A raid by US-led forces in northwestern Syria on Friday killed a senior leader in the ISIS group, the US military said Friday.
The US Central Command said in a statement that it had killed ISIS leader Dhiya Zawba Muslih al-Hardan and his two adult sons, who were also affiliated with the group, early Friday in a raid in the town of al-Bab, in Syria’s Aleppo province.
It said the men “posed a threat to US and Coalition Forces, as well as the new Syrian Government,” adding that three women and three children at the site were not harmed.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a UK-based war monitor, said the raid was carried out through an airdrop of forces, the first of its kind to be carried out by the US-led coalition against ISIS this year, and that ground forces from both the Syrian government’s General Security forces and the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces participated.
The observatory said the operation was “preceded by a tight security cordon around the targeted site, a heavy deployment of forces on the ground, and the presence of coalition helicopters in the airspace of the area.”
There was no statement from either the government in Damascus or the SDF about the operation.
Washington has developed increasingly close ties with the new Syrian government in Damascus since the fall of former President Bashar al-Assad in a lightning opposition offensive last year, and has been pushing for a merger of forces between the new Syrian army and the Kurdish-led SDF, which controls much of the country’s northeast.
However, progress between the two sides in agreeing on the details of the merger has been slow and could be further complicated by the recent outbreak of sectarian violence in the southern province of Sweida, in which government forces joined Bedouin clans in fighting against armed factions from the Druze religious minority.
