The Daily Star
U.S.-backed fighters in Syria have captured a senior Daesh (ISIS) leader who served as an assistant to the group’s self-declared “caliph” Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, they said Friday. The Syrian Democratic Forces, a Kurdish-led alliance that holds the quarter of Syria east of the Euphrates, detained Osama al-Awaid last week, it said in a statement.
The SDF have been attempting to take Daesh last Syrian pocket of territory on the banks of the Euphrates near Iraq for weeks, in an offensive backed by U.S.-led airstrikes.
They captured Awaid in a special operation in a village in eastern Syria, the statement said, adding that he had been a senior security official for Daesh in the country.
More than a year after Daesh’s physical “caliphate” collapsed in both Syria and Iraq under military attack, Baghdadi’s whereabouts remain a mystery.
However, despite its loss of territory, the group has been able to launch guerrilla attacks in areas controlled by both the Syrian and Iraqi governments.
Earlier Friday, The Syrian Foreign Ministry said it had complained to the United Nations about what they said was an act of Israeli aggression on the area of Kisweh south of Damascus. The Syrian regime claimed its air defense systems shot down all “hostile targets” late Thursday.
The Syria Observatory for Human Rights said they were the first such missiles to hit the country since an air defense upgrade after the downing of a Russian plane in September.
It said the strikes hit two positions in the south of Damascus province, one an area where there are Iranian weapons depots in Kisweh.
“Israeli forces bombarded for an hour,” observatory chief Rami Abdel Rahman said. Two missiles hit “weapons depots belonging to the Lebanese Hezbollah as well as Iranian forces” in Kisweh.
“The depots that were targeted are used to temporarily store rockets until they are taken somewhere else,” he said.
“It appears the Israelis had intelligence that weapons had arrived there recently.” Another missile hit the area of Harfa, where there is a Syrian base, the observatory said.
Israel’s military denied any of its assets were hit but stopped short of denying it had conducted strikes at all. “Reports regarding an IDF aircraft or an airborne IDF target having been hit are false,” it said in an English-language statement.
It said a Syrian surface-to-air missile was fired in the direction of an open area of the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights but it was unclear if it had hit Israeli-held territory.
Israel has carried out hundreds of airstrikes in neighboring Syria against what it says are Iranian targets, many of them in the area south of Damascus.