Published Sunday, September 28, 2014
A Twitter account run by an Qaeda member said the leader of the al-Qaeda-linked Khorasan group was killed in a US airstrike in Syria, SITE monitoring service said on Sunday, following several days of uncertainty over whether he survived the raid.
A US official on Sept. 24 said the United States believed Mohsin al-Fadhli, a senior al-Qaeda operative, had been killed in a strike a day earlier, but the Pentagon said several hours later that it was still investigating what had happened to him.
In a message posted on Sept. 27, the jihadist offered condolences for the death of Kuwaiti-born Fadhli, otherwise known as Abu Asmaa al-Kuwati or Abu Asmaa al-Jazrawi, following the Sept. 23 airstrike, SITE reported.
US oficials have described Khorasan as a network of seasoned al-Qaeda fighters with battlefield experience mostly in Pakistan and Afghanistan that is now working in league with al-Qaeda's Syrian affiliate, al-Nusra Front.
Khorasan is a term for an area including parts of Pakistan and Afghanistan where al Qaeda's main council is believed to be in hiding.
After the Sept. 23 strikes, US officials said they were was still assessing how badly Khorasan had been hit. Islamist militants on social media have said there were unconfirmed reports that the 33-year-old Fadhli had been killed.
SITE did not name the jihadist who reported Fadhli's death but said he had trained under a close associate of al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahri and had fought in Khorasan before traveling to Syria.
Khorasan and al-Nusra Front
The US says it has hit a group called "Khorasan" in Syria, but experts and Syria's so called "moderate" opposition argue it actually struck al-Qaeda's Syrian affiliate, al-Nusra Front, which fights alongside the Syria rebels.
In announcing its raids in the northern province of Aleppo on Tuesday, Washington described the group it targeted as Khorasan, a cell of al-Qaeda veterans planning attacks against the West. But many cast doubt on the distinction between Khorasan and al-Nusra Front.
"In Syria, no one had ever heard talk of Khorasan until the US media brought it up," said Rami Abdel Rahman, director of the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
"Rebels, activists and the whole world knows that these positions (hit Tuesday) were al-Nusra positions, and the fighters killed were al-Nusra fighters," added Abdel Rahman, who has tracked the Syrian conflict since it erupted in 2011.
Even though al-Nusra officially pledged allegiance to al-Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri and was named the group's official Syrian branch, amost all Syria "rebel groups" have been willing to cooperate with the extremist group against the Syrian army.
That history of cooperation has left some so-called "moderate" Syria rebels on the ground suspicious and even angry about the strikes on al-Qaeda.
Ibrahim al-Idlibi, an activist in Idlib province, said the opposition backed strikes against ISIS, but not against al-Nusra, or the so-called Khorasan.
"Some of these strikes only serve Western interests," he said.
Al-Nusra "has stood with the rebels against both Daesh and the regime," he added, using the Arabic acronym for ISIS.
Syria's rebels have often rejected the world community's designation of al-Nusra as a "terrorist" group and has criticized Washington for adding the group to the list of "terrorist" organizations.
Join ISIS?
Al-Qaeda's affiliate in Syria, al-Nusra Front, is facing mounting pressure from its own members to reconcile with the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and confront a common enemy after US-led airstrikes hit both groups this week.
The two share the same ideology and rigid Islamic beliefs, but fell out during a power struggle that pitted ISIS head Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi against al Qaeda chief Ayman Zawahri and Nusra Front leader Abu Mohammad al-Golani.
But US-led air and missile strikes, which have hit Nusra as well as ISIS bases in Syria, have angered many Nusra members who say the West and its allies have joined forces in a "crusader" campaign against Islam.
Sources close to ISIS said some Nusra fighters were joining them after the strikes and there was a growing sense among many that it was time to put their differences aside.
"There are hardline voices inside Nusra who are pushing for reconciliation with Islamic State," a source close to Nusra's leadership told Reuters, though he doubted it would happen.
On Saturday, Nusra denounced US-led airstrikes on Syria, saying they amounted to a war against Islam and vowing to retaliate against Western and Arab countries that took part.
"We are in a long war. This war will not end in months nor years, this war could last for decades," the group's spokesman Abu Firas al-Suri said.
"It's not a war against Nusra Front, it's a war against Islam," he added in an audio message published on the group's social media network, its first reaction since the launch of the US-led strikes on Tuesday.
(Reuters, Al-Akhbar, AFP)
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