The U.S. military said Friday it had killed a senior leader of the Islamic State jihadist group in a raid in Syria, adding that four soldiers were wounded in the operation Thursday night. "The target, a senior ISIS official, Hamza al-Homsi, was killed," the brief statement from the US military command for the Middle East (Centcom) said.
The four soldiers, hit by an explosion during this attack in northeastern Syria, are being treated in Iraq. A working dog participating in the operation was also injured, the statement said. Since ISIS's territorial defeat in Syria in 2019, hundreds of US troops, deployed in northeastern Syria as part of the anti-jihadist coalition, continue to fight with the Kurdish-dominated Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and target suspected ISIS members.
On February 10, another operation with the SDF led to the seizure of weapons and the death of another IS leader. In 2022, two other leaders of the group were killed, one in February, by US special forces in the northwest and the other in October, by former rebels from the regime-backed southern province of Deraa. In October 2019, the United States announced the death of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi during a US operation in northwestern Syria.
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