatory chief Rami Abdel Rahman said.

Suri’s killing may even be a warning by the regime to Al Nusra against staging any more offensives, Abdel Rahman added.

ISIL has also lost a string of high-ranking members in recent weeks, mainly to strikes by the US-led coalition that launched an aerial campaign against the group in Iraq and Syria in 2014.

Last Wednesday, a drone strike near ISIL’s de facto capital Raqa killed Tunisian commander Abu Al Haija.

Fifteen ISIL commanders accused of revealing his position have since been executed by the group, and the fate of another 20 men accused of collaborating with the US-led coalition remains unknown.

“This is the highest number of executions of security officials by ISIL,” said Abdel Rahman, whose Britain-based group has a wide network of contacts on the ground across Syria.

On Monday, ISIL’s press officer in the eastern province of Deir Ezzor was killed in an air strike while covering fighting between the militants and regime troops, the Observatory said.

“It was unclear whether the air strike that killed Mohammad Al Lafi was Russian or Syrian,” the group said, adding that the ISIL official used the nom de guerre Abu Abdallah Azzam.

On Sunday, the army seized the town of Al Qaryatain, one of the last ISIL strongholds in central Syria, a week after the Russian-backed army scored a major victory in the ancient city of Palmyra, also located in the vast province of Homs.

The recapture of Al Qaryatain allows the army to secure its grip over Palmyra, where ISIL destroyed ancient temples during their 10-month rule and executed 280 people.

It has also left ISIL with just one bastion in Homs province, Sukhna, where the focus of the fighting has now shifted.

*Agence France-Presse