According to the SANA agency, “the security forces conducted a special operation”, which led to “the death of the terrorist Abu Salem al-Iraqi”, in the western part of Deraa province. The terrorist “detonated an explosive vest after being surrounded and wounded by gunfire.”
A leader of the Islamic State (IS) jihadist organization detonated the explosives he had been wearing after being surrounded by government troops in southern Syria, the official SANA news agency reported Wednesday, citing a source close to the Syrian security forces.
According to SANA’s source, “the security forces conducted a special operation”, which led to “the death of the terrorist Abu Salem al-Iraqi”, in the western part of Deraa province. The IS operative “detonated an explosive vest after being surrounded and wounded by gunfire.”
Al-Iraqi was the jihadist group’s military leader in southern Syria, according to the source close to the Syrian security forces.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a British-based non-governmental organization that relies on a wide network of sources in the war-torn country, confirmed Al-Iraqi’s death.
According to the NGO, the jihadist leader had been hiding in the region since 2018 and was involved in killings and chaos in southern Syria.
Deraa province has been largely controlled by the regime since 2018. Rebel groups, however, hold parts of it under a truce brokered by Russia, the main ally of Bashar al-Assad’s regime.
IS’s presence in the province is limited to a small enclave: a group of extremists who held the sector pledged allegiance to it before it was defeated and pushed back.
After surging to power in 2014 and seizing huge swathes of Iraq and Syria, IS has seen its self-proclaimed “caliphate” crumble under simultaneous attacks from many sides. It crashed in 2017 in Iraq and in 2019 in Syria.
Syria’s complex war over the past eleven years, involving foreign forces and jihadist groups, has claimed the lives of at least half a million people, destroyed much of the country’s infrastructure and turned millions of its residents into internally displaced persons and refugees.
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