ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - The United States army’s Central Command (CENTCOM) on Wednesday announced that on Sunday it had killed a senior Islamic State (ISIS) official in Syria. Kurdish forces claimed the militant was killed in Turkish-occupied Afrin and accused opposition forces of harbouring ISIS.
“On June 16, U.S. Central Command conducted an airstrike in Syria, killing Usamah Jamal Muhammad Ibrahim al-Janabi, a senior ISIS official and facilitator. His death will disrupt ISIS’s ability to resource and conduct terror attacks,” read a statement from CENTCOM.
“There is no indication any civilians were harmed in this strike,” it added.
Farhad Shami, head of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) media centre, said in a post on X that the person killed in the US strike was the same person that the Ankara-backed Syrian opposition government claimed had been killed by the SDF.
The opposition government accused the SDF of targeting Kuwait al-Rahma camp for displaced persons in an attack on Sunday that resulted “in the martyrdom of one man and the injury of others.”
“These actions underscore the systematic terrorism carried out by these militias against the present and future of the Syrian people,” the statement added.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported at the time that a young man was killed while collecting logs when the camp came under fire from areas under the control of the Kurdish-led SDF.
Farhad Shami accused the opposition government of harbouring ISIS militants.
“This once again clearly reveals the extent of the deliberate deception practiced by the so-called [Syrian opposition] coalition and the media supported by Turkey and the attempt to cover up the movements of ISIS leaders and assign them civilian status,” he charged.
The White Helmets, a US-funded Syrian civil defence organization that operates in opposition-held areas, said that a person was killed by “an unknown drone strike” near the same camp on Sunday.
“Our teams recovered and transported the body to the hospital in Afrin city,” it said, sharing a photo of a corpse in an ambulance in a post on X.
Charles Lister, director of the Middle East Institute’s Syria Program, said it is “quite possible” that this drone strike was the US CENTCOM airstrike.
The deceased ISIS official is an Iraqi national, according to Syrian activist Omar Abu Layla.
ISIS rose to power and seized swathes of Iraqi and Syrian land in a brazen offensive in 2014, declaring a so-called “caliphate.”
While the group was declared territorially defeated in 2019, it still continues to pose a serious security risk through hit-and-run attacks, bombings, and abductions, especially across the vast Syrian desert as well as several Iraqi provinces.
