ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - The Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) said on Friday that a suspected “high-ranking” leader of the Islamic State (ISIS) was arrested in an operation in the eastern Deir ez-Zor province.
The SDF, with US-led coalition support, “conducted a precise and targeted security operation … targeting a high-ranking leader of the terrorist organization ISIS named Hamoud Abdullah al-Khatib, aka Abu Zakaria,” the Kurdish-led force said in a statement.
It labeled him as the group’s so-called economic “emir” who “extorted money from civilians at gunpoint under the pretense of collecting ‘zakat’ and threatening those who refused with death.”
A large cache of weapons was also seized during the operation.
ISIS captured large swathes of Iraqi and Syrian territory in a brazen 2014 offensive. The group’s so-called “caliphate” was declared territorially defeated in 2019 but remains a security threat and continues to carry out hit-and-run attacks, abductions, and bombings.
The jihadists have tried to take advantage of the changing security landscape in Syria after the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime to regroup and reorganize, particularly in the country’s vast central and eastern deserts.
The SDF played a key role in defeating ISIS in Syria and captured thousands of the group’s fighters and their kin. The Kurdish-led force operates alongside hundreds of US troops as part of the global coalition to defeat ISIS.
In mid-January, SDF chief Mazloum Abdi noted that 10,000 ISIS fighters are imprisoned in Syria, 2,000 of whom are considered "highly dangerous." He stressed the “need to intensify efforts to continue the fight against ISIS if we don’t want to see it make a comeback.”
