US strike kills Yemeni leader in Syria
Idlib, Syria – (AFP)
A US drone strike in northwestern Syria killed a Yemeni leader of a local extremist group affiliated to Al-Qaeda, the US military and a Syrian war monitor said.
The strike, carried out on Monday just before midnight (2100 GMT) on the eastern edge of the city of Idlib, took out a man described as a leader of the Hurras al-Deen group.
The US is “highly confident” that the strike, carried out from a drone, killed Abu Hamzah al-Yemeni, a US official with knowledge of the operation told CNN, speaking on condition of anonymity.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which relies on a wide network of sources inside Syria, confirmed on Tuesday that Yemeni was killed in the attack, saying it was the second such attempt to neutralise him after a similar strike last year.
An AFP correspondent in Idlib said that members of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), a rival extremist group that dominates the area, gathered at the scene of the strike shortly after it happened and took away Yemeni’s charred remains.
HTS, whose leadership includes many ex-members of Al-Qaeda’s former Syria franchise, has tried to cast itself as a credible political force in the Idlib region.
Since a 2020 ceasefire agreement reached by Moscow and Turkey, the main foreign broker in northern Syria, HTS has come under pressure to crack down on the myriad of other factions still present in the Idlib region.
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