A leader of the extremist group Islamic State (IS), responsible for planning attacks in Europe, died on Tuesday (4) in an attack in Syria, the U.S. Army’s Middle East Command (Centcom) said.
Khaled Aydd Ahmad Al Jaburi was, among other things, “responsible for planning IS attacks in Europe,” Centcom said in a statement. The note stresses that the death “will temporarily impair the organization’s ability to carry out attacks abroad.”
IS has claimed several attacks in Europe when it controlled large swaths of territory in Syria and Iraq, where it proclaimed a “caliphate.”
The extremist group claimed the November 13, 2015 attacks in Paris (130 killed), as well as the July 14, 2016 attack in Nice (southeastern France), which claimed 86 fatalities.
It also claimed three suicide bombings in 2016 in Belgium, mainly in the Brussels area, which left 30 dead.
A year later, attacks in Spain on August 17 and 18, one of them in Barcelona, led to 16 deaths.
The U.S. military command said Tuesday’s attack took place in northwestern Syria and caused no deaths or injuries among civilians.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (OSDH) said that an American drone attacked the IS leader in Idlib province, in an area controlled by the extremists in northwestern Syria.
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The extremist leader, an Iraqi who posed as a Syrian and was called Khaled, had been taking refuge in the area for ten days, the OSDH, which has a wide network of sources in Syria, said.
He was targeted by the drone as he was walking near the house he occupied and talking by phone, according to the Observatory.
Damien Ferré, founder of Jihad Analytics, which analyzes the landscape of extremism around the world and on the Internet, told AFP that the deceased leader’s real name is Khalil Abdallah al Khulaif and that he was operating from the Deir Ezzor region in eastern Syria.
“As always happens, he will be replaced by another (…) But one should not minimize what happened, because it is a new blow against the ultra-radical group,” Ferré said.
“IS continues to pose a threat to the region and beyond,” Centcom’s Middle East commander, General Michael Kurilla, said.
“Even though weakened, the group remains capable of executing operations in the region, with the intention of attacking beyond the Middle East,” he added.
Since the territorial defeat of IS in Syria in 2019, hundreds of American soldiers, deployed in the northeast of the country as part of the anti-jihadist coalition, have continued to fight alongside the Kurdish-dominated Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), attacking suspected IS members.
The U.S. government frequently announces that IS leaders who have sought refuge in Syria continue to target the country.
In October 2019, the US military announced the killing of IS leader Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi in an operation in northwestern Syria.
On February 16, the U.S. military reported that it killed a leader of the extremist group in an operation in northeastern Syria that left four American soldiers wounded.
In 2022, two other IS leaders were killed, one in February by U.S. special forces in the northwest and another in October by former rebels in the regime-backed Deraa province (south).
Despite its territorial defeat, IS continues to carry out attacks in Syria, where the group recently attacked civilians gathering truffles in the desert, an action that killed dozens of people.