The United States says it has killed a person in charge of the Islamic State, “responsible for attacks carried out in Europe.” Khaled Ayd Ahmad al Jaburi, a name unknown until now, would have fallen victim to a US bombardment in Syria, according to the US military command. in the Middle East (Centcom).
Islamic State claimed responsibility for several high-profile attacks in Western Europe at the time of its peak, between 2015 and 2016. Attacks that left 130 dead in Paris, 86 in Nice, 30 in Brussels and 16 in Barcelona, ​​on August 17 last year reviewed.
As a result of the catastrophic Anglo-American invasion of Iraq and the failed attempt to oust Bashar al-Assad in Syria, Islamic State went as far as erasing the Iraq-Syria border, extending its attempted caliphate from Raqqa to Mosul. A jihadist fire finally put out by the sum of the intervention of state actors – such as the armies of Russia, Iran and the US, as well as Syria and Iraq – and non-state ones, such as the Shiite militias of Iran and Lebanon or the Kurdish militias affiliated with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).
Centcom, in charge of US extraterritorial military activities between Egypt and Pakistan, is headquartered in Tampa, Florida. The Pentagon statement states that the attack took place in northwestern Syria, without giving further details, and that no civilians have been injured. A British intelligence source specifies that it was in Idlib and that the subject in question, “an Iraqi posing as a Syrian and who had been in the region for just ten days”, would have been hit “while talking on the phone near his home “. The northern half of Idlib province, where the Turkish army maintains several strongholds, serves as a refuge for forces formerly loyal to al Qaeda.
The Islamic State has been, since its final defeat five years ago, little more than a ghost, except in Afghanistan, where the so-called Islamic State in Khorasan challenges the Taliban control of the territory with sectarian terrorist attacks and against the interests of the countries that hold open its embassy in Kabul. The foreign ministries of countries like Turkey have their own theories about the ultimate origin of these attacks.
The bombing reported by the Pentagon coincides with an important moment for the future evolution of the frozen conflict in Syria. On the one hand, yesterday and today the deputy foreign ministers of Russia, Turkey, Syria and Iran met in Moscow to prepare the way for a possible summit between Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Bashar al-Assad that would seal the end of the war.
On the other hand, today in Paris begins the trial of eleven alleged members of the PKK, accused of recruiting teenagers from Kurdish immigration in France to send them to the front and of being behind the collection of the “revolutionary tax” on said diaspora in French territory. The PKK’s Syrian affiliate, the Popular Mobilization Units (YPG), has been rearmed by the United States in northeastern Syria with the ostensible aim of preventing the reappearance of Islamic State (IS).
However, IS’s two worst enemies, the Syrian Arab Army itself and pro-Iranian Shiite militias, are regularly harassed by Israeli Air Force bombings, with deaths this week. Tel Aviv’s overriding objective remains preventing the growth of Hezbollah’s arsenal in Lebanon, limiting the Iranian presence in Syria and destabilizing the Syrian state in the hands of Bashar al-Assad, whose Golan Plateau has been militarily occupied by Israel for the most part since 1967.
Likewise, the US military commander for the Middle East, General Michael Kurilla, assured in the Pentagon statement that “IS continues to be capable of carrying out operations in the region, with a desire to strike beyond the Middle East.” As a backdrop, meanwhile, in Washington some Republican representatives are once again questioning the US occupation of Syrian territory, which Donald Trump tried -unsuccessfully- to put an end to.
In recent years, the United States has regularly reported the removal of Islamic State leaders no one has ever heard of, with the exception of Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, the “caliph” killed in a 2019 bombing.
In any case, the best guarantee for the disappearance of the Islamic State seems to be the current rapprochement between the secular regime of Bashar al-Assad – an ally of Moscow – and the other Arab regimes in the region, allies of Washington, but mostly suspected of have financed jihadist forces in the past.
The reconstruction of Syria continues to be a pending issue, as is its territorial integrity -in both cases, with lethal effects during the recent earthquake- but it is closer with the progressive reestablishment of relations with the Arab monarchies and Ankara’s desire for reconciliation. , which will be practically unconditional in the event of a victory for the Turkish opposition next month.
