A senior leader of the al-Qaeda-linked Khorasan Group was killed in a US-led airstrike in Syria, the Pentagon said yesterday, amid a fresh exodus of people from the war-torn country.
Sanafi al-Nasr, a Saudi national and prominent al-Qaeda financier, died in an air attack in the northwest of the country on Thursday, US officials said.
The US Treasury department listed al-Nasr — also known as Abdul Mohsen Abdullah Ibrahim al-Sharikh — in 1914 as a “specially designated global terrorist”. He worked for al-Qaeda’s Iran-backed network before taking charge of the militant group’s finances in 2012 and moving to Syria a year later, the Pentagon said. He was the fifth senior Khorasan leader to be killed in the past four months.
“This operation deals a significant blow to the Khorasan Group’s plans to attack the United States and our allies, and once again proves that those who seek to do us harm are not beyond our reach,” Ash Carter, the US secretary of defence, said.
The UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights also claimed yesterday that 40 Islamic State fighters were killed in an airstrike on their convoy in the Syrian province of Hama.
Advertisement
Little is known about Khorasan, a group named after an area in Afghanistan and Pakistan where al-Qaeda’s main council is believed to be hiding. Many of its fighters are said to have moved to Syria since the civil war erupted to back Jabhat al-Nusra, al-Qaeda’s local affiliate.
The war took a new turn at the end of last month when President Assad’s most powerful backer, Russia, launched airstrikes in the central provinces of Homs and Hama, Latakia and Idlib in the northwest, and Aleppo, claiming to be targeting Islamic State.
Last week 300 Cuban troops were reported to have joined Assad forces, alongside hundreds of officers from Iran and Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shia group.
Pounded by missiles from the sky and shelling from the ground, tens of thousands of civilians have left in the past two weeks, activists in the hardest-hit areas told The Times.
“Thousands are fleeing to Turkey via Khirbet al-Joz border village every day,” said Tareq Abdul-Hoq, who is monitoring the movement of people on the border. “The numbers of people fleeing has grown by 40 per cent in the last two and half weeks. Everyone is escaping the Russian airstrikes, people say they have no mercy.”