US-led raids kill Isis leader

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The US bombing campaign in Iraq and Syria is believed to have killed an Isis leader.

An Isis leader with direct links to the alleged mastermind of the Paris attacks was among ten senior jihadists killed by US-led bombing raids in Iraq and Syria this month, the Pentagon said on Tuesday.

Washington said the strikes were weakening the extremist group, which captured swaths of Iraq and Syria last year but has suffered a string of setbacks in recent weeks.
Colonel Steve Warren, spokesman for the coalition bombing Isil in Syria and Iraq, named the man as Charaffe al-Mouadan.

He said Mouadan, a French national, had been plotting additional acts of terror from Syria when he was hit by a US-led airstrike, but did not name the area in which he was killed.

"They want to strike in Europe. They want to strike in our very own homeland. And it is important that people understand that as long as those external attack planners are operating, the US military will hunt them and we will kill them," Col Warren said.

Mouadan, 26, was described as having a "direct link" with Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the Belgian jihadist thought to have masterminded the attacks in Paris on Nov 13, then shot dead by police days later. The son of Moroccan parents, he grew up in the suburbs of Paris and was arrested in 2012 while getting ready to leave with two friends for either Yemen or Afghanistan.

It was not immediately clear when he travelled to Syria, where he was known as Abu Souleymane, or what form his links to Abaaoud took.

Abaaoud served as an "emir of war" in the east Syrian province of Deir Ezzor, according to local activists and news reports, an unusually high rank for a fighter who hailed from Europe. David Thomson, a leading expert on French jihadists, questioned whether Mouadan was as senior within Isis as the US claimed. But he confirmed that the jihadi was indeed thought to have links with members of the Paris attacks cell.


 - The Telegraph, London


http://www.stuff.co.nz/world/middle-east/75523252/usled-raids-kill-isis-leader

One down, and 50,000 to go...........